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From an intuitive layperson perspective, it should be easy to determine whether someone is experiencing a particular emotion. However, scientific evidence suggests that measuring a person’s emotional state is one of the most vexing problems in affective science. To organise our review of research relevant to this question, we take as our starting point a consensual, componential model of emotion (see Figure 4.1). In this model, an emotional response begins with appraisal of the personal significance of an event (Lazarus, 1991; Scherer, 1984; Smith & Ellsworth, 1985), which in turn gives rise to an emotional response involving subjective experience, physiology, and behaviour (Frijda, 1988; Gross, 2007; Lang, 1988; Larsen & Prizmic-Larsen, 2006). The present review examines whether emotionevocative stimuli are associated with discrete patterns of responding in each system, how such responses seem to be …