Perspectives on Emotion

Abstract

We may have an intuitive understanding of emotions, but their sheer complexity makes them difficult to define. What exactly is an emotion? Should it be differentiated from cognition? Can emotions be measured through observation of brain and body? These three questions have been hotly debated in the research literature. According to some, the differentiation between cognition and emotion is becoming more and more foggy, and underlines the need for new, less fuzzy, concepts (Rimé, 2009). Other researchers hold on to a more traditional Western view of “emotion as physicality”, and “emotion as natural fact” (Lutz, 1986: 294–295). Those who adopt an empirical view of emotion, as Solomon (2003: 119) puts it, are “desperate for the observables and something to measure”.