Seeing What Others Feel

Abstract

Looking at a person’s expression is a good way of telling what she feels – what affective states she has. Why is that? Is it because we see her emotion, or is it because we infer her mental state from her expression? My answer is that there is a sense in which we do see her emotion. I support this view by showing that expressions can be thought of as physical events that carry information about affective states. This, however, does not explain how we can see emotions by looking at expressions. To address this point I develop an account of the visual system as having the function to detect affective states when they are shown in expressions. By drawing on evidence from psychology and neuroscience, I argue that the visual system extracts the information that expressions carry about affects and makes it available in the content of visual experience.