Chapter 5 Introduction

This chapter focuses on dimensional models. Dimensional models focus on the emotion component subjective feelings. This means dimensional models believe that understanding and measuring conscious, subjective feelings is important.

Developers of dimensional models criticize basic emotions for seeking categories of emotions. They identify three problems with basic emotion theory: 1) the four components do not clearly combine into separate emotion categories, 2) facial expressions are not accurate measures of emotional experiences, and 3) the number of basic emotions differs across theories. Instead of measuring emotions with categories, dimensional researchers emphasize that we should measure emotions — dimensionally!! Thus, one goal of the dimensional perspective is to identify the smallest number of dimensions that represent all emotions. In turn, dimensions researchers state that all the basic emotion categories can be measured with a small number of dimensions.