Research on the Psychophysiology of Anger

Abstract

A prominent field of psychophysiological inquiry has been the specificity of physiological emotion profiles (Ax, 1953; Ekman, Levenson, & Friesen, 1983; Fridlund, Schwartz, & Fowler, 1984; Funkenstein, 1956; Levenson, Ekman, & Friesen, 1990; Roberts & Weerts, 1982; Schachter, 1957; Schwartz, Weinberger, & Singer, 1981; Stemmler, 1989). While some authors are convinced that physiological emotion specificity is an already established fact (e.g., Wagner, 1989), other authors are much more skeptical (e.g., Stemmler, 1989). Elsewhere I have suggested that part of the inhomogeneity of the specificity literature can be traced back to different implicit meanings of the notion of physiological emotion specificity that seem to underly different emotion theories (Stemmler, in press). A close inspection of experimental designs that could be employed to test these different notions of specificity revealed that emotion theories are too vaguely formulated as to permit an adequate test. A related difficulty of this research is to disentangle the effects on physiological activation profiles of the situational context within which an emotion induction is embedded from the putative emotion effects themselves (Stemmler, in press).