Toward a General Theory of Emotion

Professor Gerald C. Cupchik

Department of Psychology University of Toronto

Lecture available at:www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~cupchik

Phenomena

- Emotions = fundamental phenomena in-the-world.

- Emotions occur in situations involving episodes either real or imagined.

- Emotional experiences take place in a context.

- Emotional experiences are multilayered:

Perceptual, Cognitive, Affective, Bodily.

- Goethe: Describe different aspects of a phenomenon and indicate the contexts which affect them or within which they occur.

- Avoid Reductionism!

- Don’t assume that accounting for emotions in terms of bodily responses solves the problem.

- Consider the dimension of Abstract – Concrete.

- Thought and seeing relations is more abstract and bodily responses in the brain and viscera are more concrete.

- You always see the world in an affective way.

Cognition – Emotion [or cognition – affection] complementarity:

“You can’t have one without the other.”

The question becomes:

“How do mind and body affect each other?”

“What kind of mental process goes with what kind of bodily process?”

General Principle

Situational Themes

Search for Meaning

Is it true?

Adaptation to needs or challenges

Is it real?

Motivational Psychology & the Action Model

1. Life theme: Adaptation

2. Historical context:

(i) 18th Century Enlightenment emphasis on the covariation of rational judgment and feelings that provide feedback regarding the wisdom of decisions.

(ii) Darwin’s world: Adapt to challenges and resolve needs.

(iii) 20th Century Behaviourism emphasizing bodily states and drives and Cognitivism emphasizing strategic planning.

3. Fundamental assumptions:

(i) Presumes the separation of mind and body.

(ii) No emotion here please… it’s irrational and gets in the way… it must be filtered out and reduced to generalized arousal!

This model is really about thoughts and feelings.

Emotion = (a) Cognition + (b) Arousal

(a) planning and executive functioning mind

- thoughts which enable us to analyze our worlds

- respond to categories of stimuli that resolve need

Formula

(b) feeling dimension of bodily arousal which provides energy and facilitates focus on the problem.

- feelings of pleasure and excitement that both reflect the impact of our worlds and the purity of bodily resonance.

Feelings are the shadow of cognition!

Psychology of Emotion and the Experience Model

1. Life theme: Search for emotional meaning in life.

2. Historical context:

(i) 18th Century Romanticism and the shift from passion to emotion with the increasing secularization of society and emergence of the self.

(ii) Goethe’s emphasis on the understanding of whole systems that evolve over time.

(iii) William James’s emphasis on the shaping of emotional experiences as such by feedback from visceral processes and facial/bodily expression.

(iv) The Psychodynamic emphasis on the power of situated personal meanings that shape the subject matter of emotional experiences.

(v) The Phenomenological emphasis on distortions in time, space, sensation, causality, and social connection that shape the form of subjective experience.

3. Fundamental assumptions and principles:

(i) Presumes the interrelation of mind and body in emotional experiences that evolve over time.

(ii) The spontaneous (fast) and unreflective response to symbolically perceived meanings in the social world.

(iii) The symptomatic expression of physical and dysfunctional responses to situations the fundamental meaning of which elude the person.

(iv) The humanistic valuation of an effort after holistic reconciliation of mind and body through the exploration of hidden meanings.

(v) Feelings provide the form of an emotional experience.

Summary of Basic Processes

Action Model

Mechanistic – homeostatic process

Experience Model

Vitalistic – Self-sustaining multileveled system

Basic Principles

Action Model

Matching: if you have a need, you are sensitized to stimuli that will satisfy it.

Experience Model

Coherence: you preserve essence of personally meaningful situations at all level of reaction… sensory, cognitive, bodily, experiential.

When situations merge with meaning of situation, you have an emotion.

Action Model

Living the dimension of bodily response in terms

of pleasure and excitation.

Experience Model

Living the personal search for being-in-the-world.