The view that experiencing emotions is a sensory activity, totally independent from their motor expression, is an old idea among scholars of emotions. In his seminal work Darwin considered the emotion as a feeling preceding the emotional expression, while James considered the emotion as a feeling consequent to the emotional expression. In both cases, the motor output is not considered to be part of the emotion itself. The heritage of Darwin’s and James’s views strongly influenced contemporary neuroscience, mostly accepting the experience/expression dichotomy, considering the emotional experience as a specific type of sensory activity. Indeed, according to a widely shared perspective, experiencing and expressing a given emotion are two different and independent processes. Both Dewey and Mead explicitly criticized the experience/expression dichotomy by stressing the lack of any proof of the previous existence of the emotions with respect to the emotional response. In contrast, they suggested that the behavior connected to a specific emotion is part of the emotion itself. By endorsing Dewey’ s and Mead’s account of emotions and capitalizing upon recent empirical findings I’ll propose an alternative perspective: the behaviour connected to a specific emotion is part of the emotion itself. In my talk I will present and discuss recent neuroscientific studies showing the link between emotion experience and expression in social cognition.
Keywords: Embodied simulation; Embodiment; Emotion; Mirror neurons; Social cognition