The Motivational Architecture of Emotions

Abstract

Evolutionary research on emotion is increasingly converging on the idea that emotions can be understood as superordinate coordination mechanisms. Despite its plausibility and heuristic power, the coordination approach fails to explicitly address the relations between emotions and motivation. This chapter aims to fill this conceptual gap. The author argues that the current view of emotions as coordination mechanisms should be extended—and partially revised—to include motivational systems as an additional control layer, responsible for the activation and deactivation of specific emotions in the pursuit of domain-specific goals. The extended coordination approach proposed in this chapter facilitates the analysis of folk emotion categories; helps clarify the distinction between emotions and moods; suggests new ways to think about emotion regulation; and provides a more natural interface to model the link between emotions and personality.