Emotional Self-Organization at Three Time Scales

Abstract

Theories of emotion and theories of emotional development have remained largely insulated from each other. As a result, important interactions between emotional processes in real time (moment-to-moment) and emotional patterning over development are rarely examined in detail. This split is particularly troublesome for the study of individual differences. For example, appraisal theories claim that cognitive interpretations give rise to emotions, and individual differences in interpretations are what make this claim interesting (Frijda and Zeelenberg, in press). However, without exposure to models of individual development, appraisal theorists have been unable to explain individual differences and have largely ignored them instead. Conversely, the study of personality development assumes that individual pathways emerge from recurrent real-time emotional processes (e.g., cognition-emotion interactions). But without theoretical insights into the nature of these processes, it is difficult to specify how they create long-lasting structure. As in other psychological domains, nobody doubts the importance of interscale relations, but the means for studying them remain elusive. The premise of this chapter is that principles of self-organization provide the necessary tools for bridging emotional time scales. All self-organizing systems are characterized by the interdependence of processes at different scales, and complex, nested, multiscale patterns are ubiquitous in the natural world. In general, large-scale or macroscopic patterns (e.g., the contours of a coastline) set the conditions for small-scale or microscopic processes (e.g., the erosion of rocks by waves), and these microscopic processes contribute to macroscopic patterning in turn.

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