The Laws of Emotion

Nico H. Frijda University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
ABSTRACT: It is argued that emotions are lawful phenomena
and thus can be described in terms of a set of
laws of emotion. These laws result from the operation of
emotion mechanisms that are accessible to intentional
control to only a limited extent. The law of situational
meaning, the law of concern, the law of reality, the laws
of change, habituation and comparative feeling, and the
law of hedonic asymmetry are proposed to describe emotion
elicitation; the law of conservation of emotional momentum
formulates emotion persistence," the law of closure
expresses the modularity of emotion; and the laws of care
for consequence, of lightest load, and of greatest gain pertain
to emotion regulation.
For a long time, emotion was an underprivileged area in
psychology. It was not regarded as a major area of scientific
psychological endeavor that seemed to deserve
concerted research efforts or......

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Title: Laws Of Emotion
Approximate Word Count: 9674
Approximate Pages: 39 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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