Theories of Emotion

There are different theories of emotion to explain what emotions are
and how they operate. This is challenging, since emotions can be
analyzed from many different perspectives. In one sense, emotions are
sophisticated and subtle, the epitome of what make us human. In
another sense, however, human emotions seem to be very similar to (if
not the same as) the responses that other animals display. Further,
the emotions that we have and how we express them reflect our social
environment, but it also seems likely that emotions were shaped by
natural selection over time. These and other conflicting features of
the emotions make constructing a theory difficult and have led to the
creation of a variety of different theories.

Theories of emotion can be categorized in terms of the context within
which the explanation is developed. The standard contexts are
evolutionary, social and internal. Evolutionary theories attempt to
provide an historical analysis of the emotions, usually with a special
interest in explaining why humans today have the emotions that they
do. Social theories explain emotions as the products of cultures and
societies. The internal approach attempts to provide a description of
the emotion process itself. This article is organized around these
three categories and will discuss the basic ideas that are associated
with each. Some specific theories, as well as the main features of
emotion will also be explained.

1. Emotion

Emotion is one type of affect, other types being mood, temperament and
sensation (for example, pain). Emotions can be understood as either
states or as processes. When understood as a state (like being angry
or afraid), an emotion is a type of mental state that interacts with
other mental states and causes certain behaviors.

Understood as a process, it is useful to divide emotion into two
parts. The early part of the emotion process is the interval between
the perception of the stimulus and the triggering of the bodily
response. The later part of the emotion process is a bodily response,
for example, changes in heart rate, skin conductance, and facial
expression. This description is sufficient to begin an analysis of the
emotions, although it does leave out some aspects of the process such
as the subjective awareness of the emotion and behavior that is often
part of the emotion response (for example, fighting, running away,
hugging another person).

The early part of the process is typically taken to include an
evaluation of the stimulus, which means that the occurrence of an
emotion depends on how the individual understands or "sees" the
stimulus. For example, one person may respond to being laid-off from a
job with anger, while another person responds with joy—it depends on
how the individual evaluates this event. Having this evaluative
component in the process means that an emotion is not a simple and
direct response to a stimulus. In this way, emotions differ from
reflexes such as the startle response or the eye-blink response, which
are direct responses to certain kinds of stimuli.

The following are some of the features that distinguish emotion from
moods. An emotion is a response to a specific stimulus that can be
internal, like a belief or a memory. It is also generally agreed that
emotions have intentional content, which is to say that they are about
something, often the stimulus itself. Moods, on the other hand, are
typically not about anything, and at least some of the time do not
appear to be caused by a specific stimulus. Emotions also have a
relatively brief duration—on the order of seconds or minutes—whereas
moods last much longer. Most theories agree about these features of
the emotions. Other features will be discussed in the course of this
article. There is much less agreement, however, about most of these
other features that the emotions may (or may not) have.
2. Evolutionary Theories

The evolutionary approach focuses on the historical setting in which
emotions developed. Typically, the goal is to explain why emotions are
present in humans today by referring to natural selection that
occurred some time in the past.

It will help to begin by clarifying some terminology. Evolution is
simply "change over generational time" (Brandon, 1990, p. 5). Change
to a trait can occur because of natural selection, chance, genetic
drift, or because the trait is genetically linked with some other
trait. A trait is an adaptation if it is produced by natural
selection. And a trait is the result of natural selection only when
"its prevalence is due to the fact that it conferred a greater
fitness" (Richardson, 1996, p. 545), where fitness means reproductive
success.

However, a trait can enhance fitness without being an adaptation. One
example, noted by Darwin in The Origin of Species, is the skull
sutures in newborns:

The sutures in the skulls of young mammals have been advanced as a
beautiful adaptation for aiding parturition [that is, live birth], and
no doubt they facilitate, or may be indispensable for this act; but as
sutures occur in the skulls of young birds and reptiles, which have
only to escape from a broken egg, we may infer that this structure has
arisen from the laws of growth, and has been taken advantage of in the
parturition of the higher animals (p. 218).

In this case, the evidence from non-mammals indicates that this trait
was not selected because it aids live birth, although it later became
useful for this task.

In order to know that a trait is an adaptation, we have to be familiar
with the circumstances under which the selection occurred (Brandon,
1990; Richardson, 1996). However, often the historical evidence is not
available to establish that a new trait replaced a previous one
because the new trait increased fitness. This is especially true for
psychological traits because there is no fossil record to examine.
Hence, establishing that an emotion is an adaptation presents some
difficult challenges.

Nevertheless, this has not prevented the development of theories that
explain emotions as adaptations. The attractiveness of this approach
is easy to see. Since all humans have emotions and most non-human
animals display emotion-like responses, it is likely that emotions (or
emotion-like behaviors) were present in a common ancestor. Moreover,
emotions appear to serve an important function, which has led many to
think that the certain emotions have been selected to deal with
particular problems and challenges that organisms regularly encounter.
As Dacher Keltner et al. has stated, "Emotions have the hallmarks of
adaptations: They are efficient, coordinated responses that help
organisms to reproduce, to protect offspring, to maintain cooperative
alliances, and to avoid physical threats" (Keltner, Haidt, & Shiota,
2006, p. 117).

Three different ways in which the evolutionary position has been
developed will be discussed in the following sections. The first is
based on the claim that emotions are the result of natural selection
that occurred in early hominids. The second also claims that emotions
are adaptations, but suggests that the selection occurred much
earlier. Finally, the third position suggests that emotions are
historical, but does not rely on emotions being adaptations.
a. Natural Selection in Early Hominids

The theories in the first group claim that the emotions were selected
for in early hominids. Most of these theories suggest that this
selection occurred in response to problems that arose because of the
social environment in which these organisms lived (Tooby & Cosmides,
1990; Cosmides & Tooby, 2000; Nesse, 1990; Keltner et al., 2006). Some
examples of the problems that early hominids may have encountered, and
the emotions that may have been selected in response to these
problems, are listed in Table 1.

Table 1

Table 1. Some possible examples of emotions that were selected for
in early hominids.
These emotions, it is suggested, have been selected to deal with
the types of problems indicated.

Although the time period during which this selection is believed to
have occurred is typically not specified with any precision, the
general period begins after the human lineage diverged from that of
the great apes, 5 to 8 million years ago, and continues through the
appearance of Homo sapiens, which was at least 150,000 years ago (Wood
& Collard, 1999; Wood, 1996).

Adherents of this position suggest that each emotion should be
understood as a set of programs that guide cognitive, physiological,
and behavioral processes when a specific type of problem is
encountered (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990; Cosmides & Tooby, 2000; Nesse,
1990). In Randolph Nesse's words, "The emotions are specialized modes
of operation shaped by natural selection to adjust the physiological,
psychological, and behavioral parameters of the organism in ways that
increase its capacity and tendency to respond adaptively to the
threats and opportunities characteristic of specific kinds of
situations" (1990, p. 268).

