The Laws of Emotion

by Nico H. Frijda

The Laws of Emotion is an accessible work that reviews much of the insightful new research on emotions conducted over the last ten years. It expands on the theory of emotions introduced in Nico Frijda’s earlier work and addresses a number of unanswered, basic problems on emotion theory. The author’s goal is to better understand the underlying psychological mechanisms of emotion. In this book, Professor Frijda also examines previously neglected topics of emotion such as determinants of emotional intensity, the duration of emotions, and sexual emotions. It touches on both evolutionary and neuroscientific explanations.

The book begins by reviewing a number of principles governing emotion, or “the laws of emotion”. The author then examines the passionate nature of emotions and the motivational processes underlying them, and the nature and causes of pleasure and pain. Professor Frijda then explores the processes that lead to emotional arousal, including cognitive influences and why people care more about certain things than others. Emotional intensity is then discussed, including the often-neglected topic of the course of emotions over time. The book concludes with the author's insights into complex emotional domains such as sex, revenge, and the need to commemorate past events.

The Laws of Emotion will appeal to social, cognitive, and developmental psychologists, social scientists, philosophers, and neuroscientists, as well as anyone interested in the workings of the mind. It also serves as a text for advanced courses in the psychology of emotions or the neuroscience of emotions.

Genres: Psychology

366 pages, Paperback

First published August 16, 2006

About the author

Born in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Studied psychology at Amsterdam University. Ph.D. 1956 at Amsterdam University on a thesis on "Understanding Facial Expression of Emotions".

Worked as clinical psychologist at the Dutch Army Neurosis Center and youth delinquency center, Ministry of Justice, 1952-1955. Assistant professor, University of Amsterdam, 1955-1965. Professor in experimental and theoretical psychology, 1965-1992 (retirement), University of Amsterdam. Professor extraordinarius in emotion psychology, University of Amsterdam, 1992-2002.

Visiting professor, Universiteit van Maastricht, University College Utrecht, Maison des Sciences de l'Homme/LEPS, Paris, Université de Paris X-Nanterre, Université de Genève, Universitas de San Sebastian, Universitá di Bari, Universitá di Padova, Universidade di Sao Paulo.

Chairman, Netherlands Psychonomics Foundation, 1965-1975; co-founder, executive officer, member, International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE); director, Institute for Emotion and Motivation, Amsterdam University,1988-1992.

Member, Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences; member, Netherlands Society for the Sciences; member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Honorary Doctorate, Universitá degli Studi di Padova.
Three children from a first marriage. Lived in Amsterdam with his second wife and their son.

Reviews

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

From second time reading:

I was impressed by how careful of a thinker Frijda can be while still writing very accessibly. Frijda proposes his framework for appraisal theories on emotion. He links up swathes of empirical studies that support his points, and he does conceptual analysis that would be familiar to philosophers. For example, a major point he makes is that although appraisal is roughly synonymous with judgment in common parlance, appraisal as talked about under this theoretical context should be understood as consisting in complex nonconscious processes. This means that appraisal, when it hits us consciously, could be manifest in the form of meaning baked into pre-reflective, perceptual experience, and it may simultaneously be partially constituted by reflective judgments or reasoning we've engaged in, or are to later engage in, over an emotion episode.

Frijda also nicely distinguishes between appraisal, as it instigates an emotion episode, and appraisal understood as the overall meaning apprehended by the emotional subject, which can be described in general terms after the fact, to characterize the quality of their experience. He shows how confusion between these two senses of appraisal lead to misleading puzzles and slipshod interpretations of empirical findings.

The part of this book that most fascinates me is Frijda's "law of apparent reality": emotion can only respond to that which we take to be real. Emotion is ever more intense, if we take this sensed-as-real thing to be in our immediate vicinity, as possibly unleashing causal consequences upon us, where we sense that this possibility is very high, and the consequences are near. He notes that exceptions include emotion induced by art and music. I've aired these ideas in previous "book reviews": I think the fact that sometimes genuine emotion is induced by music shows that we can have quite "unconscious" thoughts or memories of real-life things, which are somehow affectively homologous to the affect of a piece of music, and the actual emotion is had in response to these real-life things. but if a real-life thing is so fuzzy or below our radar, the nature of the emotion is probably significantly different than that directed towards things that we've explicitly aware of. This issue opens various questions about whether emotion and mere affect are continuous with one another, and which dimensions are most relevant, and ought to be named, for making sense of the significant differences between cases.

Frijda doesn't have too much hands-down evidence for this principle of apparent reality. He mostly appeals to intuition and introspection. I wonder what sorts of arguments could be made in its favor, and whether there are possible arguments out there that need not rely on much empirical evidence. It does seem that it's difficult to study this issue empirically. Asking a subject whether they took something to be real or not, and then assessing whether they really had an emotion, is delicate. When we sense something to be unreal, it may nevertheless conjure forth a "penumbra" of real-life associations, which may activate actual emotion. I'd like to think more about how to make sense of this link between emotion and real life, and how to argue for whichever characterization of this link turns out to be best.

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From first time reading:

Although Frijda is a psychologist, his theory of emotions has important implications for philosophical debates on emotion. It may be helpful to contrast Frijda’s account of emotion with those which are predominant in philosophical debates about emotion. Often, philosophers will argue over whether emotions are pure feelings, lacking propositional content; or whether they ought to be understood on the model of propositional attitudes, and so incorporate propositional content. Fridja shows that emotions are not to be understood as either of these. Instead, emotions are constituted by and serve within this overall process of our evaluating and responding to our environments; thinking about emotion as either a feeling or a propositional attitude obscures this essential nature of emotion.

