7 - Old–new answers and new-old questions for personality and emotion: a matter of complexity

Summary

We are very fortunate to see the beginning of an exciting time in psychology, an era in which we may bring together complex intuitive ideas with appropriate technical tools for expanding them. This may be particularly interesting in the area of emotion and personality development. The present authors have described changes in theories of identity and emotion from dichotomous sets to systems of sets across the twentieth century (Haviland and Kahlbaugh, 1993) and have also examined the impact of emotion on personality development (Magai and McFadden, 1995). Here we intend to take a further step in this direction with some analyses of the development of identity, or self-concept, in two individuals as these are interwoven with emotion. With a dynamic mathematical model of emotion we will also show how emotional processes may be variable without the necessity for variable cognitive content in the analysis of the stimulation that led to an emotional change. We will use our examples to show how different contexts at the origin of a fearful stimulus might lead either to fear or to anger without any necessity for awareness by the individual.

In this chapter we will first briefly review a few instances of our past research in which we employed some of the older tools of categorization and linear analysis. We will use these examples to demonstrate the questions that arose that we could not answer with these tools.