What more is there to emotion concepts than prototypes

Abstract

Russell's principal claim is that a characterization of emotion concepts in terms of prototypes offers the most fruitful approach to understanding emotion. He contrasts this position with the classical view that emotion categories have necessary and sufficient conditions. The focal issue concerns whether the two views of emotion concepts that Russell contrasts really are incompatible. Reasons are offered for supposing that concepts in general embody both representations of proto-types and of theory-laden information, some of which might be compatible with a classical view. The proposal is made that the primary utility of the prototype representation is as a heuristic for the identification of instances, whereas other parts of the conceptual representation support rea-soning and explanation processes, as well as providing a backup for cases in which the similarity-to-the-prototype heuristic fails. Do people's emotion concepts embody prototypes? Russell's (1990) answer to this question is that they do, and we concur. In his interesting and provocative article, he expresses pessimism about the possibility of specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for emotion concepts and proposes that such con