Meta-emotions

Once the notion of a pattern and that of a situation becomes key to localize emotional occurrences, it also becomes possible to more easily identify that emotions can happen in a layered fashion. When emotions are about emotions, they are layered instead of sequential (Pugmire 2005, 174). In fact, an important way to recognize that emotions are not as simple and compact as their names we have for them, is to appreciate the impact of meta-emotions upon the emotional landscape. For instance, when someone is sad about their jealousy, their sadness is a meta-emotion. Or, to give another example, when someone is happy about feeling happy, this person has a first-order emotion—joy about something that happened—and a second-order emotion—joy about feeling joy.