Contemporary Theories and Concepts in the Psychology of Emotions

Following the decisive change of the 1980s which was marked by a veritable explosion of scientific study of emotion, emotion is now considered to be a determining explanatory factor in human behavior. In this context, it seems important for any area of research into the functioning of psychological processes and their modeling, as is the case in informatics, to consider current theories and concepts in psychology of emotions [SAN 09a, SAN 09b]. The central role of emotion in the cognitive system is illustrated by the fact that emotion occupies a “privileged status” in the human brain [DAV 04]; the majority of psychological mechanisms are either necessary for emotion as such, or influenced by emotion or involved in regulating emotions. However, as these above quotations suggest, conceptual precision of emotion remains a problem [ALV 02], so much so that there are almost as many definitions of emotion as there are theories or researchers working on this topic [KLE 81, STR 96]. In this introductory chapter, we will present the main contemporary theories and concepts of emotion touching on the notions established towards the end of the nineteenth century in which modern approaches are rooted. For each major current theory, we will present its premise, its main assumptions, and its characteristics, as well as the criticisms which have been aimed at it. As we will see, there is huge variation in the contribution to discovering the functional architecture of emotional mechanisms which consists in characterizing the functional sub systems responsible for the different stages of processing needed to produce emotions and specifying the organization and interaction of these sub-systems [FEL 2005, KOR forthcoming, SAN 02].