Short-term Time Structure of Food-related Emotions: Measuring Dynamics of Responses

Contemporary emotion theories have come to conceptualize emotions as multicomponent and dynamic phenomena. Central to this dynamical perspective is that emotions are viewed as a series of dynamic and recursive events that unfold over time, rather than single discrete responses. This chapter describes the architecture of emotions, decomposed into more elementary constituents including antecedent parts such as appraisal, and response parts like physiological responses, facial expressions, and the subjective experience or conscious feeling. The chapter mainly focuses on food-related emotions. Several methods are explained that allow measurement of the temporal dynamics of emotion components, including mapping of the relevant time-course variables. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the main implications of measuring temporal dynamics of emotion responses.