The Laws of Emotion

The Laws of Emotion

Nico H. Frijda University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

ABSTRACT: It is argued that emotions are lawful phenomena

and thus can be described in terms of a set of

laws of emotion. These laws result from the operation of

emotion mechanisms that are accessible to intentional

control to only a limited extent. The law of situational

meaning, the law of concern, the law of reality, the laws

of change, habituation and comparative feeling, and the

law of hedonic asymmetry are proposed to describe emotion

elicitation; the law of conservation of emotional momentum

formulates emotion persistence," the law of closure

expresses the modularity of emotion; and the laws of care

for consequence, of lightest load, and of greatest gain pertain

to emotion regulation.

For a long time, emotion was an underprivileged area in

psychology. It was not regarded as a major area of scientific

psychological endeavor that seemed to deserve

concerted research efforts or receive them.

Things have changed over the last 10 or so years.

Emotion has become an important domain with a coherent

body of theory and data. It has developed to such

an extent that its phenomena can be described in terms

of a set of laws, the laws of emotion, that I venture to

describe here.

Formulating a set of laws of emotion implies not

only that the study of emotion has developed sufficiently

to do so but also that emotional phenomena are indeed

lawful. It implies that emotions emerge, wax, and wane

according to rules in strictly determined fashion. To argue

this is a secondary objective of this article. Emotions are

lawful. When experiencing emotions, people are subject

to laws. When filled by emotions, they are manifesting

the workings of laws.

There is a place for obvious a priori reservations

here. Emotions and feelings are often considered the most

idiosyncratic of psychological phenomena, and they suggest

human freedom at its clearest. The mysticism of

ineffability and freedom that surrounds emotions may

be one reason why the psychology of emotion and feeling

has advanced so slowly over the last 100 years. This mysticism

is largely unfounded, and the freedom of feeling is

an illusion. For one thing, the notion of freedom of feeling

runs counter to the traditional wisdom that human beings

are enslaved by their passions. For another, the laws of

emotion may help us to discern that simple, universal,

moving forces operate behind the complex, idiosyncratic

movements of feeling, in the same way that the erratic

path of an ant, to borrow Simon's (1973) well-known

parable, manifests the simple structure of a simple animal's

mind.

The word law may give rise to misunderstanding.

When formulating "'laws" in this article, I am discussing

what are primarily empirical regularities. These regularities--

or putative regularities--are, however, assumed to

rest on underlying Causal mechanisms that generate them.

I am suggesting that the laws of emotion are grounded

in mechanisms that are not of a voluntary nature and

that are only partially under voluntary control. Not only

emotions obey the laws; we obey them. We are subject

to our emotions, and we cannot engender emotions at

will.

The laws of emotion that I will discuss are not all

equally well established. Not all of them originate in solid

evidence, nor are all equally supported by it. To a large

extent, in fact, to list the laws of emotion is to list a program

of research. However, the laws provide a coherent

picture of emotional responding, which suggests that such

a research program might be worthwhile.

The Law of Situational Meaning

What I mean by laws of emotion is best illustrated by the

"Constitution" of emotion, the law of situational meaning."

Emotions arise in response to the meaning structures

of given situations; different emotions arise in response

to different meaning structures. Emotions are dictated by

the meaning structure of events in a precisely determined

fashion.

On a global plane, this law refers to fairly obvious

and almost trivial