For example, Cosmides and Tooby suggest that sexual jealousy is an
adaptation that occurred in "our hunger-gatherer ancestors" (2000, p.
100). As they explain it, sexual jealousy was selected to deal with a
group of related problems. The main one is that a mate is having sex
with someone else, but other problems include the harm that has been
done to the victim's status and reputation, the possibility that the
unfaithful mate has conceived with the rival, and the likelihood that
the victim of the infidelity has been deceived about a wide variety of
other matters (2000, p. 100).

According to Cosmides and Tooby, the emotion of sexual jealousy, deals
with these problems in the following ways:

Physiological processes are prepared for such things as violence,
sperm competition, and the withdrawal of investment; the goal of
deterring, injuring, or murdering the rival emerges; the goal of
punishing, deterring, or deserting the mate appears; the desire to
make oneself more competitively attractive to alternative mates
emerges; memory is activated to reanalyze the past; confident
assessments of the past are transformed into doubts; the general
estimate of the reliability and trustworthiness of the opposite sex
(or indeed everyone) may decline; associated shame programs may be
triggered to search for situations in which the individual can
publicly demonstrate acts of violence or punishment that work to
counteract an (imagined or real) social perception of weakness; and so
on (2000, p. 101).

Cosmides and Tooby, and others who have similar theories, stress that
these emotions are responses that enhanced fitness when the selection
occurred—whenever that was in the past. Although these emotions are
still present in humans today, they may no longer be useful, and may
even be counterproductive, as Cosmides and Tooby's description of the
more violent aspects of sexual jealousy illustrates.
b. Adaptations Shared by All Animals: Plutchik

In contrast to theories that claim that the emotions are the result of
natural selection that occurred in early hominids, another position is
that the selection occurred much earlier, and so the adaptations are
shared by a wider collection of species today. Robert Plutchik claims
that there are eight basic emotions, each one is an adaptation, and
all eight are found in all organisms (1980, 1984). According to
Plutchik, the emotions are similar to traits such as DNA or lungs in
air breathing animals—traits that are so important that they arose
once and have been conserved ever since. In the case of the emotions,
which he calls "basic adaptations needed by all organisms in the
struggle for individual survival" (1980, p. 145), Plutchik suggests
that the selection occurred in the Cambrian era, 600 million years
ago. The eight adaptations are incorporation, rejection, destruction,
protection, reproduction, reintegration, orientation, and exploration
(see Table 2 for a description of each).

Table 2

Table 2. This table lists the eight basic emotions in Robert
Plutchik theory. On the left are the behaviors that, according to
Plutchik, are the result of natural selection, and on the right are
the emotions associated with these behaviors. The first emotion listed
in each row (e.g., fear, anger, joy) is the basic emotion, the second
is the same emotion except at a greater intensity (that is, terror,
rage, ecstasy) (1980, 1984).

In Plutchik's theory, these adaptations are, in one sense, types of
animal behaviors. The term "emotion" is just a particular way of
describing these behaviors in humans. However, he does acknowledge
that the same behaviors are not found in all species. The emotions
that appear in humans are more complex than what are found in lower
species, "but the basic functional patterns remain invariant in all
animals, up to and including humans" (1980, p. 130).

Plutchik's theory also accounts for more than just these eight
emotions. Other emotions, he says, are either combinations of two or
three of these basic emotions, or one of these eight emotions
experienced at a greater or a milder intensity. Some examples are:
anger and disgust mixing to form contempt; fear and sadness mixing to
form despair; and with regard to levels of intensity, annoyance is a
milder form of anger, which is itself a milder form of rage.
c. Historical, but Not Adaptationist: Griffiths

Although the trend when explaining emotions from a historical point of
view is to focus on adaptations, an alternative is simply to identify
the traits that are present in a certain range of species because of
their shared ancestry. According to Paul Griffiths, some emotions
should be identified and then classified in this way (1997, 2004).
This classification creates a psychological category, which Griffiths
terms the affect program emotions: surprise, anger, fear, sadness,
joy, and disgust. In Griffiths' theory, the other emotions belong to
different categories—the higher-cognitive emotions and the socially
constructed emotions—and in some cases a single vernacular term, for
example, anger, will have instances that belong to different
categories. Affect programs are explained further in section 4.

Griffiths' idea is that these emotions are basically the same as other
traits that are studied and classified by evolutionary biology. An
affect program emotion is, "no different from a trait like the human
arm, which has unique features but can be homologized more or less
broadly with everything from a chimpanzee arm to a cetacean fin"
(1997, p. 230). For example, sadness, one of Griffiths' affect program
emotions, occurs in all humans and in other related species. This
trait may differ slightly from species to species, but it is a single
trait because all of the occurrences can be traced back to a common
ancestor.

Griffiths suggests that this method of classification will identify
the emotions that are carried out by similar mechanisms in different
species. For example, "threat displays in chimps look very different
from anger in humans, but when their superficial appearance is
analyzed to reveal the specific muscles whose movement produces the
expression and the order in which those muscles move, it becomes clear
that they are homologues of one another. The same is almost certainly
true of the neural mechanisms that control those movements"
(Griffiths, 2004, p. 238). Rather than simply focusing on the
functions of the emotions, this kind of analysis is more useful for
psychology and neuropsychology because these sciences are interested
in identifying the mechanisms that drive behavior (Griffiths, 2004).
3. Social and Cultural Theories

The second main approach to explaining the emotions begins with the
idea that emotions are social constructions. That is, emotions are the
products of societies and cultures, and are acquired or learned by
individuals through experience. Virtually everyone who defends this
position acknowledges that emotions are to some degree, natural
phenomena. Nonetheless, the central claim made in these theories is
that the social influence is so significant that emotions are best
understood from this perspective.
a. Motivations for the Social Approach

This section will discuss some of the motivations for adopting this
approach to explaining the emotions. Some brief examples to show how
these ideas have been developed are also reviewed.

1. A number of anthropological studies have found discrepancies among
the emotion words used in different languages. In particular, there
are emotion words in other languages that do not correspond directly
or even closely to emotion words in English. Given that individuals
experience the emotions that they have terms for (and vice versa), the
claim that follows from these findings is that people in different
cultures have and experience different emotions. The following are
some of the examples that are often used to illustrate the variability
of emotion terms.

The people of Ifaluk, a small island in the Pacific, have an emotion
that they refer to as fago. Catherine Lutz translates fago as
"compassion/love/sadness" and claims that it is unlike any single
western emotion (1988). The Japanese have the emotion amae, which is a
feeling of dependency upon another's love. This is similar to the
feeling that children have towards their mothers, but it is
experienced by adults. (Morsbach & Tyler, 1986). And there are several
cultures in which anger and sadness are not distinguished as separate,
discrete emotions (Orley, 1970 [quoted in Russell, 1991]; Davitz,
1969; M. Z. Rosaldo, 1980; R. I. Rosaldo, 1984). (See Russell [1991]
for a comprehensive review of this literature.)

