ABSTRACT
If psychological inquiry were like a crossword puzzle, then, despite differences in origin, procedure, or sequence of moves, one could be assured of ultimately reaching a correct solution. Instead, the study of emotion is typically approached from many different angles without the security of a guaranteed outcome. Final conclusions with respect to mechanism will rely intimately on the questions originally asked, the variables manipulated, and the responses that are measured. Current approaches in the study of emotion include those in which emotion is considered to be primarily organized as a set of specific, discrete affective states (e.g., happiness, sadness, disgust, etc.), and those that view emotion as varying continuously along some limited number of affective dimensions (e.g., pleasure, arousal, etc.). The emotion puzzle looks very different depending on which metatheoretical position launches the search, due to differences in both the nature of the questions asked and the data base to which attention is directed.
