The Laws of Emotion

367 Pages·2006·42.65 MB·English

by  Nico H. Frijda

The Laws of Emotion

The Laws of Emotion
Nico H. Frijda
~ ~ ~~o~;~~n~~;up
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Copyright© 2007 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any
other means, without prior written permission of the publisher.
First published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, lnc., Publishers
This edition published 2013 by Routledge
Routledge Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group
711 Third Avenue 27 Church Road
New York, NY 10017 Hove
East Sussex BN3 2FA
Routledge is an imprint oft he Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Cover design by Jan Bons & Tomai Maridou
CIP information for this book can be obtained by contacting the Li-
brary of Congress
JSBN-13: 978-0-805-82597-8 (hardcover)
lSBN-13: 978-0-805-82598-5 (paperback)
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
For David and for Roos

Contents
Preface ix
1 Laws 1
2 Passion 25
3 Pleasure 63
4 Appraisal 93
5 Concerns 123
6 Strength 153
7 Time 175
8 "Feelings" 199
9 Sex 227
vii
viii CONTENTS
10 Revenge 259
11 Commemorating 283
References 305
Preface
This book resulted from pondering emotions, after I wrote my 1986 book
The Emotions. It reflects several papers that I wrote since, one of which
inspired the title of this volume, and of chapter 1. What made me ponder,
and motivated me to write this book, is the desire to understand emotions
at the level of underlying mechanisms. Most of the work on the psychology
of emotions moves at what Dennett called the intentional or
phenomenological level of analysis. One talks about feelings, appraisals,
motives or concerns, without too much analytical reflection on the pro-
cesses that might underlie those phenomena.
That left me unsatisfied. Small wonder. Not all basic emotion processes
are well explored; the issues are difficult. So I tried to conceive how to fill
the gaps that analysis at the intentional level leaves. Seeking to fill the gaps
may be useful for additional reasons than probing into the processes under-
lying emotional phenomena. It tries to construct an alternative for two cur-
rent ways of explaining emotions. Going below the intentional level is
mostly being undertaken in one of two ways. The first consists of evoking
evolution. Emotional phenomena are there because evolution made them
be there, for supposed reasons of variable plausibility. Evolutionary expla-
nations can rather easily be found, and they only probe into these distal
evolutionary processes. They do not examine how these distal processes
ix