2. Emotions typically occur in social settings and during
interpersonal transactions—many, if not most, emotions are caused by
other people and social relationships. Thus, in many cases emotions
may be best understood as interactions between people, rather than
simply as one individual's response to a particular stimulus
(Parkinson, 1996). Brian Parkinson and his colleagues have developed a
theory based upon these considerations (Parkinson, 1996, 1997;
Parkinson, Fischer, & Manstead, 2005). In brief, Parkinson describes
emotion as:

something that emerges directly through the medium of interaction.
Interpersonal factors are typically the main causes of emotion, and
emotions lead people to engage in certain kinds of social encounter or
withdraw from such interpersonal contact. Many emotions have
relational rather than personal meanings … and the expression of these
meanings in an emotional interaction serves specific interpersonal
functions depending on the nature of the emotion (1996, p. 680).

Rom Harré also points out that language, social practices, and other
elements of an individual's culture have a significant role in the
formation of emotions. Individuals in a society develop their emotions
based on what they are exposed to and experience, either directly or
indirectly (1986, 1995). One example that Harré uses to demonstrate
this is an emotion that depended upon religious beliefs and the norms
that develop around those beliefs in the Middle Ages. Accidie was a
negative emotion that Harré and Finlay-Jones describe as "boredom,
dejection, or even disgust with fulfilling one's religious duty"
(Harré & Finlay-Jones, 1986, p. 221). Moreover, this emotion was "the
major spiritual failing to which those who should have been dutiful
succumbed" and "to feel it at all was a sin" (p. 221). Nevertheless,
experience it people did. Today, although people still get bored and
dejected, this emotion no longer exists because our emotions are,
according to Harré and Finlay-Jones, "defined against the background
of a different moral order" (p. 222).

3. Emotions and their expression are regulated by social norms,
values, and expectations. These norms and values influence what the
appropriate objects of emotion are (that is, what events should make a
person angry, happy, jealous, and so on), and they also influence how
emotions should be expressed.

As an example of how specific and recognizable these norms, values,
and expectations sometimes are, one can consider "emotion rules" that
Americans often follow. James Averill (1993; see also 1982) has
identified the rules for anger, some of which are listed here:

* A person has the right (duty) to become angry at intentional
wrongdoing or at unintentional misdeeds if those misdeeds are
correctable (for example, due to negligence, carelessness, or
oversight).
* Anger should be directed only at persons and, by extension,
other entities (one's self, human institutions) that can be held
responsible for their actions.
* Anger should not be displaced on an innocent third party, nor
should it be directed at the target for reasons other than the
instigation.
* The aim of anger should be to correct the situation, restore
equity, and/or prevent recurrence, not to inflict injury or pain on
the target or to achieve selfish ends through intimidation.
* The angry response should be proportional to the instigation;
that is, it should not exceed what is necessary to correct the
situation, restore equity, or prevent the instigation from happening
again.
* Anger should follow closely the provocation and not endure
longer than is needed to correct the situation (typically a few hours
or days, at most) (pp. 182–84).

Once these rules are specified by society (either implicitly or
explicitly), they become, Averill says, "part of our 'second nature'"
(1993, p. 184), and so we follow them without any deliberate effort.

Claire Armon-Jones goes further and says that the purpose of the
emotions is to reinforce society's norms and values (1986b, see also
1985, 1986a). Allowing that emotions may also serve other purposes,
some of the functions that they have are "the regulation of socially
undesirable behavior and the promotion of attitudes which reflect and
endorse the interrelated religious, political, moral, aesthetic and
social practices of a society" (1986b, p. 57). For example, an
individual's envy of someone who is successful (or his guilt over
having cheated someone) are both emotions that have been prescribed by
the individual's society so that the individual will take the
appropriate attitude towards success and cheating.

Of course, there are times when emotion responses do not adhere well
to what one may think of as moral rules or values, for instance,
taking pleasure in creating graffiti or taking pride in hurting
people. For these cases, Armon-Jones suggests that the emotion has
still been learned by the individual, just not in a way that is
consistent with what the larger portion of the society would endorse.
Rather, the individual has acquired the emotion from some
sub-population of society or a peer-group that the individual
identifies with (1986b).
b. Emotions Are Transitory Social Roles: Averill

Many theories have been developed from the social perspective, but one
that has been particularly significant is James Averill's, which will
be reviewed in this section (1980, 1982, 1986). According to Averill,
"an emotion is a transitory social role (a socially constituted
syndrome) that includes an individual's appraisal of the situation and
that is interpreted as a passion rather than as an action" (1980, p.
312). These transitory social roles and syndromes are generated by
social norms and expectations, and so, by these means, social norms
and expectations govern an individual's emotions.

Averill employs the notion of a syndrome to indicate that each emotion
(like fear, anger or embarrassment), covers a variety of elements. A
syndrome is a collection of all of the appropriate responses of a
particular emotion, any of which may at certain times constitute an
emotion response, but none of which are essential or necessary for
that emotion syndrome. It also consists of beliefs about the nature of
the eliciting stimuli and perhaps some natural (that is, non-social)
elements. All of these various components are linked together for an
individual by principles of organization. These principles are what
allow the various elements to be construed coherently as one
particular emotion (1982).

For example, grief is a syndrome. Every individual who understands
this syndrome may at different times have the following grief
responses: shock, crying, refusing to cry (that is, keeping a stiff
upper lip), declining to eat, neglecting basic responsibilities, and
so on. Further, the conditions that the individual understands should
elicit grief are also part of this syndrome: the death of a loved one,
the loss of a valuable object, a setback at work, rainy days, and so
forth.

Bringing these parts together into one coherent whole are the mental
constructs that allow an individual to construe all of these various
elements as grief. An individual labels both his response at a funeral
and his response to his favorite baseball team losing as grief, even
if the two responses have nothing in common. Additionally, with an
understanding of the grief syndrome an individual can judge when
others are experiencing grief and whether another individual's grief
is genuine, severe, mild, and so on.

The idea of emotions as transitory social roles is distinct from the
notion of a syndrome, but characterizes the same phenomena, in
particular, the eliciting conditions and the responses for an emotion.
In Averill's theory, transitory social roles are the roles that
individuals adopt when they choose to play a particular part in a
situation as it unfolds. That being said, although the individual
chooses the role, Averill stresses that the emotional responses are
interpreted by the agent as passive responses to particular
situations, not as active choices.

The transitory social roles are rule governed ways of performing a
social role, and so individuals adopt a role that is consistent with
what a given situation calls for. For example, a grief response is
appropriate at a funeral, but different grief responses are
appropriate at the burial and at the service before the burial. In
order to have an emotion response that is consistent with social norms
and expectations, the individual must understand what the role they
are adopting means in the context in which it is used.

