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One chapter in the science of emotion has focused, largely through an individualist lens, on just a few emotions: the Ekman Six. Considerable debate has occurred and entrenched positions have ensued. In this essay we offer evidence and argument revealing that there are not only six emotions, nor states measured as valence and arousal, but upwards of 20 discrete emotions that contribute to our subjective and social lives. These emotions enable the rich fabric of relationships, from caregiving interactions to collective activities, that are vital to cooperation. Grounded in advances in cultural evolution, we detail how emotions and culture co-evolved, highlighting how emotions are building blocks of cultural forms such as ceremonies, dance, narratives, music, and visual art.

Some people feel emotions when they look at abstract art. This article presents a ‘simulation’ theory that predicts which emotions they will experience, including those based on their aesthetic reactions. It also explains the mental processes underlying these emotions. This new theory embodies two precursors: an account of how mental models represent perceptions, descriptions, and self-reflections, and an account of the communicative nature of emotions, which distinguishes between basic emotions that can be experienced without knowledge of their objects or causes, and complex emotions that are founded on basic ones, but that include propositional contents. The resulting simulation theory predicts that abstract paintings can evoke the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and anxiety, and that they do so in several ways. In mimesis, models simulate the actions and gestures of people in emotional states, elicited from cues in the surface of paintings, and that in turn evoke basic emotions. Other basic emotions depend on synaesthesia, and both association and projection can yield complex emotions. Underlying viewers’ awareness of looking at a painting is a mental model of themselves in that relation with the painting. This self-reflective model has access to knowledge, enabling people to evaluate the work, and to experience an aesthetic emotion, such as awe or revulsion. The comments of artists and critics, and experimental results support the theory.

In 29 informal interviews and 91 online questionnaires, we asked people about secular pilgrimages mostly to places associated with writers, musicians, and visual artists. Pilgrims often felt strong...

In Imagination, Jim Davies explains that most humans have mental imagery: an ability to make pictures in the mind without immediate perceptual input-as we do when we dream. Davies writes programs that enable computers to do something similar. Given a few words of description, a computer can generate pictures with several objects arranged in appropriate ways. Jonathan Gilmore’s Apt Imaginings is about whether engagement in works of fiction is continuous or discontinuous with how we deal with people and objects in everyday life. He argues for discontinuity. In constructing a critical framework within which to evaluate these two books, I use Kenneth Craik’s theory of mental models. Craik’s theory enables us to understand how we humans have evolved to imagine possible futures, to plan and to act in relation to them, and also to imagine what might be going on in other people’s minds.

Fiction involves exploring imaginative arrangements of places and characters: elements that can be recognized by readers. In childhood, exploration occurs from a safe home base of a caregiver; fiction enables a comparable basis. Physical elements in fiction are settings. More important are social explorations: transactions with characters that can include transformation. This is illustrated by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.