Emotions are Unobservable, Variable, and Situated Responses: Convergences in Four Disciplines

Research on emotions in four disciplines—psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and history—has converged, to a significant extent independently, on three points of agreement: (1) Emotional episodes are situated, varying greatly from one situated episode to another. (2) The emotion concept itself refers to something that cannot be directly observed, and it remains unclear where the boundary lies between emotion and cognition. (3) The standard English terms for emotions do not correspond to distinct patterns combining cognitive, neurophysiological, muscular, and behavioral responses. Local agreement on the label for an emotion is no guarantee of scientific accuracy. Finally, within each discipline, researchers confront difficulties in conveying the significance of their findings to colleagues not directly concerned with emotions.