Evidence map›Paper›PMID 34060370›Full record

ArticleEvolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior

Are Emotions Natural Kinds After All? Rethinking the Issue of Response Coherence.

Daniel Sznycer, Adam Scott Cohen

Open access · goldAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
6citing papers in PubMed
3.9field-weighted citation impact, top 7% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

6 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Cross-cultural evidence that shame is a defense against reputational damage.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026
    Article
  2. Article
  3. Article
  4. The evolution of shame and its display.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022
    Review
  5. How pride works.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021
    Article
  6. The Shame System Operates With High Precision.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior
    Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.

Daniel SznycerDepartment of Psychology, University of Montreal, QC, Canada.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6510-3313
Adam Scott CohenUniversity of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA.
Université de Montréal · CAUniversity of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa · US

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

The synchronized co-activation of multiple responses-motivational, behavioral, and physiological-has been taken as a defining feature of emotion. Such response coherence has been observed inconsistently however, and this has led some to view emotion programs as lacking biological reality. Yet, response coherence is not always expected or desirable if an emotion program is to carry out its adaptive function. Rather, the hallmark of emotion is the capacity to orchestrate multiple mechanisms adaptively-responses will co-activate in stereotypical fashion or not depending on how the emotion orchestrator interacts with the situation. Nevertheless, might responses cohere in the general case where input variables are specified minimally? Here we focus on shame as a case study. We measure participants' responses regarding each of 27 socially devalued actions and personal characteristics. We observe internal and external coherence: The intensities of felt shame and of various motivations of shame (hiding, lying, destroying evidence, and threatening witnesses) vary in proportion (

Indexed as

EmotionsShameHumansMotivationadaptationismcultureemotionresponse coherencevaluation

Identifiers

PMID34060370
PMCPMC10355299
OpenAlexW3165701384

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY-NC
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.