# Emotion perception from a componential perspective **Keywords:** Emotion perception, componential emotion, emotion expression **Abstract:** ARTICLE HISTORY The common conceptual understanding of emotion is that they are multicomponential, including subjective feelings, appraisals, psychophysiological activation, action tendencies, and motor expressions. Emotion perception, however, has traditionally been studied in terms of emotion labels, such as “happy”, which do not clearly indicate whether one, some, or all emotion components are perceived. We examine whether emotion percepts are multi-componential and extend previous research by using more ecologically valid, dynamic, and multimodal stimuli and an alternative response measure. The results demonstrate that observers can reliably infer multiple types of information (subjective feelings, appraisals, action tendencies, and social messages) from complex emotion expressions. Furthermore, this finding appears to be robust to changes in response items. The results are discussed in light of their implications for research on emotion perception. Received 31 October 2014 Revised 17 July 2015 Accepted 20 July 2015 Research on emotion perception has long used the same basic template: participants are presented with stimuli depicting different expressions and asked to identify the emotion by indicating the label with which the expressions are associated. “Emotions”, in these paradigms, are operationalised with a list of colloquial, categorical, descriptors (e.g., “happy” and “sad”), from which participants can select the most appropriate label(s). This is the standard, not **Authors:** [[Shuman et al]]