# Emotional Perception **Keywords:** emotion, perception, affect, motivation **Abstract:** Some perceptual experiences seem to have an emotional element that makes both an affective and motivational difference in the content and character of the experience. I offer a novel account of these experiences that is inspired by related work on pain that I call the ‘Affective-Motivational Account’. Like typical sensory pain, perceptual experience should be understood as a complex state generated by both a sensory-discriminative component and a functionally distinct affective-motivational component. It is this latter system that provides such experiences with their emotional character. Such a view is strongly supported by the available empirical evidence, and has the potential to address several longstanding philosophical puzzles about the relation between perception and emotion. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 26 February 2018; Revised 9 December 2018 **Authors:** [[Matthew Fulkerson]]