Emotion and Motivation: Toward Consensus Definitions and a Common Research Purpose

Historically, the hypothesis driving emotion research has been that emotion’s data-base—in language, physiology, and behavior— is organized around specific mental states, as reflected in evaluative language. It is suggested that this approach has not greatly advanced a natural science of emotion and that the developing motivational model of emotion defines a better path: emotion is an evolved trait founded on motivational neural circuitry shared by mammalian species, primitively prompting heightened perceptual processing and reflex mobilization for action to appetitive or threatening survival cues. As the field moves forward with increasingly sophisticated measurement technology and assessing more complex affective functioning, scientific understanding of human emotion will proceed best within the framework of this mammalian brain model.