Psychological Models of Emotion

Abstract This chapter provides an overview of theories currently discoed in the psychology of emotion and the controversies and research issues they generate. As should become obvious in this review, many of the fundamental differences among the models relate to the thorny issue of the definition of the phenomenon called emotion and its conceptualization and operationalization. Not surprisingly, the disagreement as to the nature of emotion extends to the problem of delimitation of the psychological tales or processes to betided under this label from other affective phenomena. We first review the elements of the definition of emotion that seem to show at least some degree of convergence between different theorists.