Overall, one only needs to read the first chapter (25 pages) to gain these philosophical insights. The rest of the book is dedicated to presenting many and specific empirical findings which his theory is supposed to explain. Some of this is interesting, but it's not worthwhile to read if one's aim is to get a handle on Frijda's theory of emotion.

Let me summarize his theory in a bit more detail. Frijda argues that emotions correspond with kinds of “situational meanings,” or ways we appraise or evaluate a situation. For example, we may evaluate a range of situations (e.g., a violent hailstorm, a poisonous snake, a pink slip from the boss, an exile from one’s community) as all involving a threat to our survival, either to literal biological survival or to the “survival” or maintenance of our commitments which define our sense of personal identity. While these situations may involve very different objects, there is a certain, abstracted property of the situation that it presents a threat to our survival that is common between them; that commonality is the “situational meaning.” The emotion that corresponds with the situational meaning of this example will be fear.

In general, a situational meaning is constituted by our understanding of the relationship between a situation and ourselves, and thus of the effects the situation may have on what we are concerned about (e.g., our survival and commitments). Emotion is to be understood both as necessary for our capacities to appraise situations and as partially constituted by the situational meanings we determine and our responses to them. Frijda argues that these situations that we evaluate and that solicit emotions are necessarily part of what we take to be the real world, rather than what we take to be fictional.

Here's a summary of the "laws" of emotion Frijda identifies (they are strictly speaking explanations of patterns of emotional phenomena): “Laws” (1) Law of concern: "every emotion hides a concern... a major goal or value," (2) Law of apparent reality: "emotions are elicited by events with meanings appraised as real, and their intensity corresponds to the degree to which this is the case," (3) Laws of change, habituation, and comparative feeling: our baseline (or more generally “frame of reference” and "readily conceivable counterfactual alternatives") determines the felt magnitude of change; the greater that magnitude, the more emotion we feel, (4) Law of hedonic asymmetry: we get habituated to pleasure and so stop feeling it; but we do not get habituated to pain, and so pain persists, (5) Law of conservation of emotional momentum: "emotional events retain their power to elicit emotions indefinitely, unless counteracted by repetitive exposures that permit extinction or habituation," (6) Law of closure: “emotions tend to be closed to considerations that its aims may be of relative and passing importance... they claim top priority.... with regard to appraisals of urgency and necessity of action,” (7) Law of care for consequence: "every emotional impulse elicits a secondary impulse that tends to modify it in view of its possible consequences," and (8) Laws of the lightest load and greatest gain: "whenever a situation can be viewed in alternative ways, a tendency exists to view it in a way that minimizes negative emotional load"


A very interesting philosophical implication of this is that only real life situations can have consequences for what we care about. (This has relevance to a philosophical debate on whether we can have emotions in response to works of fiction; or whether those apparent emotional responses are make-believe). Let me unpack what I mean by this. Take this example: I care about my friends. One of my friends decides to move across the country. This is a real life situation that impacts my life: I can no longer be with my friend in-person as we have done for many years. In contrast, a novel may depict a friendship in which one friend moves away from another. “Experiencing” this fictional narrative may have consequences for how I think about my real life situation; but the actions of the characters and events portrayed in the novel are not causally linked to the real world. When the character who moves gets a haircut within the fictional world of the novel, this has no implications for what my real friend does in the world. Only real life situations are causally linked to events that make up reality; fictional events may influence how we think and feel, which in turn influences how we act in the real world, but they are not directly causally linked to events of the understood independently of our experience of those events. So only real life situations put what we care about at stake and thereby solicit our emotions, which enable us to appraise these situations and act appropriately.

This shows that defining genuine emotion as a quasi-emotion (i.e., the phenomenological and psychological features of an apparent emotion, such as "what it is like" to feel fear) is inappropriate. If we defined emotion as quasi-emotion, we would sever this essential connection between emotion, what we care about, and our fundamental drive to pursue and defend what we care about. Most of our lives is centered on pursuing and defending what we care about, and this is made possible by emotion. So it is critical to define emotion in such a way that can account for this essential role of emotion. Defining genuine emotion as quasi-emotion may be useful for particular theoretical questions that are disconnected from interest in our actual lives (e.g., if we care solely about physiological similarities between responses to real life and fictional situations, without interest in how these similarities bear on broader issues such as our behavioral responses to these). But as soon as we care about making sense of our actual lives, we need to define genuine emotions as essentially constituted by the real life situations to which they are responsive.

I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in emotion, from a philosophical or psychological angle. He provides a theory that differs radically from most theories out there, which wish to base emotion on purely a feeling or propositional attitude, both conceived as things merely "in our heads."

[Kea]

To have a theory and a grasp of human understanding of our intercate being is astonishing to see how we have developed to be able to have the grasp of what emotions could be. Very insightful and broadening way of looking at emotions.

[Jelle Bruineberg · Rating 1 out of 5]

De Nederlandse vertaling maakt dit boek compleet onleesbaar. Niet aan beginnen, terug naar de winkel ermee. Als je iets van wilt begrijpen, lees alsjeblieft het Engels origineel... Het origineel is trouwens fantastisch.