Emotional states possess a distinct phenomenal character: there is something it is like to experience fear, sadness, or joy. But what does emotional phenomenal character consist of? Understanding the nature of emotion experience is crucial to understanding emotion, and therefore remains one of the central tasks in the philosophy and science of emotion (Lambie and Marcel 2002).

Most theories of emotion experience do not consider it a unique form of experience but rather reduce it to some other kind of experience. Among the most prominent are the views that emotion experience consists in the feeling of bodily changes associated with physiological response (e.g., Damasio and Carvalho 2013), felt action tendency (e.g., Arnold 1960), or a blend of ‘hedonic tone’ and ‘arousal’ (e.g., Russell 2003).

I shall argue that these theories fail to capture the proper nature of emotion experience—by showing there are clear phenomenological differences as well as dissociations between emotion experience and the above-mentioned kinds of experience—and present my own account. In my view, emotion experience is an entirely unique, and therefore irreducible, kind of experience—one that I call affective feeling—which consists in an affective disclosure of significance that things, people, and events in the world have for us. 

Finally, I will examine the relation between emotion experience and the world. Contrary to the widely held view that emotion experience is intentional—that is, ‘directed at’ or ‘about’ events in the world—as well as to the more radical view that it is a form of experience of the world (e.g., Tappolet 2016), I argue that emotion experience does not pertain to the world. Constituting the subjective pole of our overall being in the world, it is rather merely integrated with world-directed experience.