Emotions, Psychological Structure of

Abstract

Emotion is conceptualized as a hypothetical construct describing a process of interrelated changes in several components of psychobiological functioning, namely the evaluation of objects or events with respect to the organism's goals or needs and the ensuing changes in physiological arousal, motor expression, behavior preparation, and subjective feeling. The differentiation of separate emotions has been conceived rather differently by competing theoretical traditions, including the assumption of innate neuromotor programs or circuits for a limited number of basic emotions, mapping emotions in a dimensional space (e.g., a two-dimensional space defined by valence and activation), a large number of fuzzily defined emotions consisting of the adaptive consequences of complex appraisal processes, or social constructions on the basis of cultural values and meaning. However, in spite of apparent differences, these models are generally compatible once one allows for the fact that they focus on different components of emotion and different phases of the process.