CHAPTER 21 THE EMOTIONS AN INTEGRATIVE APPROACH JAMES R. AVERILL UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, AMHERST I INTRODUCTION If you want to know what people are like, ask about their loves and hates, hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, and the myriad of other emotions that lend meaning to their lives. But what is an emotion? n. THE DOMAIN OF EMOTION We all know what an emotion is—until we are asked to give a definition. Then we seem to be at a loss for words. Or are we? Roughly 550 to 600 words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) in the English language have a rather clear-cut emotional connotation (Averill, 1975; Johnson-Laird & Oatley, 1989; Storm & Storm, 1987). Some languages have a larger vocabulary to describe emotions than does English; others have a much smaller vocabulary (Russell, 1991). For example, Lutz (1982) found no general term equivalent to "emotion" among the Ifaluk, a people of Micronesia, and only 58 words that she considered unambiguously emotional in connotation ("about our insides"). But simply countmg words is of Httle interest. What do the words signify? And more generally, what is the relation between language and emotion? COPYRIGHT © 1997 BY ACADEMIC PRESS. HANDBOOK OF PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY 513 ALL RIGHTS OF REPRooucnoN IN A^fY FORM RESERVED. 514 JAMES RAvERiLL A. The Meaning of Emotional Concepts The class of emotions is held together by what Wittgenstein (1953) called ''family resemblances." To illustrate, consider an actual family, the Smiths. Most members of the Smith family have big ears, but not everyone; most have hazel eyes, but not everyone; and most have stocky builds, but not everyone. No single member of the family need have all these characteristic features (big ears, hazel eyes, and a stocky build), yet the family forms a recognizable unit. Although opinions vary (cf. Wierzbicka, 1992), emotions, too, form a recogniz­ able unit based on family resemblances (Fehr & Russell, 1984; Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson, & O'Connor, 1987). And like the big ears, hazel eyes, and stocky build of the Smith family, three features are prototypic of emotions, namely, passivity, intentionality, and subjectivity. i. Passivity For most of Western history, from the ancient Greeks to about the middle of the 18th century, what we now refer to as emotions were called passions. The term "passion" and its cognate "passivity" stem from the Greek pathe via the Latin pari, passiones. The root meaning of these terms is to suffer or undergo change, particu­ larly for the worse. Although it is no longer common to speak of emotions as passions, the connota­ tion of passivity (of being "overcome") is implicit in emotional concepts. We "fall" in love, are "gripped" by anger, "can't help" but hope, and so forth. Because emotional concepts connote passivity, emotions themselves have often been likened to reflexes and simple sensory experiences, which are also beyond personal control. As will be discussed below, however, people typically have more control over their emotions than the connotation of passivity would suggest. 2. Intentionality Intentionality is another of those terms (like passion) that has a long history in psychological thought, but that can be easily misunderstood if interpreted in its ordinary, everyday meaning. Emotions are intentional in the sense that they are about something. People cannot simply be angry, they must be angry at something, afraid o/something, hopeful/or something, and so forth. That "something" is the intentional object of the emotion, the result of an evaluative judgment or appraisal (Solomon, 1993). Intentionality helps distinguish emotions from reflexes, which presume no cognitive intermediary. Intentionality also renders suspect any theory that attempts to reduce emotional phenomena to simple sensory experiences, such as the James- Lange theory. Sensations, whether of a toothache or of bodily arousal, are not about anything; they do not point beyond themselves in the way that emotions do. Intentionality does not, however, distinguish emotions from rational judgments, which also are about something. CHAPTER 21 THE EMOTIONS 515 3. Subjectivity In everyday discourse, it is common to speak of emotions as subjective and of rational judgments as objective. These terms (subjective and objective) are ambigu­ ous, and hence the contrast between them is easily misunderstood. On one interpre­ tation, emotions are subjective in the sense of being biased, whereas factual judg­ ments are impartial (dispassionate). However, not all emotional judgments are misguided, and presumably rational judgments can be, and often are, self-serving and ill-founded. Hence, this contrast is not informative of the distinction between emotional and rational judgments. At the most fundamental level, subjectivity refers to the relation of the object to the subject of experience. For example, if on a rainy day I see a rainbow, the rainbow is the object of my experience; I am the subject, the one who sees. Other persons