New Developments in the Scientific Study of Emotion: An Introduction to the Special Section

Most of the great psychologists and biologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries regarded emotion as a process of central importance to the understanding of behavior. Included among this group were Darwin, Freud, and James. Unfortunately, the empirical study of emotion was pursued only sporadically in the history of scientific psychology until quite recently. The topic lay dormant for several interrelated reasons, including behaviorism's shunning of internal states and the lack of appropriate methods to prob~ emotional experience, expression, and physiology. Today, emotion research has come of age. Witness the recent proliferation of major books on this topic (Buck, 1984; Clark & Fiske, 1982; Ekman, 1982; Frijda, 1986; Gainotti & Caltagirone, 1989; Lazarus, 1991; Lewis & Michalson, 1983; Plutchik, 1980; Scherer & Ekman, 1984; Stein, Leventhal, & Trabasso, 1990; Tomkins, 1991), two journals devoted almost exclusively to this topic (Cognition and Emotion, Motivation and Emotion), the increase in number of papers.on emotion published in the premier journal in social and personality psychology (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology), and the creation of a new society for the study of emotion (International Society for Research on Emotion). The explosion of new work in this area is due, in part, to the changing zeitgeist within psychology regarding the importance of internal states to explaining behavior and to the refinement of established procedures and the development of new methods with which to investigate emotional experience, expression, and physiology. There have been important conceptual developments as well. Emotion is now recognized to be critically important to understanding many of the core phenomena in virtually every major subdiscipline of psychology. For example, basic research on emotion has been useful In 1890, William James held that ". . . the merely descriptive literature of the emotions is one of the most tedious parts of psychology ... the general causes of the emotions are indubitably physiological" (Principles ofPsychology, vol. 2, pp. 448-449). A century later, this "Symposium on Emotion" takes issue with the first of these propositions, finds some support for the second, and presents an overview of the now vastly larger literature.