How to Study the Structure of Emotions? A Welcome Call to Action and a Pragmatic Proposal

The field of affective science is fraught with conflicting views on the question of how emotions should be conceptualized. In her target article, Agnes Moors (this issue) reviews much of the ongoing debate by summarizing the extensive literature on various models of emotion, including affect program (or basic emotion) theory, appraisal theory (both discrete and dimensional variants), and psychological constructionism. The roots of this debate, about how emotions should be conceptualized, run deep; many of the central ideas behind what Moors refers to as “classical” theories, such as the understanding that emotions are discrete universal states that are evolutionarily prepared to serve adaptive functions, can be traced to Darwin (1872). These ideas became entrenched in the emotions literature decades ago, through pioneering work supporting the contention that certain basic emotions come in distinct packages that manifest similarly across cultures (e.g., Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Izard, 1971; Tomkins, 1962). Yet, despite accumulating evidence supporting this claim, to this day affective scientists continue to debate whether classical theories do, in fact, offer the best way to conceptualize emotions; only 3 years ago, an issue of Emotion Review was dedicated to outlining the tenets of several competing conceptualizations, including classical theories (Tracy, 2014) and what Moors refers to as “skeptical” theories—those that, in stark contrast, attempt to explain emotions as emergent experiences that are constructed from a variety of lower level components, rather than as discrete, functional packages (Barrett, 2014; Moors, 2014). Moors’s review reminds us that psychological scientists continue to conceptualize emotions from contradictory perspectives. Fortunately though, where debate persists, the opportunity for theoretical advancement emerges. In our view, Moors’s article usefully alerts the field at-large to this ongoing area of debate, and therefore has the potential to stimulate research aiming to adjudicate between the classical and skeptical theories of emotion. In this commentary we focus on one line of research that could prove fruitful toward this end: studies that seek to test the validity of one primary tenet of the classical theories that Moors describes, namely, that certain components are intrinsic to each emotion and occur with some regularity across a representative sample of episodes of that emotion. For example, classical theorists contend that, across a representative sample of fear episodes, a certain set of experiential components (i.e., certain cognitions, subjective feelings, somatic sensations, and desires to act) reliably and consistently occur. Importantly, this proposition represents a critical point of divergence between classical and skeptical theories; as Moors points out, whereas classical theories such as affect program theory assume beyond-chance, probabilistic co-occurrence of specific components for each emotion (e.g., Roseman, 2011; Tracy, 2014), skeptical theories such as psychological constructionism do not (e.g., Barrett, 2014; Russell, 2003). Although pinpointing the relative coherence of specific components within an emotional episode is therefore crucial to adjudicating between classical and skeptical theories of the structure of emotion, Moors notes that almost no studies have empirically tested the extent to which various emotional components co-occur within emotional episodes. As a result, “there is currently no consensus about the exact number of components to include in the emotion” (Moors, this issue, p. 2). In what follows, we offer a proposal for how future studies might empirically test the validity of the classical theoretical stance regarding the structure of emotions—focusing primarily on subjective, experiential components—and we describe the kinds of results that might support this account and challenge competing accounts offered by skeptical theorists.