Theories of Emotion and Emotion-Behavior Relationships

Abstract

Although McDougall’s theory (1908) linked emotions and “conation” and his work and Freud’s (1938) laid the groundwork for relating emotions, motivations, and behavior, one of the persistent problems in the human sciences is that most theories of personality, theories of behavior, and theories of emotion have been created independently of each other. The majority of personality theories have typically not concerned themselves with the problem of emotion. Most personality theorists make use of one or more concepts of motivation, but they have very infrequently made use of discrete emotion concepts as motivational variables. On the other hand, investigators in the field of emotions have typically been concerned with one or more components of the emotion process—its neurophysiology, its expression, or its phenomenology—and with only a few exceptions (e.g., Tomkins, 1962, 1963), they have done little to relate their findings to personality or the behavior of the organism as a whole. This chapter will consider some of the major approaches to the study of emotion and discuss where possible the relevance of a given approach to the study of other functions of the organism or to personality as a whole.