ArticleCurrent opinion in behavioral sciences2018
The subjective experience of emotion: a fearful view.
Article in Current opinion in behavioral sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 71 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled 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.
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.
Who cites it
71 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Socially Assistive Robots for Pain Management and Emotional Responses in Pediatric Hospital Care: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Pooled it
- An Overview of Stress Analysis Based on Physiological Signals: Systematic Review of Open Datasets and Current Trends.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Pooled it
- Fear learning and generalization during pandemic fear: How COVID-19-related anxiety affects classical fear conditioning with traumatic film clips.Journal of psychiatric research · 2022Trial
- Cortisol administration after extinction in a fear-conditioning paradigm with traumatic film clips prevents return of fear.Translational psychiatry · 2019Trial
- Exploring emotional expression in invertebrates: mechanisms, functions and phylogeny.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- The Tripartite Structure of Preparation Anxiety: Development and Validation of the Preparation Anxiety Scale.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Tail-rattling in rodents: more than a threat display.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2026Review
- Aperiodic and oscillatory activity of the human brain during induced emotional states.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Moving targets: threat and uncertainty on the front line.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Subjective and psychophysiological response to pictures of ancestral and modern threats: Not all evolutionary threats are alike.PloS one · 2026Article
- Digital Measurement of Subjective Experiences in Alzheimer Disease and Related Dementias (AD/ADRD).JMIR aging · 2025Article
- Differential modulation of freezing and 22-kHz USVs by shock intensity, tone-duration matching, and anxiety levels in rodent fear-conditioning paradigms.Learning & behavior · 2025Article
- A neurofunctional signature of affective arousal generalizes across valence domains and distinguishes subjective experience from autonomic reactivity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Mechanisms of Change in Exposure Therapy for Anxiety and Related Disorders: A Research Agenda.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- The Affective Science Network: A Fieldwide Map of over 1 Million Citations.Affective science · 2025Article
- Towards a latent space cartography of subjective experience in mental health.Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences · 2025Article
- Multicomponent approach reveals differences in affective responses among children and adolescents.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Emotion Forecasting: A Transformer-Based Approach.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Article
- Breath-Counting Task Enhances the Sensitivity of Fear Acquisition.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Extending insights from LeDoux: using movies to study subjective, clinically meaningful experiences in neuroscience.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
11 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
We argue that subjective emotional experience, the feeling, is the essence of an emotion, and that objective manifestations in behavior and in body or brain physiology are, at best, indirect indicators of these inner experiences. As a result, the most direct way to assess conscious emotional feelings is through verbal self-report. This creates a methodological barrier to studies of conscious feelings in animals. While the behavioral and physiological responses are not 'emotions,' they contribute to emotions indirectly, and sometimes profoundly. Whether non-verbal animals have emotional experiences is a difficult, maybe impossible, question to answer in the positive or negative. But because behavioral and physiological responses are important contributors to emotions, and the circuits underlying these are highly conserved, studies of animals have an important role in understanding how emotions are expressed and regulated in the brain. Conflation of circuits that directly give rise to conscious emotional feelings with circuits that indirectly influences these conscious feelings has hampered progress in efforts to understand emotions, and also to understand and to develop treatments for emotional disorders. Recognition of differences in these circuits will allow research in animals to have a lasting impact on understanding of human emotions as research goes forward.
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Registered trials
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.