Theoretical Approaches to Emotion

Four major theoretical perspectives on emotion in psychology are described. Examples of the ways in which research on emotion and speech utilize aspects of the various perspectives are presented and a plea is made for students of emotion and speech to consider more self-consciously the place of their research within each of the perspectives. 1. ARE THEORIES OF EMOTION NECESSARY? Fifty years ago, B. F. Skinner (Skinner, 1950; Skinner, 1972) asked "Are theories of learning necessary?" Calling theories, especially those that traffic in intervening variables or that appeal "to events taking place somewhere else, at some other level of observation, described in different terms and measured, if at all, in different dimensions" (Skinner, 1972, p. 69) from the phenomena they seek to explain, "fun" but "useless," Skinner argued that theories of learning are ultimately "a refuge from the data" (Skinner, 1972, p. 72) and so should be abandoned by any self-respecting science of behavior. I would like to ask the same question of theories of emotion; namely, "Are theories of emotion necessary?" More specifically, I would like to ask, "Are theories of emotion necessary--and useful--to students of emotion and speech?" Although it is beyond the scope of this paper, I believe it can be shown that Skinner's attack on theory was wrongheaded and that his conviction that a scientific psychology could make do without theories and just "get back to an observable datum" (p. 72) was belied by his own arguments, which are saturated by the kind of theoretical statements to which he objected. Contra Skinner, I will argue that theories of emotion are absolutely essential for students of emotion, no matter what aspect of emotion they study. I will further argue that both contemporary and classic theories of emotion are eminently useful to students of emotion and speech. I know that you all make reference in your work to very specific theories of how emotion gets encoded into speech and the like. I would like to convince you of the centrality and usefulness of the "big" theories of emotion to your research. To get there, I will first describe four of the most influential theoretical perspectives and research traditions in the study of emotion in the past 125 years or so. I will then briefly describe what I see as some of the ways in which the four perspectives have begun to converge. Next, I will attempt to locate some examples of the research presented at this conference within the four perspectives. This will give you a sense, I hope, of the ways in which students of emotion and speech already make use of the "big" theories of emotion, if sometimes only implicitly. Finally, I will outline what students of emotion and speech might gain from an integration of theories from the four perspectives. 2. FOUR THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES When Skinner (Skinner, 1950) talked about theories of learning, he was actually talking about families or kinds of theories. I shall for the most part be doing the same. A survey of contemporary theory and research on emotion in psychology reveals four different general theoretical perspectives about how to define, study, and explain emotion. I have called these the Darwinian, Jamesian, cognitive, and social constructivist perspectives (Cornelius, 1996) . Each of these perspectives has its own set of assumptions about the nature of emotion, about how to construct theories about emotion, and about how to conduct research on emotion. Each perspective is also associated with it own body of empirical research. Because each of the perspectives has its own more or less unique way of thinking about emotions, has endured in time, and has its sometimes passionate cadre of adherents whose research exemplifies "how things are done" within the perspective, it is appropriate to speak about each perspective as embodying its own tradition of research. There are, of course, several areas of overlap among the four perspectives and their associated research traditions, this is especially true of the Darwinian and Jamesian perspectives. However, for the most part, each ultimately presents a quite different account of what emotions are all about. 2.1 The Darwinian Perspective The central organizing idea of the Darwinian perspective is the notion that emotions are evolved phenomena with important survival functions that have been selected for because they have solved certain problems we have faced as a species. As such, we should see the same emotions, more or less, in all humans. In addition, since humans share an evolutionary past with other mammals, we should expect to observe similarities in the emotions of closely-related species. The Darwinian perspective and its associated tradition of research had their beginnings in Darwin's 1872 book The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. The book, whose origin lay in Darwin's discomfort with earlier attempts to explain emotional expressions in terms of special creation, described in Darwin's typically marvelous attention to detail the facial expressions and bodily movements that accompany several emotions in humans and other animals and presented ISCA Archive