EMOTION SYSTEM AS A SUB-SYSTEM OF PERSONALITY

Abstract

If one accepts that the emotion system is an important sub-system of personality, and that interindividual differences traceable to this system are important for describing individuals, it follows immediately that, to attain its goals, personality psychology must consider the emotions. Since its beginnings as a sub-discipline of psychology personality psychology has aimed at two different though related goals. The first goal is to construct a general theory of the person, understood as the integrated whole of the several sub-systems of the mind. The second goal is to describe and explain the interesting psychological differences between individuals, that is, the relatively stable psychological attributes that allow us uniquely to characterize individuals and to distinguish them from each other. Although there is as yet no generally accepted theoretical definition of emotion, there is widespread agreement among emotion researchers that the objects of their inquiry are, centrally, the transitory states of persons denoted by ordinary language words such as ‘happiness’, ‘sadness’, ‘fear’, ‘anger’, ‘pity’, ‘pride’, ‘guilt’, and so forth. There is also agreement that emotion episodes normally occur as reactions to the perception or imagination of ‘objects’ (typically events or states of affairs), and that they have both subjective and objective (intersubjectively observable) manifestations. In accordance with this conclusion, most classical personality theorists proposed an affective (or affective-motivational) system as a core system of the mind; and most taxonomic systems of personality descriptors include a sub-set that refer directly or indirectly to emotions. Nonetheless, the in-depth investigation of emotions from a personality perspective has only begun fairly recently, in the wake of an upsurge of interest in the emotions that arose in the 1980s and continues to this day. Since that time, the two historically largely separate fields of personality psychology and emotion psychology have become increasingly integrated, to the benefit of both fields.