The legacy of the person–situation debate for understanding variability in emotional experience

Abstract

abstract 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. People can experience a vast range of different emotionalexperiences, ranging from joy and love to anger, sadness andfear. Where the person situation debate revolved around thequestion how we can explain why people behave the way theydoŽ, a tantalizing question that has occupied emotion research-ers over the past decades is how we can account for the vari-ability in emotional experiences across different persons andcontexts, or„stated differently„how we can understand whypeople feel the way they feelŽ. As it turns out, there is remark-able similarity between the answers that have been formulatedto this question and the insights that emerged from the person situation debate.Appraisal theories of emotions are widely regarded as one ofthe most compelling accounts of the elicitation and differentia-tion of different emotions (Scherer, Schorr, & Johnstone, 2001).They posit that an individual evaluates (orappraises) his or hercircumstances as a function of his or her own concerns, goals,and competencies (e.g., as positive or negative, as fair or unfair,controllable or not) and that the outcome of this appraisal pro-cess is associated with speci“c emotional experiences. For in-stance, when publically insulted, a person may appraise thisevent as negative and unfair, and he or she may experience an-ger in response to the event. As such, appraisal theories stronglyresonate with one of the key insights from the person situationdebate by assuming that the emotion-eliciting process rests onthe interaction between person and environmental characteris-tics (Griner & Smith, 2000; Kuppens & Van Mechelen, 2007).Moreover, contemporary appraisal research has shown that notonly how people appraise their circumstances, but also how spe-ci“c appraisals are associated with emotional experience is sub-ject to individual differences. In other words, the same appraisedmeaning may not be associated with the same emotion for allindividuals (Kuppens, Van Mechelen, Smits, De Boeck, & Ceule-mans, 2007). Taken together, appraisal theories can thus be con-sidered to re”ect a speci“c realization of the CAPS theoryformulated by Mischel (Mischel & Shoda, 1998). In this theoryit is likewise posited that a situation elicits particular cogni-tive-affective units (in the emotion context: appraisals), thatthe excitatory and inhibitatory in”uences of these units (apprais-als) combine to determine the persons behavior (emotion), andthat individual differences in behavior (emotion) result fromhow people differ in the accessibility of the CAPS units (apprais-als) and in the ways these units give rise to behavioral outcomes(emotions).It is no mere coincidence that our current knowledge about howemotions come about strongly re”ects and corroborates what wehave learned from the person situation debate. If there is anythingto learn from this fundamental convergence reached between thepersonality and emotion domain, it is that for both the key taskahead lies in studying the regularities and consistencies in peoplescontextualized behavioral and emotional signatures„how peoplebehave and feel in response to speci“c contexts„if we truly wantto capture the richness, and both stability and variability in howpeople behave and feel the way they do.AcknowledgmentsPeter Kuppens is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Fundfor Scienti“c Research, Flanders (FWO) and an Honorary Re-search Fellow at the University of Melbourne. The work for this