Five New Ideas About Emotion and Their Implications for Social-Personality Psychology

Abstract

Emotions are important to personality and social psychology and to the relationship between them. In this chapter, we contrast traditional views of emotion with more recent social-personality views and then contrast these with emerging new perspectives. We consider five questions and conclude that: (1) the components of emotion are not sufficiently correlated to implicate underlying affective programs for specific emotions in the brain; (2) an iterative processing view of emotion elicitation can accommodate both subcortical, unconscious affect and cognitively rich, conscious emotion; (3) emotions influence perceptions in a manner consistent with a resource-based view of both; (4) rather than triggering behavior directly, emotional experience appears to serve a self-teaching function; (5) positive and negative emotions affect thinking styles by promoting or inhibiting the cognitive orientations that are dominant in particular situations. The chapter is thus both historical and modern, emphasizing new developments and their implications for social and personality psychology.