Summarizing these different resources from Averill's theory, the
syndromes are used to classify emotions and demarcate them from each
other. The transitory social roles are useful for explaining how the
emotion responses relate to the society as well as the specific social
context. Considering an emotion as a syndrome, the individual has a
variety of choices for the emotion response. The transitory social
role imposes rules that dictate which response is appropriate for the
situation. For example, the possible responses for anger may include
pouting, yelling, hitting, or perhaps no overt behavior at all. In a
particular situation, say a baseball game, a player may adopt a social
role that includes pushing the umpire as an anger response. Yelling at
the umpire would have been another role the player could have adopted.
However, social norms and expectations dictate that pouting in this
situation would not be an appropriate response.
4. Theories of the Emotion Process

The third category of theories contains those that attempt to describe
the emotion process itself. Generally speaking, the emotion process
begins with the perception of a stimulus, although in some cases the
"stimulus" may be internal, for example, a thought or a memory. The
early part of the emotion process is the activity between the
perception and the triggering of the bodily response (that is, the
emotion response), and the later part of the emotion process is the
bodily response: changes in heart rate, blood pressure, facial
expression, skin conductivity, and so forth.

Most of the theories that will be considered in this section focus on
the early part of the emotion process because—according to these
theories—the specific emotion that occurs is determined during this
part of the process. There is, however, disagreement about how simple
or complex the early part of the emotion process might be, which has
lead to competing cognitive and non-cognitive theories. These two
types of theories are discussed in this section, as is a third type,
the somatic feedback theories.
a. Cognitive Theories

The cognitive theories contend that the early part of the emotion
process includes the manipulation of information and so should be
understood as a cognitive process. This is in contrast to theories
that state that the generation of the emotion response is a direct and
automatic result of perceiving the stimulus—these non-cognitive
theories are discussed below.

Two observations demonstrate some of the motivation for the cognitive
position. First, different individuals will respond to the same event
with different emotions, or the same individual may at different times
respond differently to the same stimulus. For example, one person may
be relieved to be laid-off from her job, while a co-worker greets the
same news with dread. Or one person may, as a young woman, be excited
to be laid-off from her job, but several years later find being
laid-off frightening. As the psychologists Ira Roseman and Craig Smith
point out, "Both individual and temporal variability in reaction to an
event are difficult to explain with theories that claim that stimulus
events directly cause emotional response" (2001, p. 4).

Second, there is a wide range of seemingly unrelated events that cause
the same emotion. None of these events share any physical feature or
property, but all of them can cause the same response. Roseman and
Smith provide an example using sadness and comment on the consequence
of this example for a theory of emotion:

sadness may be elicited by the death of a parent (see Boucher &
Brandt, 1981), the birth of a child (see, for example, Hopkins,
Marcus, & Campbell, 1984), divorce (for example, Richards, Hardy, &
Wadsworth, 1997), declining sensory capacity (Kalayam, Alexopoulos,
Merrell, & Young, 1991), not being accepted to medical school
(Scherer, 1988), or the crash of one's computer hard drive … These
examples pose problems for theories claiming that emotions are
unconditioned responses to evolutionary specified stimulus events or
are learned via generalization or association (2001, p. 4).

Cognitive theories account for these two observations by proposing
that the way in which the individual evaluates the stimulus determines
the emotion that is elicited. Every individual has beliefs, as well as
goals, personal tendencies, and desires in place before the emotion
causing event is encountered. It is in light of these factors that an
individual evaluates the event. For example, different emotions will
occur depending on whether an individual evaluates being laid-off as
consistent with her current goals or inconsistent with them.
i. Judgment Theories

Judgment theories are the version of the cognitive position that have
been developed by philosophers. The basic idea, as Robert Solomon puts
it, is that an emotion is "a basic judgment about our Selves and our
place in our world, the projection of the values and ideals,
structures and mythologies, according to which we live and through
which we experience our lives" (1993, p. 126). Judging in this context
is the mental ability that individuals use when they acknowledge a
particular experience or the existence of a particular state of the
world; what Martha Nussbaum calls "assent[ing] to an appearance"
(2004, p. 191).

Taking anger as an example, in Solomon's theory, "What constitutes the
anger is my judging that I have been insulted and offended" (1977, p.
47). Nussbaum has a similar, but more detailed, description of anger
as the following set of beliefs: "that there has been some damage to
me or to something or someone close to me; that the damage is not
trivial but significant; that it was done by someone; that it was done
willingly; that it would be right for the perpetrator of the damage to
be punished" (2004, p. 188). In some contexts, Nussbaum treats
judgments and beliefs interchangeably and it is sometimes the case
that a series of judgments constitute the emotion.

Elaborating upon her example, Nussbaum points out how the different
beliefs are related to the emotion. She notes that, "each element of
this set of beliefs is necessary in order for anger to be present: if
I should discover that not x but y had done the damage, or that it was
not done willingly, or that it was not serious, we could expect my
anger to modify itself accordingly or recede" (2004, p. 188). Thus, a
change in an individual's beliefs—in his or her way of seeing the
world—entails a different emotion, or none at all.

Judging is the central idea in these theories because it is something
that the agent actively does, rather than something that happens to
the individual. This in turn reflects the judgment theorists' claim
that in order to have an emotion the individual must judge (evaluate,
acknowledge) that events are a certain way. Of course, one can make
judgments that are not themselves emotions. For example, the judgment
that the wall is red, or the judgment that the icy road is dangerous.
One way to distinguish the judgments that are emotions from those that
are not is to suggest (like Nussbaum) that the judgment must be based
on a certain set of beliefs. If those beliefs are present, then the
emotion will occur; if they are not, then it won't. A second response
is to be more specific about the nature of the judgment itself. The
judgments related to emotions are, as Solomon says, "self-involved and
relatively intense evaluative judgments … The judgments and objects
that constitute our emotions are those which are especially important
to us, meaningful to us, concerning matters in which we have invested
our Selves" (1993, p. 127).

It is also important to note that, although these theories claim that
emotion is a cognitive process, they do not claim that it is a
conscious or a deliberative process. As Solomon says, "by 'judgment',
I do not necessarily mean 'deliberative judgment' … One might call
such judgments 'spontaneous' as long as 'spontaneity' isn't confused
with 'passivity'" (1977, p. 46). For example, the judgment that I have
been insulted and offended does not necessarily require any conscious
mental effort on my part.

