Key Points
- Pleasant emotions follow Weber’s law, the same rule that governs how we perceive light, sound, and touch.
- As feelings grow more intense, the brain becomes less precise at telling apart small differences in pleasantness.
- This supports William James’s 1884 idea that emotions are not separate from perception but are sensations themselves.
- The effect was found for positive emotions, not negative ones – suggesting unpleasant feelings may serve a survival purpose by staying sharp.
A taste that’s too sweet
Think of the first sip of cold lemonade on a scorching day. It feels blissful. The second sip is still good—but the difference between them is harder to notice.
Our brains seem to smooth over the extra sweetness once pleasure hits a certain level.
That everyday experience isn’t just in your head. A new psychology study finds that pleasant feelings follow the same mathematical law as basic senses like sight and sound.
When emotions become very intense, the mind encodes them less precisely—just as we struggle to detect the difference between two bright lights if both are already dazzling.
Emotions under the microscope
The researchers set out to test a bold claim from William James, one of psychology’s founders.
Back in 1884, James suggested that emotional feelings arise just like sensations: the mind gathers evidence from the body and world, then builds a conscious experience.
To probe this, the team used a clever experimental trick. Volunteers looked at standardized emotional pictures – some uplifting, some disturbing – and simply reported whether each felt pleasant or unpleasant.
Instead of asking people to rate intensity on a scale (which is subjective and messy), the scientists applied a computational decision model. This model tracks how quickly and consistently people accumulate evidence before making a choice.
The key parameter—called the “drift rate”—acts like a speedometer for emotional intensity.
Faster rates mean stronger feelings. Just as importantly, the model also captures variability, which reveals how certain or uncertain the brain is when encoding an emotion.
When joy gets fuzzy
The results were striking. Drift rates lined up neatly with the official ratings of each picture: happier pictures boosted pleasantness speed, sadder ones slowed it down.
That confirmed the model was truly tracking emotional strength.
But the big finding came next. As pleasantness increased, variability also increased. In other words, when joy was mild, people’s brains agreed on it.
When joy was intense, their internal meters wobbled. This is exactly what Weber’s law predicts: as intensity grows, precision falls.
Surprisingly, this pattern held only for pleasant feelings. Unpleasant emotions didn’t show the same decline in precision.
Instead, negative feelings seemed to stay sharp, as if the brain wanted to keep a closer watch on potential threats.
The survival logic of bad vibes
Why would our minds blur joy but sharpen fear?
The researchers suggest a functional reason. When everything feels great, small differences don’t matter much.
Choosing between two delicious desserts is hardly life-or-death. But when things feel threatening, distinguishing small shades of danger can be critical.
In evolutionary terms, our nervous system may allow bliss to blur but insists that fear stays crisp. It’s the brain’s way of making sure survival signals cut through the noise.
Why it matters
This research offers one of the clearest demonstrations yet that emotions are not separate from perception but follow the same rules.
It means that “feeling happy” or “feeling scared” might be closer to sensing brightness or loudness than to thinking abstract thoughts.
For mental health, this perspective has big implications.
If emotional awareness relies on the same coding principles as perception, then therapies that sharpen perception – like mindfulness training, which tunes attention to subtle bodily sensations – might also enhance emotional clarity.
It also suggests why strong positive emotions can feel overwhelming and hard to measure: the brain’s precision naturally drops at the high end of the scale.
Clinicians can take away that patients may struggle to differentiate levels of extreme joy or distress not because they lack insight, but because the nervous system itself is imprecise at high intensities.
Everyday readers can take comfort in knowing that it’s normal to find peak feelings a little hard to put into words.
The bigger picture
For over a century, psychologists have debated whether emotions are unique mental states or just another kind of perception. This study tips the scales toward the latter.
Joy, it seems, is not just a fleeting mood – it’s a sensory signal, encoded with the same quirks as sight and sound.
And like all senses, it comes with limits. Too much light blinds us, too much sound deafens us, and too much pleasure blurs together.
Recognizing these limits doesn’t cheapen our emotions—it reveals the elegant, universal logic of how the brain makes sense of both the world and our inner lives.
Reference
Berkovich, R., & Meiran, N. (2023). Pleasant emotional feelings follow one of the most basic psychophysical laws (weber’s law) as most sensations do. Emotion, 23(5), 1213–1223. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001161
