Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [315]
Either because this was so recent a development or because the subject is so heterogeneous, emotion researchers and theorists found it difficult to agree on a definition of what they were studying. Ordinary people have no such difficulty; even a child of three knows what he means when he says he is happy, sad, or afraid—it’s how he feels. But research psychologists were looking much deeper; their definitions of emotion included causes, physiological concomitants, and consequences, and may strike the layman as ponderous and abstruse. An example:
Emotions are changes in action readiness which have control precedence (which interrupt or compete with alternative mental and behavioral activities), changes caused by appraising events as relevant to concerns (hence giving rise to positive or negative feelings).6
But neither this nor any of the dozens of then-extant professional definitions of emotions was generally accepted by psychologists. As the authors of one journal article commented in 1984, “Everyone knows what an emotion is, until asked to give a definition.” Even in 2004, long after emotion had re-emerged as a key topic in psychology, the editor of a book of research articles on the subject said, in his introduction, “There is, at present, no consensus about what the emotions are… [or] any good single definition of emotion.”7
And although most psychologists said that there is a handful of basic emotions and that the many others are derived from or related to these, there was no agreement as to what the basic emotions are. Some experts included “desire,” others did not; some included “surprise,” others specifically excluded “startle,” which most people would consider a form of surprise; most psychotherapists used “affect” to mean either conscious or unconscious emotional states, but some academic psychologists said that sensory likes and dislikes are affects, emotions are not.
Seeking to filter out the essentials, in 1984 Robert Plutchik, a noted emotion researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, asked volunteers to rate a long list of pairs of emotion-related words in terms of their similarity. Factor-analysis of their ratings showed which emotions had the greatest degree of overlap with others and thus were the most central. Plutchik concluded that there are eight basic emotions: joy, acceptance, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. Other common emotions, he found, are milder or stronger versions of these; for example, grief is sadness at an extreme, and pensiveness is sadness at a low level.8 It’s as good a list as exists, yet though it has often been cited, it did not become the standard among emotion researchers—nor did any other such list.
And there was not yet—nor is there today—a generally accepted theory of the emotions. Some theorists stress the causes of emotions, others their behavioral consequences; some say emotions consist of visceral states, others of higher mental processes, and still others of autonomic and central nervous system phenomena. The proliferation of theoretical ideas is typical of a science in its early, exploratory years; by 1985 one report said that there were roughly a hundred distinguishable theories of the emotions and that even when similar ones were grouped, there were still eighteen groups or types of theory.9
But one can group all those theories into three categories: those that focus on the physical changes accompanying an emotion, such as increased heart rate, skin temperature, palmar sweating, and activation