The last issue that needs to be addressed concerns the bodily
response. All of the judgment theories state that judgments are
necessary for an emotion. While these theories acknowledge that in
many cases various bodily responses will accompany the emotion, many
do not consider the bodily response an integral part of the emotion
process. Nussbaum believes that this can be demonstrated by
considering the consequences of having the requisite mental states
while not having a bodily response:

There usually will be bodily sensations and changes involved in
grieving, but if we discovered that my blood pressure was quite low
during this whole episode, or that my pulse rate never went above
sixty, there would not, I think, be the slightest reason to conclude
that I was not grieving. If my hands and feet were cold or warm,
sweaty or dry, again this would be of no critical value (2004, p.
195).

Some judgment theorists are, however, more accommodating and allow
that the bodily response is properly considered part of the emotion,
an effect of the judgments that are made. Thus, William Lyons
describes his theory, the causal-evaluative theory, as follows:

the causal-evaluative theory gets its name from advocating that X
is to be deemed an emotional state if and only if it is a
physiologically abnormal state caused by the subject of that state's
evaluation of his or her situation. The causal order is important,
emotion is a psychosomatic state, a bodily state caused by an
attitude, in this case an evaluative attitude (1980, pp. 57–58).

In theory such as Lyons', the bodily response is considered part of
the emotion process and the emotion is determined by the cognitive
activity—the judgment or evaluation—that occurs (Lyons 1980, pp.
62–63; see also Roseman and Smith, 2001, p. 6).
ii. Cognitive Appraisal Theories

Cognitive appraisal theories are the cognitive theories that have been
developed by psychologists. Like the judgment theories, the cognitive
appraisal theories emphasize the idea that the way in which an
individual evaluates or appraises the stimulus determines the emotion.
But unlike the judgment theories, the cognitive appraisal theories do
not rely on the resources of folk psychology (beliefs, judgments, and
so forth). The cognitive appraisal theories also offer a more detailed
analysis of the different types of appraisals involved in the emotion
process.

This section will focus on Ira Roseman's theory (1984), which was one
of the first cognitive appraisal theories. As an early contribution,
Roseman's theory is in some ways simpler than more recent cognitive
appraisal theories and so will serve as a good introduction. Similar
models are offered by Roseman, Antoniou, and Jose [1996], Roseman
[2001], Lazarus [1991], and Scherer [1993, 2001]. The basic
theoretical framework is the same for all of the cognitive appraisal
theories. The main differences concern the exact appraisals that are
used in this process.

Roseman's model, which is described in Table 3, has five appraisal
components that can produce 14 discrete emotions. The appraisal
components and the different values that each component can take are
motivational state (appetitive, aversive), situational state
(motive-consistent, motive-inconsistent), probability (certain,
uncertain, unknown), power (strong, weak), and agency (self-caused,
other-caused, circumstance-caused). The basic idea is that when a
stimulus is encountered it is appraised along these five dimensions.
Each appraisal component is assigned one of its possible values, and
together these values determine which emotion response will be
generated.

Table 3

Table 3. The different appraisal components in Roseman's theory
are motivational state, situational state, probability, power, and
agency. The arrows point to the different values that each appraisal
component can take. Each emotion type takes the values that its
placement in the chart indicates. When the emotion is placed such that
it lines up with more than one value for an appraisal component (e.g.,
anger can be uncertain or certain), any of those values can be
assigned for that emotion. Adapted from Roseman (1984, p. 31).

For example, for joy, the situational state must be appraised as
motive-consistent, the motivational state as appetitive, agency must
be circumstance-caused, probability must be certain, and power can be
either weak or strong. Notice also that the different emotions all use
the same appraisal components, and many emotions take the same values
for several of the components. For example, in Roseman's model, anger
and regret take the same values for all of the appraisals except for
the agency component; for that appraisal, regret takes the value
self-caused and anger takes other-caused.

The five appraisal components are described as follows:

1. The motivational state appraisal distinguishes between states
that the individual views as desirable (appetitive) and states that
are viewed as undesirable (aversive). This is not an evaluation of
whether the event itself is positive or negative; rather it is an
evaluation of whether the event includes some important aspect that is
perceived as a goal or some aspect that is perceived as a punishment.
A punishment (or something perceived as a punishment) that is avoided
is a positive event, but still includes an evaluation of a punishment.
For example, according to Roseman, although relief is a positive
emotion, it includes an evaluation that some important aspect of the
event is aversive. Conversely, sorrow, a negative emotion, includes an
evaluation that some important aspect of the event is appetitive.
2. The situational state component determines whether the desirable
or undesirable quality of the event is present or absent. The
appraisal that something desirable is present and the appraisal that
something undesirable is absent are both motive-consistent. On the
other hand, the appraisal that something desirable is absent or
something undesirable is present is motive-inconsistent. So for
instance, the situational state for both joy and relief is
motive-consistent. But, joy includes the appraisals that there is a
desirable state and it is present, and relief includes the appraisals
that there is an undesirable state and it is absent.
3. The probability component evaluates whether an event is definite
(certain), only possible (uncertain), or of an unknown probability.
For this component, an outcome of uncertainty contributes to hope
instead of joy or relief, which both involve an appraisal that the
event is certain (that is, the outcome of the event has been
determined). The possibility that the event can be appraised as having
an unknown probability was added by Roseman in order to account for
surprise, which is often considered a basic emotion (for example,
Izard, 1977; Ekman, 1992). For this appraisal, unknown differs from
uncertain in that unknown is the value that is assigned when the
distinction between motive-consistent versus motive-inconsistent
cannot be made. When the distinction can be made, the value is
assigned certain or uncertain.
4. The evaluation of power is the individual's perception of his or
her strength or weakness in a situation. These values distinguish, for
example, shame (weak) and regret (strong), as well as dislike (weak)
and anger (strong). Roseman suggests a situation that would be likely
to cause an evaluation of weakness rather than strength. He suggests
that we "consider someone being robbed at gunpoint. Will this person,
quite unjustly treated but quite weak, be feeling anger? I contend
that he would not, though he would probably feel some negative emotion
towards his assailant. This emotion, in … [my] theory, is dislike"
(1984, p. 27).
5. Lastly, the agency component. An evaluation is made about
whether the event was caused by the individual, caused by some other
person, or is merely a result of the situation (that is, the event is
perceived as lacking an agent). This appraisal usually determines to
whom or towards what the emotion is directed. Making this evaluation
sometimes requires a subtle understanding of what the emotion-causing
stimulus is. For instance, consider an individual who is presented
with a gift by a friend. If the individual focuses on the gift and
having just received it (the general state of affairs), his emotion is
joy. If the individual focuses on the friend who has just given the
gift (focuses on another person), the emotion is liking.

Just like the judgment theorists, Roseman and the other appraisal
theorists say that these appraisals do not have to be deliberate, or
even something of which the individual is consciously aware. To
illustrate this, consider someone accidentally spilling a glass of
water on you versus intentionally throwing the glass of water on you.
According to Roseman's theory, in the first case, the agency appraisal
would most likely be circumstance-caused. In the latter case, it would
be other-caused. As a result, different emotions would be elicited.
Most people have had an experience like this and can see that
determining these values would not take any conscious effort. The
values are set outside of conscious awareness.

