Emotional responses provide a type of conceptual coherence. Specific emotional reactions to events may render those events equivalent for the perceiver. The emotional response categories are probably implicit in that the individual can not necessarlly articulate the rule of conceptual coherence. Furthermore, we argue that the set of emotional response categories corresponds to a set of basic emotions. Because the basis of these categories is innate, some members of the categories are pre-wired. Others are learned during experience; but there are constraints on the possible connections between emotional responses and naturally-occurring stimuli. Experimental evidence for the existence of emotional response categories, as well as their effects in low-level perceptual and linguistic processes is reported.