Symposium on Emotion EMOTIONS RESEARCH: Some Promising Questions and Some Questionable Promises

The study of the emotions makes salient the principal psychophysical question: What is the link between physical changes and subjective experience? In this special issue of Psychological Science. the "mind-body" question hovers close to the surface. Psychologists inherited the mind-body problem from philosophers. who have yet to otTer a scientifically useful answer. Descartes argued for two distinct processes, psychic and physical, that could interact causally with each other in the pineal gland. The Cartesian dualism was contradicted by Spinoza's paralle,lism, which postulated two parallel attributes of a single process. Bertrand Russell opposed all forms of dualism, arguing quite convincingly that events can have both the causal relations characteristic of physics and the causal relations typical of psychology. Russell was not at all disturbed by the possibility that events could be at once mental and material. He saw no more difficulty in the matter than in a person being at the same time a carpenter and a father (Russell, 1948). When brilliant people disagree on an important and difficult issue, it is quite likely that they are each partly correct. Psychology has moved well beyond speculation in formulating and exploring the mind-body problem, and it is fair to say that the field of the emotions holds the best promise for a solution. The reasons for this promise lie in the fact that here we can begin our investigations with data that are directly observablethe emotional expressions. The focus on the more observable to reveal the less observable is the hallmark of emotion research from Darwin on. Because the study of the emotions, under the il}fluence of Ekman (1984) and Izard (1971), began with a focus on the clearly observable correlates-emotional expressions-the field moved ahead systemati-