Unlike some of the judgment theorists, all of the cognitive appraisal
theorists agree that the appraisals are followed by a bodily response,
which is properly consider part of the emotion process. Roseman
suggests that once the appraisals have been made, a response that has
the following parts is set in motion: (1) "the thoughts, images, and
subjective 'feeling' associated with each discrete emotion," (2) "the
patterns of bodily response," (3) the "facial expressions, vocal
signals, and postural cues that communicate to others which emotion
one is feeling," (4) a "behavioral component [that] comprises actions,
such as running or fighting, which are often associated with
particular emotions," and (5) "goals to which particular emotions give
rise, such as avoiding some situation (when frightened) or inflicting
harm upon some person (when angered)" (1984, pp. 19–20).
b. Non-Cognitive Theories

Non-cognitive theories are those that defend the claim that judgments
or appraisals are not part of the emotion process. Hence, the
disagreement between the cognitive and the non-cognitive positions
primarily entails the early part of the emotion process. The concern
is what intervenes between the perception of a stimulus and the
emotion response. The non-cognitive position is that the emotion
response directly follows the perception of a relevant stimulus. Thus,
instead of any sort of evaluation or judgment about the stimulus, the
early part of the emotion process is thought to be reflex-like.

The non-cognitive theories are in many ways a development of the folk
psychological view of emotion. This is the idea that emotions are
separate from the rational or cognitive operations of the mind:
cognitive operations are cold and logical, whereas emotions are hot,
irrational, and largely uncontrollable responses to certain events.
The non-cognitive position has also been motivated by skepticism about
the cognitive theories. The non-cognitive theorists deny that
propositional attitudes and the conceptual knowledge that they require
(for example, anger is the judgment that I have been wronged) are
necessary for emotions. Advocates of the non-cognitive position stress
that a theory of emotion should apply to infants and non-human
animals, which presumably do not have the cognitive capabilities that
are described in the judgment theories or the cognitive appraisal
theories.

With respect to the non-cognitive theories themselves, there are two
different approaches. The first develops an explanation of the
non-cognitive process, but claims that only some emotions are
non-cognitive. The second approach describes the non-cognitive process
in a very similar way, but defends the idea that all emotions are
non-cognitive.
i. Some Emotions Are Non-Cognitive: Ekman and Griffiths

Paul Ekman originally developed what is now the standard description
of the non-cognitive process (1977), and more recently Paul Griffiths
has incorporated Ekman's account into his own theory of the emotions
(1997). This section will review the way in which Ekman and Griffiths
describe the non-cognitive process. The next section will examine a
theory that holds that all emotions are non-cognitive, a position that
Ekman and Griffiths do not defend.

Ekman's model is composed of two mechanisms that directly interface
with each other: an automatic appraisal mechanism and an affect
programme. Griffiths adopts a slightly different way of describing the
model; he treats Ekman's two mechanisms as a single system, which he
calls the affect program. Griffiths also suggests that there is a
separate affect program for each of several emotions: surprise, fear,
anger, disgust, sadness, and joy (1997, p. 97). (As noted in section
one, Griffiths identifies this class of emotions, the affect programs,
historically.)

Describing the automatic appraisal mechanism, Ekman says:

There must be an appraiser mechanism which selectively attends to
those stimuli (external or internal) which are the occasion for
activating the affect programme … Since the interval between stimulus
and emotional response is sometimes extraordinarily short, the
appraisal mechanism must be capable of operating with great speed.
Often the appraisal is not only quick but it happens without
awareness, so I must postulate that the appraisal mechanism is able to
operate automatically. It must be constructed so that it quickly
attends to some stimuli, determining not only that they pertain to
emotion, but to which emotion, and then activating the appropriate
part of the affect programme (1977, p. 58).

The automatic appraisal mechanism is able to detect certain stimuli,
which Ekman calls elicitors. Elicitors can vary by culture, as well as
from individual to individual. On a more general level, however, there
are similarities among the elicitors for each emotion. These are some
of the examples that Ekman offers:

Disgust elicitors share the characteristic of being noxious rather
than painful; … fear elicitors share the characteristic of portending
harm or pain. One of the common characteristics of some of the
elicitors of happiness is release from accumulated pressure, tension,
discomfort, etc. Loss of something to which one is intimately attached
might be a common characteristic of sadness elicitors. Interference
with ongoing activity might be characteristic of some anger elicitors
(1977, pp. 60–61).

Related to Ekman's notion of an elicitor, Griffiths suggests that this
system includes a "biased learning mechanism," which allows it to
easily learn some things, but makes it difficult for it to learn
others. For example, it is easier for humans to acquire a fear of
snakes than a fear flowers (Griffiths, 1997, pp. 88–89). Furthermore,
this system "would have some form of memory, storing information about
classes of stimuli previously assessed as meriting emotional response"
(1997, p. 92).

The second mechanism that Ekman describes, what he calls the affect
programme, governs the various elements of the emotion response: the
skeletal muscle response, facial response, vocal response, and central
and autonomic nervous system responses (1977, p. 57; see also
Griffiths, 1997, p. 77). According to Ekman, this is a mechanism that
"stores the patterns for these complex organized responses, and which
when set off directs their occurrence" (1977, p. 57).

Griffiths also points out that the affect programs (recall that, in
Griffiths' parlance, affect program refers to the whole system) have
several of the features that Fodor (1983) identified for modular
processes. In particular, when the appropriate stimulus is presented
to the system the triggering of the response is mandatory, meaning
that once it begins it cannot be interfered with or stopped. The
affect programs are also encapsulated, or cut off from other mental
processes (1997, pp. 93–95). Ekman appears to have been aware of the
modular nature of this system when he wrote, "The difficulty
experienced when trying to interfere with the operation of the affect
programme, the speed of its operation, its capability to initiate
responses that are hard to halt voluntarily, is what is meant by
out-of-control quality to the subjective experiences of some emotions"
(1977, p. 58).

Ekman and Griffiths both believe that this system accounts for a
significant number of the emotions that humans experience, but neither
think that it describes all emotions. Ekman says that the automatic
appraisal mechanism is one kind of appraisal mechanism, but he also
believes that cognitive appraisals are sometimes utilized. Griffiths
defends the view that the vernacular term emotion does not pick out a
single psychological class. In addition to the affect program
emotions, he suggests some emotions are cognitively mediated and some
are socially constructed.
ii. All Emotions Are Non-Cognitive: Robinson

An alternative view is that the emotion process is always a
non-cognitive one. That is, a system like the one described by Ekman
and Griffiths accounts for all occurrences of emotion. This position
is defended by Jenefer Robinson (1995, 2004, 2005). It is also similar
to the theories developed by William James (1884) and, more recently,
Jesse Prinz (2004a), which are discussed in the next section. See
Zajonc (1980, 1984) for another important defense of the non-cognitive
position.

