ABSTRACT
The study of affect is as old as scientific psychology. One hundred years ago, two of the most influential psychologists were Wilhelm Wundt and William James. Both were centrally concerned with affect but in different ways-Wundt was a structuralist and James was a functionalist. Wundt (1874) was concerned with the underlying structure of emotions, and his conclusions were similar to those of recent investigators concerning the dimensions of emotional quality (e.g., Rus sell, 1980). But James was more concerned with function than structure. When
it came to questions of structure and classification, James believed that the num ber of emotions was infinite, and hence not susceptible to systematic treatment. He said that he “should as lief read verbal descriptions of the shapes of the rocks on a New Hampshire farm as toil through the literature of emotion . . (1890, p. 448).
