The Emotion-in-Relationships Model: Reflections and Update: Ellen Berscheid

My invitation to participate in this volume celebrating the redoubtable scholarship of George Mandler stems, no doubt, from my application and slight extension of his "interruption theory of emotion," as he originally outlined it in Mind and Emotion (1975). The application was to emotion as it occurs, or sometimes inexplicably and disappointingly fails to occur, in the context of a close relationship with another person and the extension (i.e., the "completion hypothesis") was intended to account better for positive emotions (Berscheid, 1983).