Authors' Reply: Why a Connectionist Perspective on Emotion is Helpful

To make progress related to long-standing questions related to the nature of emotion, we offer the Interactive Activation and Competition framework for Emotion (IAC-E). The IAC-E is not another conventional theory of emotion. Rather, it offers a neural-network-based, algorithmic account of how emotion instances and categories arise. Our approach suggests that there need not be a contradiction between instances of the same emotion being sometimes consistent and sometimes variable. Similarly, there need not be a contradiction between observations of homogeneity (common in the basic emotion approach) and heterogeneity (common in the constructed emotion approach) within emotion categories