On Emotions

Typical Emotions

Aaron Ben Ze'ev, The Philosophy of Psychology,
Edited by William O'Donohue and Richard F. Kitchener
SAGA Publications
London * Thousand Oaks * New Delhi
Excerpt

CHAPTER 16

Emotions are of interest to everyone. Indeed, they play a central role in our lives. Talking to lay people about emotions is instructive: Ordinary people are highly curious and knowledgeable about emotional phenomena. Common sense, poems, novels, movies, historical accounts, psychological studies, and philosophical discussions supply us with a host of information about emotions. Despite their apparent simplicity and the great deal of available information, emotions are an extremely crucial and complex topic. The problem in understanding emotions is the formulation of a comprehensive framework to adequately explain the various emotional phenomena. Owing to the enormous complexity and diversity of emotions, the presentation of such a framework is difficult and rare.

One aim of this chapter is to offer an outline for such a framework by providing an initial characterization of typical emotions. Because of space limitations I will concentrate on the presentation of the framework itself rather than on critical discussions of possible objections to its various contentions.

The typical emotional cause is suggested to be a perceived significant change in our situation; the typical emotional concern is a comparative concern; and the typical emotional object is a human being. Typical emotions are considered to have four basic characteristics: instability, great intensity, relative brevity, and a partial perspective; and to consist of four basic components: cognition, evaluation, motivation, and feeling. I will try to show that this is not an arbitrary characterization, but one that is helpful in understanding emotions and is compatible with commonsense as well as scientific usages.

 

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