1 Emotional Experience: Affective Consciousness and its Role in Emotion Theory  Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni Draft To appear in U. Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness It is uncontroversial that subpersonal, neurophysiological processes subtend the emotions. This is what leads some prominent neuroscientists to claim that emotions are identical with such processes (Damasio 2000, LeDoux 1998). In these models, we may or may not feel the emotions we undergo. Others, first and foremost the philosophers, tend to speak of emotions as experiences (Descartes 1989, James 1884, Stocker 1996). Emotions, they say, are necessarily felt. One may think that these alternative ways of demarcating the territory are innocuous terminological choices and as such equally acceptable. After all, both camps agree that there are happenings at the subpersonal level that may be felt. To a large extent, this is true: researchers in the area tend to apply the term Dzemotiondz to the focus of their investigation and these terminological choices are reflective of the distinctive interests of neuroscience and philosophy. This conciliatory standpoint is easily put under pressure, however, since an important family of approaches to consciousness seems to imply that the understanding of emotions as felt experiences is fundamentally misguided. According to these approaches, something is conscious if and only if it is the object of a psychological state. We become conscious of a tree when we see or touch it. Similarly, we become conscious of a psychological state when it is the object of another, higher-order psychological state.1 In the light of these approaches, there is indeed pressure to demarcate the territory in the way neuroscientists do. For one may reason as follows: while botanists should be concerned with trees and not with our consciousness of them, emotion scholars should be concerned with emotions and not with our consciousness of them. Observe that these approaches, when applied to the emotions, rest on a specific understanding of the expression Dzthe experience of an emotiondz, according to which the  We would like to thank Margherita Arcangeli, Richard Dub, Uriah Kriegel, Moritz Mueller, Tristram Oliver-Skuse, Joel Smith and Jona Vance for their helpful comments on a previous version of this article. 1 These so-called higher-order theories of consciousness come in two fundamental varieties: those according to which the relevant higher-order states are thoughts (e.g. Rosenthal 2005) and those according to which they are perception-like experiences (e.g. Lycan 1996). For an introduction to the issues, see Carruthers 2011.