In her "exclusively non-cognitive" theory, Robinson claims that any
cognitive processes that occur in an emotion-causing situation are in
addition to the core process, which is non-cognitive. She acknowledges
that in some cases, an emotion might be caused by cognitive activity,
but this is explained as cognitive activity that precedes the
non-cognitive emotion process. For example, sometimes an individual's
fear is in response to cognitively complex information such as the
value of one's investments suddenly dropping. In this case, a
cognitive process will determine that the current situation is
dangerous, and then what Robinson calls an affective appraisal will be
made of this specific information and a fear response will be
triggered. As Robinson describes this part of her theory, "My
suggestion is that there is a set of inbuilt affective appraisal
mechanisms, which in more primitive species and in neonates are
automatically attuned to particular stimuli, but which, as human
beings learn and develop, can also take as input more complex stimuli,
including complex 'judgments' or thoughts" (2004, p. 41).

This explanation allows Robinson to maintain the idea that emotions
are non-cognitive while acknowledging that humans can have emotions in
response to complex events. This aspect of her theory can also be used
to explain how an individual can be cognitively aware that he or she
has been unjustly treated, or been unexpectedly rewarded, but not
experience any emotion (for example, anger, or sadness, or
happiness)—a situation which does seem to occur sometimes. For
example, the cognitive appraisal may indicate that the individual has
been unjustly treated, but the affective appraisal will not evaluate
this as worthy of an emotion response.

Robinson also suggests that the non-cognitive process may be followed
by cognitive activity that labels an emotion response in ways that
reflect the individual's thoughts and beliefs. The non-cognitive
process might generate an anger response, but then subsequent
cognitive monitoring of the response and the situation causes the
emotion to be labeled as jealousy. Thus, the individual will take him
or herself to be experiencing jealousy, even though the actual emotion
process was the one specific to anger (2004, 2005).
c. Somatic Feedback Theories

The theories discussed in this section have varied in the importance
that they place on the bodily changes that typically during the
emotion process. The judgment theorist Martha Nussbaum is dismissive
of the bodily changes, whereas the cognitive appraisal theorists (that
is, the psychologists) hold that the bodily response is a legitimate
part of the process and has to be included in any complete description
of the emotions. Meanwhile, all of the non-cognitive theorists agree
that bodily changes are part of the emotion process.

However, the cognitive theories all maintain that it is the cognitive
activity that determines the specific emotion that is produced (that
is, sadness, anger, fear, and so forth.) and the non-cognitive
position is not very different in this regard. Ekman's automatic
appraisal mechanism and Robinson's affective appraisals are both
supposed to determine which emotion is generated.

The further question is whether there is a unique set of bodily
changes for each emotion. The cognitive appraisal theorist Klaus
Scherer claims that each appraisal component directs specific bodily
changes, and so his answer to this question is affirmative (2001);
Griffiths says that is likely that each affect program emotion has a
unique bodily response profile (1997, pp. 79–84); and Robinson is
skeptical that different emotions can be distinguished by any of the
features of the bodily response, except perhaps the facial expression
(2005, pp. 28–34). Nevertheless, although answering this question is
important for a complete understanding of the emotions, it does not
greatly affect the theories mentioned here, which are largely based on
what occurs in the early part of the emotion process.

The somatic feedback theorists differ from the cognitive and
non-cognitive positions by claiming that the bodily responses are
unique for each emotion and that it is in virtue of the unique
patterns of somatic activity that the emotions are differentiated.
Thus, according to these theories, there is one set of bodily changes
for sadness, one set for anger, one for happiness, and so on. This is
a claim for which there is some evidence, although except for facial
expressions, the current evidence is not very strong (see Ekman, 1999;
Levenson, Ekman, & Friesen, 1990; Prinz, 2004b). In any case, it is
the feedback that the mind (or brain) gets from the body that makes
the event an emotion.

William James (1884) was the first to develop a somatic feedback
theory, and recently James' model has been revived and expanded by
Antonio Damasio (1994, 2001) and Jesse Prinz (2004a, 2004b). Somatic
feedback theories suggest that once the bodily response has been
generated (that is, a change in heart rate, blood pressure, facial
expression, and so forth), the mind registers these bodily activities,
and this mental state (the one caused by the bodily changes) is the
emotion.

James describes it this way: "the bodily changes follow directly the
perception of the exciting fact [that is, the emotion causing event],
and … our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion,"
(1884, p. 189–90, italics and capitalization removed). Note that
James' theory overlaps with the non-cognitive theories insofar as
James suggests that when the stimulus is perceived, a bodily response
is triggered automatically or reflexively (1884, p. 195–97). The way
in which he describes this process is just as central to the
non-cognitive theories as it is to his own: "the nervous system of
every living thing is but a bundle of predispositions to react in
particular ways upon the contact of particular features of the
environment. . . . The neural machinery is but a hyphen between
determinate arrangements of matter outside the body and determinate
impulses to inhibition or discharge within its organs" (1884, p. 190).
Hence, according to James, when the appropriate type of stimulus is
perceived (that is a bear), this automatically causes a bodily
response (trembling, raised heart rate, and so forth), and the
individual's awareness of this bodily response is the fear.

A consequence of this view is that without a bodily response there
cannot be an emotion. This is a point that James illustrates with the
following thought experiment:

If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our
consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily
symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no "mind-stuff" out of
which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral
state of intellectual perception is all that remains (1884, p. 193;
notice that Nussbaum articulates the opposite intuition in a quote
above).

Jesse Prinz has recently expanded upon James' theory. For Prinz, as
for James, the emotion is the mental state that is caused by the
feedback from the body. However, Prinz makes a distinction between
what this mental state registers and what it represents. According to
Prinz, an emotion registers the bodily response, but it represents
simple information concerning what each emotion is about—for example,
fear represents danger, sadness represents the loss of something
valued, anger represents having been demeaned.

Like James, Prinz suggests that the bodily response is primarily the
result of a non-cognitive process. In Prinz's example in Figure 1,
there is no mental evaluation or appraisal that the snake is
dangerous, rather the perception of the snake triggers the bodily
changes. In this case, Prinz says that the bodily changes that occur
in response to perceiving a snake can be explained as an adaptation.
Our bodies respond in the way that they do to the perception of a
snake because snakes are dangerous, and so danger is what the mental
state is representing (2004a, p. 69).

Figure 1

Figure 1. An illustration of Prinz's somatic feedback theory. In
this example, fear is the mental state caused by feedback from the
body (that is, the perception of the bodily changes). This mental
state registers the bodily changes, but represents meaningful, albeit
simple, information. In this example the mental state represents
danger. Adapted from Prinz (2004a, p. 69).

