A Continuum of Perspectives on Emotions – The Emergence and Self-Regulating of Emotions

It is widely agreed that emotion refers to a collection of psychological states that include subjective experience, expressive behavior (e.g., facial, bodily, verbal), and peripheral physiological responses (e.g., heart rate, respiration). It is also widely agreed that emotions are a central feature in any psychological model of the human mind. Beyond these two points of agreement, however, almost everything else seems to be subject to debate.Some theorists view emotions as being characterized by unique and relatively consistent patterns of subjective, expressive, and physiological responses. Others note the surprisingly loose of coupling among emotion response components, and highlight the variability in responses associated with any particular emotion. Still others emphasize the idea that all mental states involve subjective experience, expressive behavior, and physiological responses and suggest that these three responses don’t really provide a unique definition of emotion per se. Other points of view in the current controversy include also other elements in their study: what counts as an emotion, who has emotions (infants, animals), and what the best methods are for studying emotion. Our paper presents theese differences in opinion and scientific emphasis which are reflected in the wide range of perspectives on emotion. To organize the myriad perspectives on emotion (often contradictory), we find it useful to consider a series of interrelated ellements, fundamentally, which help us to separate all these approaches. These theories will be presented in a graphically and systematically way.