😊💜Three Traditions in the Study of Emotions: Emotions as Feelings, Evaluations, and Motivations

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“Emotion” is a term that came into use in the English language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a translation of the French term “émotion” but did not designate “a category of mental states that might be systematically studied” until the mid-nineteenth century (Dixon 2012: 338; see also Dixon 2003; Solomon 2008). At the same time, many of the things we call emotions today have been the object of theoretical analysis since Ancient Greece, under a variety of language-specific labels such as passion, sentiment, affection, affect, disturbance, movement, perturbation, upheaval, or appetite. This makes for a long and complicated history, which has progressively led to the development of a variety of shared insights about the nature and function of emotions, but no consensual definition of what emotions are, either in philosophy or in affective science.

A widely shared insight is that emotions have components, and that such components are jointly instantiated in prototypical episodes of emotions. Consider an episode of intense fear due to the sudden appearance of a grizzly bear on your path while hiking. At first blush, we can distinguish in the complex event that is fear an evaluative component (e.g., appraising the bear as dangerous), a physiological component (e.g., increased heart rate and blood pressure), a phenomenological component (e.g., an unpleasant feeling), an expressive component (e.g., upper eyelids raised, jaw dropped open, lips stretched horizontally), a behavioral component (e.g., a tendency to flee), and a mental component (e.g., focusing attention).

One question that has divided emotion theorists is: Which subset of the evaluative, physiological, phenomenological, expressive, behavioral, and mental components is essential to emotion? The answer to this “problem of parts” (Prinz 2004) has changed at various times in the history of the subject, leading to a vast collection of theories of emotions both in philosophy and in affective science. Although such theories differ on multiple dimensions, they can be usefully sorted into three broad traditions, which we call the Feeling Tradition, the Evaluative Tradition and the Motivational Tradition (Scarantino 2016).

The Feeling Tradition takes the way emotions feel to be their most essential characteristic, and defines emotions as distinctive conscious experiences. The Evaluative Tradition regards the way emotions construe the world as primary, and defines emotions as being (or involving) distinctive evaluations of the eliciting circumstances. The Motivational Tradition defines emotions as distinctive motivational states.

Each tradition faces the task of articulating a prescriptive definition of emotions that is theoretically fruitful and compatible at least to some degree with ordinary linguistic usage. And although there are discipline-specific theoretical objectives, there also is a core set of explanatory challenges that tends to be shared across disciplines:

• Differentiation: How are emotions different from one another, and from things that are not emotions?
• Motivation: Do emotions motivate behavior, and if so how?
• Intentionality: Do emotions have object-directedness, and if so can they be appropriate or inappropriate to their objects?
• Phenomenology: Do emotions always involve subjective experiences, and if so of what kind?

For example, a viable account of anger should tell us how anger differs from fear and from non-emotional states (differentiation), whether and how anger motivates aggressive behaviors (motivation), whether and how anger can be about a given state of affairs and be considered appropriate with respect to such state of affairs (intentionality), and whether and how anger involves a distinctive subjective experience (phenomenology).

We now consider some of the most prominent theories within each tradition, and assess how they fare with respect to these four theoretical challenges and others. As we shall see, each tradition seems to capture something important about what the emotions are, but none is immune from counterexamples and problem cases. As a result, the most recent trend in emotion theory is represented by theories that straddle traditions, in an attempt to combine their distinctive insights. Although we begin our investigation with William James and will occasionally mention earlier accounts, our primary focus will be on theories developed in the last 50 years.