GeniesLoki

You get this with positive emotions too I think. Love is "just" liking but you do it lots, but at some point the quality of the emotion changes in a way that saying "I love you" is more than "I like you a lot" because you've crossed that threshold.

I often think of emotions as dispositional: They are (or include) a felt sense that you are predisposed towards a particular class of actions or attitude towards the world. e.g. liking something means you are inclined towards more of it in your life.

I have. It's useful and interesting, but I find a lot of it as a bit suspish but more importantly I think she's making a very nonstandard distinction between emotions and feelings and then getting mad when other people use words differently than she does.

And I mean yes it's obviously true that emotions are culturally determined and there are looping constructs around this, but there are still feelings people experience that can usefully be described with emotion words.

So how do you reconcile the "felt sense that you are predisposed towards a particular class of actions or attitude towards the world" with the constructivist culturally-influenced view of emotions?

I think this is just how words work? Suppose I'm painting a picture. There is a set of behaviours, skills, and actions, and motivations, I'm doing, and those all interrelate, but the fact that I'm "doing art" is very much a culturally determined set of practices and labels.

The idea of a "looping effect" (I keep thinking it's called "looping construt", sorry) is super useful. There's a kind of feedback loop between experience and labelling, for basically any kind of experience and any kind of labelling, and I think that's what emotion words do.