The Grand Challenge for Frontiers in Emotion Science

Everyday explanations of behavior that one way or another appeal to emotions are ubiquitous and there appear almost always to be three components to them. First, there is a reference to some significant event in the environment or in the person (a source of danger in the environment or the sight of an angry person). The second component refers to the effects in the mind, brain, and body of the person to whom we attribute an emotion or who attributes an emotion to himself. Typical examples of a change of mind are a sudden state of fear or disgust, or physiological changes like in breathing rhythm, feelings of excitement and changes in behavior like running and a number of actions. The third component consists in reference to the goal of the events. This involves typically a statement of what is good or bad for the organism, how the events that trigger emotions appear to contribute significantly, positively, or negatively, to somebody’s overall life goals. These three components, separately or in various combinations, are the pillars of our everyday language of emotions. Is the science of emotion wedded to this language and the worldview it embodies? If not, it may be easier to develop new scientific emotion theories, but the price to pay is a disconnection from subjective experience. Emotion science may be in a unique position in that subjective experience is part and parcel of its subject matter. For many decades mainstream science has been prejudiced against the possibility of a serious, respectable scientific study of emotions. Much as we all pay lip service to an evolutionary perspective on mind, brain, and behavior, many of us still somehow exclude emotions from this evolutionary objectivism. Emotions seem somehow too dense with daily psychological reality to promise solid scientific insights. To some extent this situation is related to the vagueness of the core notions used in affective science. For example, it is often unclear what the difference is between terms like emotions, feelings, affect, subjective experience, and other related ones (Russell and Feldman Barrett, 1999). Researchers outside the field of emotion sometimes blame the confusion surrounding the concept of emotion for this state of affairs. The concept of emotion is ill defined and there is the feeling both inside and outside the community that the first issue on the agenda should be to craft a definition of what emotions are (Kleinginna and Kleinginna, 1981). But this is most probably an illusion. One hardly needs to glance at the situation in other disciplines to see that notions like nature, environment etc., are equally open-ended and that this does not hinder scientific research. The history of science shows that definitions are the result rather that the beginning of scientific theories. From the very beginning of scientific psychology with Wundt (1897) and of emotion theory with Darwin (1872) and James (1890) two different ways of thinking about emotions have been around. Wundt paid attention to the phenomenal experience using quantitative and qualitative descriptors that hold across all emotions. Darwin instead concentrated on the discrete muscle patterns associated with some of the major emotions, while James focused on the causal relation between bodily changes and emotional feelings. So, from the very beginning emotion theories were addressing two very different sides of the same coin. At present, the gap between movement patterns and phenomenal experience remains as theoretically important and as hard to bridge as it was a hundred years ago. As a matter of fact, with the advent of an increasingly broad array of new measuring tools the gap has opened wider and wider. More layers than ever imagined now become visible but the task of relating the different strata to each other has become more daunting than ever. We would like to mark the launch of Frontiers in Emotion Science by looking forward and formulate a few landmark questions including some that have not attracted much attention so far: How many emotions are there, are all emotions alike, what is there to measure, how do we measure emotions, what does interdisciplinarity mean, how important is interaction, what are the issues for modeling emotions, what is the part of context, do feelings matter, consciousness, and emotions.