Essay About Laws Of Emotion And Emotion Mechanisms

The Laws of Emotion
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The Laws of Emotion
Nico H. Frijda University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
ABSTRACT: It is argued that emotions are lawful phenomena
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 emotion
elicitation; the law of conservation of emotional momentum
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 pertain
to emotion regulation.
For a long time, emotion was an underprivileged area in
psychology. It was not regarded as a major area of scientific
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 coherent
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 suggest
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 mysticism
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 Simons (1973) well-known
parable, manifests the simple structure of a simple animals
mind.
The word law may give rise to misunderstanding.
When formulating “laws” in this article, I am discussing
what are primarily empirical regularities. These regularities–
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 program
of research. However, the laws provide a coherent
picture of emotional responding, which suggests that such
a research program might be worthwhile.
The Law of Situational Meaning
What I mean by laws of emotion is best illustrated by the
“Constitution” of emotion, the law of situational meaning.”
Emotions arise in response to the meaning structures
of given situations; different emotions arise in response
to different meaning structures. Emotions are dictated by
the meaning structure of events in a precisely determined
fashion.
On a global plane, this law refers to fairly obvious
and almost trivial