Mapping the mental space of emotional concepts through kinematic measures of decision uncertainty

Emotional concepts and their mental representations have been extensively studied. Yet, some ecologically relevant aspects, such as how they are processed in ambiguous contexts (e.g., in relation to other emotional stimuli that share similar characteristics), are incompletely known. We employed a similarity judgement of emotional concepts and manipulated the contextual congruency of the responses along the two main affective dimensions of hedonic valence and physiological activation, respectively. Behavioural and kinematics (mouse-tracking) measures were combined to gather a novel 'similarity index' between emotional concepts, to derive topographical maps of their mental representations. Self-report (interoceptive sensibility, positive-negative affectivity, depression) and physiological measures (heart rate variability, HRV) have been collected to explore their possible association with emotional conceptual representation. Results indicate that emotional concepts typically associated with low arousal profit by contextual congruency, with faster responses and reduced uncertainty when contextual ambiguity decreases. The emotional maps recreate two almost orthogonal axes of valence and arousal, and the similarity measure captures the smooth boundaries between emotions. The emotional map of a subgroup of individuals with low positive affectivity reveals a narrower conceptual distribution, with variations in positive emotions and in individuals with reduced arousal (such as those with reduced HRV). Our work introduces a novel methodology to study emotional conceptual representations, bringing the behavioural dynamics of decision-making processes and choice uncertainty into the affective domain. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.