title: Multivoxel Pattern Analysis Does Not Provide Evidence to Support the Existence of Basic Emotions.
abstract: Saarimaki et al. (2015) published a paper claiming to find the neural "fingerprints" for anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise using multivariate pattern analysis. There are 2 ways in which Saarimaki et al.'s interpretation mischaracterizes their actual findings. The first is statistical: a pattern that successfully distinguishes the members of one category from the members of another (with an accuracy greater than that which might be expected by chance) is not a "fingerprint" (i.e., an essence); it is an abstract, statistical summary of a variable population of instances. The second way in which Saarimaki et al.'s interpretation mischaracterizes their results is conceptual: their findings do not actually meet the specific criteria for basic emotion theory. Instead, their findings are more consistent with a theory of constructed emotion. In our view, Saarimaki et al. is elegant in method and important in that it demonstrates empirical support for a theory of emotion that relies on population thinking; it is also an example of how essentialism-the belief that all instances of a category possesses necessary features that define what is, and what is not, a category member-contributes to a fundamental misunderstanding of the neural basis of emotion.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Elizabeth
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Clark-Polner
authors.affiliation: Department of Biostatistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
authors.forename: Timothy D
authors.initials: TD
authors.lastname: Johnson
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA.|Department of Psychiatry.|the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Lisa Feldman
authors.initials: LF
authors.lastname: Barrett
mesh_terms: D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005239:Fear; D006801:Humans; D013850:Thinking
keywords: basic emotion theory; conceptual act theory, construction; emotion; essentialism; multivoxel pattern analysis; pattern classification