Mapping Emotions Through Time: How Affective Trajectories Inform the Language of Emotion Tabitha Kirkland and William A. Cunningham The Ohio State University The words used to describe emotions can provide insight into the basic processes that contribute to emotional experience. We propose that emotions arise partly from interacting evaluations of one’s current affective state, previous affective state, predictions for how these may change in the future, and the experienced outcomes following these predictions. These states can be represented and inferred from neural systems that encode shifts in outcomes and make predictions. In two studies, we demonstrate that emotion labels are reliably differentiated from one another using only simple cues about these affective trajectories through time. For example, when a worse-than-expected outcome follows the prediction that something good will happen, that situation is labeled as causing anger, whereas when a worse-than- expected outcome follows the prediction that something bad will happen, that situation is labeled as causing sadness. Emotion categories are more differentiated when participants are required to think categorically than when participants have the option to consider multiple emotions and degrees of emotions. This work indicates that information about affective movement through time and changes in affective trajectory may be a fundamental aspect of emotion categories. Future studies of emotion must account for the dynamic way that we absorb and process information. Keywords: emotion, affect, categorization, affective trajectory, iterative reprocessing The words we use to describe, label, and categorize emotions have provided insight into the nature of affective processing (Clore, Ortony, & Foss, 1987; Johnson-Laird & Oatley, 1989; Storm & Storm, 1987). Since the early days of psychology, the dominant view has been that these linguistic categories correspond in a one-to-one relationship with underlying discrete emotional states (Ekman & Friesen, 1971). For example, the word fear exists because it represents a nondivisible biological category of a fear or threat process. However, newer work suggests that emotions are not fundamental or elemental units of the mind but instead are the emergent products of simpler, more versatile components. Just as a loaf of bread does not reveal the ingredients that constitute it, most experienced psychological states do not reveal their under- lying components (Barrett, 2009). These basic psychological in- gredients— or psychological primitives (Ortony & Turner, 1990)— can combine in various ways to produce a variety of mental experiences, including emotion. This is the essence of an approach termed psychological constructivism. We label the sub- jective sense of impending doom fear, but this is not because a fear center has been activated. Although this insight has recently gained traction in the emotion literature, it remains unclear what these ingredients are and how they interact to create the subjective sense of emotion and the emotion categories used by nearly all cultures (Barrett, 2009; Cunningham & Van Bavel, 2009). Based on the iterative reprocessing model of evaluation (Cun- ningham & Zelazo, 2007; Zelazo & Cunningham, 2007), we now have a psychological constructivist account of the cognitive and neural bases of affective processes, the affective trajectories hy- pothesis (Cunningham & Van Bavel, 2009; Cunningham & Zelazo, 2009; Kirkland & Cunningham, in press), which suggests that we must account for dynamically shifting cognitive processes to fully understand the psychological construction of subjective emotional states. It is not sufficient to know that someone is feeling negative in a more or less intense way; one also needs to understand the temporal shifts in affect that got the person to his current state. According to this account, emotions arise in part from the interaction of the evaluations of one’s current state, predictions for the future, and the outcomes that one experiences after these predictions (Cunningham & Van Bavel, 2009; Cun- ningham & Zelazo, 2009; Kirkland & Cunningham, in press). These evaluative processes interact to create a gestalt emotional impression. Differentially valenced combinations of these factors lead to qualitatively distinct affective states, which are then cate- gorized and elaborated upon. In contrast to social constructivist models, which propose that emotion categories are arbitrary, the affective trajectories hypoth- esis suggests that the labels that are used reflect underlying pat- terns of affective processing. Specifically, we suggest that the labels represent, at least in part, our affective trajectories through time. These trajectories provide critical cues about how we reached our current affective state and what we predict for the future. For example, a mildly positive affective state can be construed as pleasant or aversive, depending on whether it follows a worse or better state, respectively. Consistent with this idea, temporal fo- cus—attention to the present or the future—is associated with This article was published Online First July 25, 2011. Tabitha Kirkland and William A. Cunningham, Department of Psychol- ogy, The Ohio State University. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Tabitha Kirkland or William A. Cunningham, Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 1835 Neil Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210. E-mail: kirkland.37@osu.edu or cunningham.417@osu.edu Emotion © 2011 American Psychological Association 2012, Vol. 12, No. 2, 268 –282 1528-3542/11/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0024218 268