Data reviewed suggest that previous theories of emotion experience are too narrow in scope and that lack of consensus is due to the fact that emotion experience takes various forms and is heterogenous. The authors treat separately the content of emotion experience, the underlying nonconscious correspondences, and processes producing emotion experience. They classify the nature and content of emotion experience and propose that it depends on 3 aspects of attention: mode (analytic-synthetic; detached-immersed), direction (self-world), and focus (evaluation-action). The account is informed by a 2-level view of consciousness in which phenomenology (1st order) is distinguished from awareness (2nd order). These distinctions enable the authors to differentiate and account for cases of “unconscious” emotion, in which there is an apparent lack of phenomenology or awareness.

Although it is acknowledged that the conscious experience of different emotions differs, it is not as widely recognized explicitly that the experience of each emotion can take different forms. For...