Ambitious Theory

• Take the broad view and have grand

aims.
• Provide good summaries of the state of
knowledge about emotion.
 Leeper
• Emotions  motives  aroused most of the
time and controlling our behaviour without
our awareness.
• ‘emotional mechanism’
• Emotions  active force  we should use
and develop it.
 Tomkins
• ‘affect’  ingenious and idiosyncratic.
• Affect system is innate  as a primary system
interacts with the secondary or learned drive
system.
• Affect reflected in facial response (CNS), feedback
(rewarding or punishing)  only if self-conscious.
• Basic primary affects: interest/excitement,
enjoyment/joy, surprise/startle, distress/anguish,
disgust/contempt, anger/rage,
shame/humiliation, fear/terror.
 Averill
• Emotions as social syndromes or transitory rules.
• Characteristics: conflictive emotions, impulsive
emotions, transcendental emotions.
• Emotions as a social construction based on a
mixture of biologically determined aspects and a
number of levels of cognition, from perception
through appraisal to symbolic rules and
standards.
• Link between emotion and creativity.
 Mandler (1)
• Emotion resting on arousal (ANS), cognitive
interpretation and consciousness.
• Environment stimuli  cognitive interpretations
 perception of arousal  emotional experience
 changes the original cognitive interpretation.
• Complexity of inputs makes emotion very rich
(meaning)
• Interaction between cognition – arousal: passive
and active.
 Mandler (2)
• Consciousness  prominent role in emotion
 to select and alter the current stream of
action.
• Body (arousal) – mind (evaluationof things
social)
• Evaluations (cognition) as biologically based
and yet as socially constructed.
 Buck
• Primes: a hierarchically arranged set of
motivatonal/emotional system.
• Primary affects  happiness, sadness, fear,
anger, suprise, disgust.
• Emotion is motivation’s manifestation.
• ‘direct perception’  emotional competence
• Communication: spontaneous and symbolic
• The problem of other minds.
 Oatley and Johnson-Laird
• Emotion as communication  cognitive system 
consciousness
• Emotions function as alarms. Send semantic and
non-semantic messages.
• Five basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger,
disgust.
• Emotions as mental states that allows motivations to
be managed  deal with our various goals and
plans.
 Izard (1)
• Emotion as a motivational system  gives meaning
to human existence  determine behaviour.
• 10 fundamental emotions: interest, enjoyment,
surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, contempt, fear,
shame, syhness. (5 criteria)
• Relationship between some emotions  combined
 personality pattern.
• All emotions have elements in common.
 Izard (2)
• The meaning of emotion comes from an interplay
between neurophysiological activity, facial-postural
activity, and subjective experience.
• Emotion activated  life system involved  become
aware of the facial expression
• Four types of information processing (activate
emotion): cellular, organismic, biopsychological,
cognitive.
 Ortony
• Basic emotion: biologically given, or psychologically
primitive  being lack of a set of criteria.
• Various emotions arise from particular set of
appraisals and the like rather than their stemming
from basic emotions.
• ‘second-order intentionality’ (Ben Ze’ef and Oatley,
1996)
• Non-basic emotion depend on the making of social
comparison.
 Frijda (1)
• ‘the emotion process’  7 phases  does not
occur in isolation.
• Emotional experience  feeling as monitors.
• Emotion is a set of mechanism: for generating
pleasure and pain by turning stimuli into
rewards and punishment, for generating
reward/punishment expectancies; for
dictating relevant actions; and for controlling
these actions.
 Frijda (2)
• Abeyance and flexibility are essential to
emotions.
• Emotions can be described in terms of a set of
12 laws: empirical regularities that have
underlying causal mechanism.
• Critics on Frijda: Smedslund (1992)  Frijda’s
laws are non-empirical and tautological.