Echoes of the Abhidamma in the Component Process Model of Emotion

Abstract

The empirical study of emotion is a comparatively young endeavor, long left to the wayside in favor of more tangible psychological phenomena. In the past few decades however several theories have emerged, examining emotion in the context of reason or cognition, accelerating a cultural shift in how we view the phenomenon. This development, in part facilitated by technological advances in neuroscience, has nudged emotions out of their empirical rut. But emotions themselves have been with us all along, embedded in our makeup, molding our consciousness and our interactions with people and the world. While research on emotions is relatively new in empirical domains, they have long been studied elsewhere, notably in the Buddhist Abhidhamma. The Buddhist study of mental phenomena encapsulated in the Abhidhamma is not merely descriptive but a systematic, hierarchical classification of the experiential, including emotion, grounded in theory. These mental factors bear a likeness to components of modern, process theories of emotion. In this paper, the similarities between the Buddhist theory of mental factors and the component process model of emotion will be highlighted as an example of likeness between Buddhist and modern Western psychologies. This comparative exercise serves a broader aim to identify the Abhidhamma as a potential repository of theories from which modern-day empirical hypotheses can be derived.