Both Pleasant and Unpleasant Emotional Feelings Follow Weber’s Law but It Depends How You Ask

It remains unclear how we become aware of our emotions. The perceptual theory argues that emotions are a form of perception and reach awareness just like simple sensations. The theory was recently supported by Berkovich and Meiran (2023) showing, using evidence accumulation modeling of pleasantness reports, that pleasant emotional feelings follow one of the most basic psychophysical laws, Weber’s Law, as nearly all sensations do. Contrary to predictions, this was true for pleasantness and not for unpleasantness. In this work, of which data were collected at the end of 2022, we employed the same experimental approach and successfully replicated the results but only when pleasantness was probed directly (emotions described as either “positive feeling” or “positive vs. negative feeling”). We unexpectedly found that the results flipped when we probed unpleasantness directly (i.e., “negative feeling”) where we found that unpleasantness followedWeber’s Law while pleasantness did not. Thus,Weber’s Law holds for both pleasant and unpleasant feelings when probed directly, thereby providing an even stronger support for the perceptual theory. This in turn suggests that Weber’s Law contributes to phenomena such as the unsuccessful pursuit of happiness and why psychotherapy is especially effective in leading to felt improvement when focusing on enhancing positive emotions and not on reducing negative emotions. The findings are limited by the fact that the participants were nondepressed undergraduate students.