The laws of emotion.

Abstract

It is argued that emotions are lawful phe- nomena and thus can be described in terms of a set of laws of emotion. These laws result from the operation of emotion mechanisms that are accessible to intentional control to only a limited extent. The law of situational meaning, the law of concern, the law of reality, the laws of change, habituation and comparative feeling, and the law of hedonic asymmetry are proposed to describe emo- tion elicitation; the law of conservation of emotional mo- mentum formulates emotion persistence, the law of closure expresses the modularity of emotion; and the laws of care for consequence, of lightest load, and of greatest gain per- tain to emotion regulation. For a long time, emotion was an underprivileged area in psychology. It was not regarded as a major area of sci- entific psychological endeavor that seemed to deserve concerted research efforts or receive them. Things have changed over the last 10 or so years. Emotion has become an important domain with a co- herent body of theory and data. It has developed to such an extent that its phenomena can be described in terms of a set of laws, the laws of emotion, that I venture to describe here. Formulating a set of laws of emotion implies not only that the study of emotion has developed sufficiently to do so but also that emotional phenomena are indeed lawful. It implies that emotions emerge, wax, and wane according to rules in strictly determined fashion. To argue this is a secondary objective of this article. Emotions are lawful. When experiencing emotions, people are subject to laws. When filled by emotions, they are manifesting the workings of laws. There is a place for obvious a priori reservations here. Emotions and feelings are often considered the most idiosyncratic of psychological phenomena, and they sug- gest human freedom at its clearest. The mysticism of ineffability and freedom that surrounds emotions may be one reason why the psychology of emotion and feeling has advanced so slowly over the last 100 years. This mys- ticism is largely unfounded, and the freedom of feeling is an illusion. For one thing, the notion of freedom of feeling runs counter to the traditional wisdom that human beings are enslaved by their passions. For another, the laws of emotion may help us to discern that simple, universal, moving forces operate behind the complex, idiosyncratic movements of feeling, in the same way that the erratic path of an ant, to borrow Simon's (1973) well-known parable, manifests the simple structure of a simple ani- mal's mind. The word law may give rise to misunderstanding. When formulating 'laws in this article, I am discussing what are primarily empirical regularities. These regular- ities--or putative regularities--are, however, assumed to rest on underlying Causal mechanisms that generate them. I am suggesting that the laws of emotion are grounded in mechanisms that are not of a voluntary nature and that are only partially under voluntary control. Not only emotions obey the laws; we obey them. We are subject to our emotions, and we cannot engender emotions at will. The laws of emotion that I will discuss are not all equally well established. Not all of them originate in solid evidence, nor are all equally supported by it. To a large extent, in fact, to list the laws of emotion is to list a pro- gram of research. However, the laws provide a coherent picture of emotional responding, which suggests that such a research program might be worthwhile.