The Right Way to Study Emotion

From the beginning, the scientific study of emotions has been encumbered by inflexible rules and assumptions about the Right Way to conduct research. Most commonly, it was understood that the right way to study emotions was to measure one or more bodily processes: sympathetic nervous system activation, muscular tension, facial expression, vocal expression, respiration, skin conductance, and brain wave activity have all been recommended as the best indices of emotion, and, for more than 50 years, most experimental studies of emotion have used at least one of these methods (Woodworth & Schlosberg, 1954). William James's (1890/ 1950) emphasis on muscular and visceral feedback undoubtedly played a major role in this concern with the physical manifestations of emotion (Ellsworth, 1994), but its roots are far more ancient, tracing the dichotomy between reason and passion that has dominated discussions of emotion since the beginning of Western philosophy (Solomon, 1993). For centuries, scholars have argued that emotion is not "of the mind" in the same way that reason is; instead, emotion is "of the body" in a way that reason is not. In experimental psychology, this attitude translated into a preoccupation with physiological and other bodily measures so stultifying in its effects that, by the mid-20th century, research on emotions was one of the dullest enterprises in psychology. It took Arnold (1960), Schachter and Singer (1962), and Lazarus himself (e.g., Lazarus, Averill, & Opton, 1970) to bring the mind into the world of emotions and revitalize the field. In his target article, Lazarus once again reminds us how pernicious the distinction between "rationality" and "irrationality" has been for the study of emotion. The term rational typically serves more as a value judgment than a scientific concept, and I think Lazarus is right when he suggests that our thinking would be clearer if we abandoned it. Of course, the experimental psychologists in their shiny laboratories were not the only ones who were struggling to understand emotions. Almost simultaneously, and quite independently,' Freud and his followers explored the complexities of emotional life. Like the experimentalists, the Freudians knew the one right way to study emotions, and it was psychoanalysis. On the surface, the psychoanalytic method seems the opposite of the brass-instrument technology of the experimentalists: The patient simply talks, trying to say whatever comes to mind, what the emotions feel like, and what they mean to him or her, and the therapist listens. But the therapist does not listen in a straightforward manner, does not take the patient's account of his or her emotional experience at face value; the therapist is listening not to the story recounted, but to the hidden story, the story of repressed emotions inaccessible to the patient' s conscious mind. Thus, although the Freudians and the experimentalists disagreed about the right way to understand emotions, they agreed that serious consideration of the conscious experience of emotion, as reported by the subject, was not the right way. Lazarus seemingly shares this dim view when he expresses doubts about "the validity of appraisals when they are assessed by self-report methods." Yet, self-report methods are central to current appraisal models of emotion,' including Lazarus's own cognitive-motivational-relational theory (Lazarus, 1991), and I would argue that the present lively renaissance of research on emotion stems partly from scientists' new interest in people's conscious experience and their new willingness to take what people say about their own emotions seriously. Nonverbal and physiological measures can be enormously useful, but clear-cut nonverbal signs of emotions are uncommon and often less finely nuanced than language. And, for questions about people's appraisals or interpretations of a situation-for example, their attributions of responsibility for a pleasant or unpleasant event-nonverbal measures are even more problematical guides. I think emotion researchers have barely begun to learn how to use the valuable tool of self-report, barely begun to think of interesting questions to ask respondents, and I would hate to abandon it so soon. Of course, Lazarus is not recommending that we abandon self-report measures, only that we be cautious