could presumably see the same rainbow, but not exactly the way I do. When the unique contributions of individual observers are subtracted, what remains is an "objective" description of the rainbow as, for example, might be found in a book on optics. When the emphasis is on the seer rather than on the seen, as in an artist's rendition of a rainbow, the description is "subjective." Emotions are subjective in this sense; that is, they are an attribute of the subjective ("inner") pole of experience, rather than of the external object in and of itself. In many instances, this relation can itself be objectively assessed, for what is beautiful or ugly, beneficial or harmful, is not simply a matter of individual judgment. Society and, more indkectly, biology stipulate the kinds of relations that subserve the various emotions. B. The Organization of Emotions We have now established some of the (admittedly fuzzy) boundary conditions for distinguishing emotional from nonemotional phenomena, namely, passivity, intentionaUty, and subjectivity. We have yet to map the internal structure of the emotional domain—how emotions are organized with respect to one another. Two general approaches have been taken to this issue: categorical and dimensional. 1. Categorical Approaches A categorical approach, as its name implies, assumes that emotions can be grouped into relatively homogeneous categories, and that these categories are systematically related to one another, typically in a hierarchical fashion. A zoological taxonomy is a familiar example of a categorical approach to classification. A number of taxonomies of emotion have been proposed, based primarily on theoretical consider­ ations (e.g., de Rivera, 1977; Mees, 1991; Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988). We will consider in detail one empirically derived taxonomy, since it comes closest to our folk classification of emotion. Storm and Storm (1987) investigated the semantic relations among 590 emotional terms. Four highly educated English speakers served as expert judges. Through a process of repeated classification, discussion, and reclassification, they were able to organize 525 of the words into a taxonomic tree, as illustrated in Figure 1. 516 JAMES R. AVERILL Emotions Class Negative Positive Neutral 1 rj. Family Bad 0 ^^J^t . Passive Active awful wonderful m A Genus o | x | x §8 ^ | x | Species S |**iSS8Sg| FIGURE 1 A taxonomic tree depicting the hierarchical organization of 525 emotional terms. Only catego­ ries at the generic level and above are named in the figure. An x represents a group of 1 to 20 closely related terms; an o represents a covert category (i.e., a category that has no name in English). Based on data from Storm and Storm (1987). Four levels of the taxonomic tree are distinguished in Figure 1. For ease of reference, these levels are labeled (from top to bottom) roughly in the manner of a zoological taxonomy, namely, "class," "family,'* "genus," and "species." At the highest level of classification, three broad classes are distinguished, consisting of negative, positive, and neutral terms. At the next level, seven families of emotional concepts are identified, although only four of these (bad/awful, good/wonderful, passive and active) are named in ordinary language. These seven families subsume 20 genera of emotional concepts (sadness, pain, anxiety, fear, etc.), which in turn encompass 61 species. Each species could be further subdivided into smaller units (varieties), but these are not identified in Figure 1.^ ^ The taxonomy presented in Figure 1 is based on class inclusion; that is, emotions (or emotional concepts) lower in the hierarchy are presumed to be varieties of emotions higher in the hierarchy. Taxonomies can also be based on part-whole relations, as in anatomical schemes. The heart, for example, is part of, not a variety of, the cardiovascular system. Similarly, in some respects anger may be considered a part of jealousy, rather than jealousy being a subvariety of anger, as in Figure 1. Still other relations (e.g., cause-effect, similarity) are possible and sometimes used in both folk and scientific classifications; in the case of emotions, for example, jealousy may be linked to anger as a contributing cause, or because both may result in similar behavior (e.g., aggression). To the extent that the emotions are related to one another on bases other than class inclusion. Figure 1 gives a misleading picture. Perhaps most importantly, superordinate-subordinate relations may be reversed, depending on the context. For exam­ ple, in one context jealousy may be considered subordinate to anger, and vice versa in another context (cf. Storm, Storm, & Jones, 1996). In spite of these considerable qualifications. Figure 1 does illustrate important points about our folk classification of emotion, and it will be referred to frequently in subsequent discussion (for a similar taxonomy, see Shaver et al, 1987). CHAPTER 21 THE EMOTIONS 517 Not all categories indicated in Figure 1, particularly at the higher levels of generality, are explicitly recognized in the English language.