The advantage that Prinz's theory has over James' is that it
incorporates a plausible account of the intentionality of emotions
into a somatic feedback theory. In Prinz's theory, the mental state
(the emotion) is caused by bodily activity, but, rather than being
about the bodily activity, the emotion is about something else, namely
these simple pieces of information that the mental state represents.

The third theorist in this group, Antonio Damasio, is also able to
account for the intentionality of the mental state that is caused by
feedback from the body. Here, Damasio's account differs from Prinz's
because Damasio takes it that the emotion process does include
cognitive evaluations, at least for most emotions. A word of
clarification before proceeding: what James and Prinz call the
emotion, Damasio refers to as a feeling.

In Damasio's theory, a typical case begins with thoughts and
evaluations about the stimulus, and this mental activity triggers a
bodily response—this process Damasio calls "the emotion." A mental
representation of the bodily activity is then generated in the brain's
somatosensory cortices—this is the feeling according to Damasio (1994,
p. 145). This feeling occurs "in juxtaposition" to the thoughts and
evaluations about the stimulus that triggered the bodily changes in
the first place.

Figure 2

Figure 2. Damasio's somatic feedback theory. The part of this
process that includes (B) and (C) is what Damsio calls the emotion.
The mental representation of the activity in the body, (D), Damasio
calls the feeling. Since (B) and (D) co-occur, the feeling will be
accompanied by the information that triggered the bodily response.

According to Damasio, these feelings are crucial in helping us make
decisions and choose our actions (see Damasio's somatic marker
hypothesis, 1994, 1996). As an illustration of this, let us say that
Bill's brother-in-law has just offered to let him in on a risky, but
possibly lucrative business venture. Although Bill realizes that there
are many aspects of the situation to consider, the thought of losing a
lot of money causes a bodily response. The feedback from Bill's body
is then juxtaposed with the thought of being tangled up in a losing
venture with his brother-in-law. It is this negative feeling that
informs Bill's choice of behavior, and he declines the offer without
ever pondering all of the costs and benefits. Bill could have
considered the situation more thoroughly, but acting on this kind of
feeling is, according to Damasio, often the way in which actions are
chosen.

Another important feature of Damasio's account (and one that Prinz has
adopted) is the idea that there is an as-if loop in the brain—as in
'as-if the body were active.' According to Damasio, the mental
representations that constitute feelings can occur in the way just
described, or the brain areas that evaluate the stimulus (the amygdala
and the prefrontal cortices) can directly signal the somatosensory
cortices instead of triggering bodily activity. The somatosensory
cortices will respond as if the bodily activity was actually
occurring. This will generate a feeling more quickly and efficiently,
although it may not feel the same as a genuine bodily response (1994,
p. 155–56). In any case, the consequence is that there can be a
feeling even if the body is not involved. The possibility that there
is an as-if loop in the brain allows the somatic feedback theorists to
explain how individuals who cannot receive the typical feedback from
the body can still have feelings (or in Prinz's language, emotions),
for instance, those individuals who have suffered spinal cord
injuries.
5. Conclusion

This article has outlined the basic approaches to explaining the
emotions, it has reviewed a number of important theories, and it has
discussed many of the features that emotions are believed to have. One
tentative conclusion that can now be drawn is that it is unlikely that
any single theory will prevail anytime soon, especially since not all
of these theories are in direct competition with each other. Some of
them are compatible, for instance, an evolutionary theory and a theory
that describes the emotion process can easily complement each other;
Griffiths' theory of the affect program emotions demonstrates that
these two perspectives can be employed in a single theory. On the
other hand, some of the theories are simply inconsistent, like the
cognitive and non-cognitive theories, and so the natural expectation
is that one of these positions will eventually be eliminated. Many of
the theories, however, fall somewhere in between, agreeing about some
features of emotion, while disagreeing about others.

The empirical evidence that exists and continues to be collected is
one topic that has not been discussed in this article. Being familiar
with this research is central to analyzing and critiquing the
theories. In the past forty years, a vast amount of data has been
collected by cognitive and social psychologists, neuroscientists,
anthropologists, and ethologists. This empirical research has made
theorizing about the emotions an interesting challenge. A problem that
remains for the theorist of emotion is accounting for all of the
available empirical evidence.
6. References and Further Reading
a. References

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construction of emotion. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour,
15, 1–22.
* Armon-Jones, C. (1986a). The thesis of constructionism. In R.
Harré (Ed.), The social construction of emotions (pp. 32–56). Oxford,
UK: Blackwell.
* Armon-Jones, C. (1986b). The social functions of emotion. In R.
Harré (Ed.), The social construction of emotions (pp. 57–82). Oxford,
UK: Blackwell.
* Averill, J. R. (1980). A constructivist view of emotion. In R.
Plutchik & H. Kellerman (Eds.), Emotion: Theory, research, and
experience (pp. 305–339). New York: Academic Press.
* Averill, J. R. (1982). Anger and aggression: An essay on
emotion. New York: Springer-Verlag.
* Averill, J. R. (1986). The acquisition of emotions during
adulthood. In R. Harré (Ed.), The social construction of emotions (pp.
98–118). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
* Averill, J. R. (1993). Illusions of anger. In R. B. Felson & J.
T. Tedeschi (Eds.), Aggression and violence: Social interactionist
perspectives (pp. 171–192). Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
* Boucher, J. D. & Brandt, M. E. (1981). Judgment of emotion:
American and Malay antecedents. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology,
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* Brandon, R. N. (1990). Adaptation and environment. Princeton,
N.J: Princeton University Press.
* Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (2000). Evolutionary psychology and the
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* Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' error: Emotion, reason, and
the human brain. New York: G. P. Putnam.
* Damasio, A. R. (1996). The somatic marker hypothesis and the
possible functions of the prefrontal cortex. Philosophical
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* Damasio, A. R. (2001). Fundamental feelings. Nature, 413, 781.
* Darwin, C. (2003). On the origin of species by means of natural
selection (J. Carroll, Ed.). Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview.
* Davitz, J. R. (1969). The language of emotion. New York: Academic Press.
* Ekman, P. (1977). Biological and cultural contributions to body
and facial movement. In J. Blacking (Ed.), The anthropology of the
body (pp. 39–84). London: Academic Press.
* Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and
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b. Suggested Reading

* Lewis, M., Haviland-Jones, J. M., & Barrett, L. F. (Eds.).
(2008). Handbook of emotions (3rd ed.). New York: Guilford Press.
* Scherer, K. R., Schorr, A., & Johnstone, T. (Eds.). (2001).
Appraisal processes in emotion: Theory, methods, research. New York:
Oxford University Press.
* Solomon, R. C. (Ed.). (2003). What is an emotion?: Classic and
contemporary readings (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
* Solomon, R. C. (Ed.). (2004). Thinking about feeling:
Contemporary philosophers on emotions. New York: Oxford University
Press.