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Hence, the answer to the first question to be addressed focuses on the psychologically significant situations that emotions signify, and the answer to the second question focuses on the other chief feature: emergence.

Consistent with a constructivist approach, we have proposed in previous papers that emotions are emergent conditions reflecting multiple modalities of affective reactions to psychologically important situations. Rather than the small set of basic emotion modules with biological, experiential, and behavioral signatures, perhaps there are many emotions, arising from rather than causing bodily, expressive, experiential, and behavioral reactions. Should one assume then that specific emotions do not exist? No, but perhaps some long-standing assumptions about them should be reexamined. Decades later, despite more and better measures, some argue that the multivariate convergence assumed by traditional conceptions of the emotions has yet to appear (e.g., Barrett, 2006 Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, & Gross, 2007 Lindquist, Wager, Kober, Bliss-Moreau, & Barrett, 2012). When pressed, theorists tended to voice the faith that perhaps better measures would eventually lead to better results. His discovery was puzzling and difficult to square with what investigators thought they knew. Years ago, Peter Lang (1968) found that physiological, cognitive, and behavioral measures of fear show little convergence. There appears to be less evidence for the integrity of specific emotions than is commonly assumed. Question 1: Why is a psychological constructivist approach useful for understanding emotion? It seems that shared prototypes of emotions play a pivotal role in structuring people’s experience, and that these schemas of emotion organize individual and collective thought, memory, and communication. Psychologists have been looking in the body for what exists partly in our minds. It suggests that the long-sought modularity of emotion may be a chimera existing not in emotions themselves, but in emotion concepts. The response to the last question focuses on a function of emotions that has been largely ignored. The editor has posed six questions, which are answered in order. The article features the latter view, that emotions are multimodal representations of particular kinds of important situations, some of which are faced by all animate creatures, others of which are unique to humans by virtue of our cognitively complex and hyper-social nature. It focuses on issues of whether emotions are elicited or constructed, whether there are only a few modular emotions waiting to be triggered by particular stimuli, or whether emotions are emergent states, limited in number and variety only by the number and variety of the psychological situations they represent. This article describes one view of emotions and how they arise. The resulting affective chorus can be powerful, commanding attention and altering agendas for thought and action. Fear, for example, involves not isolated elements such as fearful thoughts or wide-eyed facial expressions, but multiple representations of the same threat as thoughts, feelings, inclinations, expressions, and so on. Emotions are thus states emerging from the co-occurrence of multiple, partially redundant, affective reactions. In contrast to isolated affective reactions, emotions arise when evaluations of the same thing occur in different modalities at the same time. The necessity of affective reactions for behaving organisms is evident in research ranging from studies of brain damage ( Damasio, 1994) to studies of emotional intelligence ( Salovey & Mayer, 1990). Such affective reactions are evaluations that may be embodied, expressed, experienced, and enacted. In living beings such reactions occur at multiple levels, from the neurochemical to the behavioral. Animate agents must also be able to select what they look at, listen to, and move toward. If one were to design a surrogate person, a robot, or what computer scientists refer to as a “believable agent,” it would not be enough to provide her with eyes that see, ears that hear, and muscles that move. What would you most want to know about other individuals before deciding whether to vote for them, negotiate with them, or marry them? Arguably, the most important thing to know is what they care about, what moves them.