Navigating the science of emotion

The science of emotion is muddled with a multitude of hypotheses and assumptions about what emotions are and how they work. The standard narrative framework used in the science of emotion conceals meaningful variation within scientific traditions and obfuscates similarities, depriving both newcomers and scientists of effective conceptual tools for making scientific progress. In this chapter, we introduce a different narrative framework to reorganize the field according to the degree to which variation is hypothesized across instances that belong to the same emotion category (e.g., instances of anger), similarities across instances of different categories (e.g., instances of anger vs. instances of fear) and the causes of this variation. The newer narrative framework will help readers to make more informed measurement decisions, equipping them to properly evaluate theoretical assumptions and understand the consequences of their measurement choices.