Kagan J
Harvard University.
Monogr Soc Res Child Dev. 1994;59(2-3):7-24.
This essay has tried to make three points. First, humans are capable of a large number of affect states (the exact number is not yet known), each marked by a distinct profile of physiology, cognition, and behavior, and each requiring a distinct name. Second, a distinction should be made among acute emotions, chronic moods, and temperamental vulnerabilities to a particular emotion state. Finally, research on human affects will profit from a return to, and a reinterpretation of, Freud's suggestion of unconscious affect states. Such inquiry would provide a corrective to the current reliance on the verbal reports of phenomenal states on questionnaires or in interviews as either the only, or the primary, index of an emotion. Continued use of this strategy will limit analyses to a small number of heterogeneous states that happen to have a popular English name and will retard discovery of the larger number of affect states that are of significance for human function. Discovery of these states will require use of new sources of evidence to supplement popular ones, including facial and postural expressions, muscle tension, EEG, vagal tone, heart-rate changes, blood pressure, GSR, facial temperature, and blood or saliva indexes of norepinephrine, opioids, and cortisol. When the cosmologist James Peebles was asked to guess the exact numerical answers to a series of astronomical puzzles, like the age of the universe or of a distant star, he replied, "If someone gave me on a tablet of clay the answer and the numbers, I would be disappointed. I would throw it away because the great discoveries are not going to be a final number, but the method you come to apply to learn that number."
本文试图阐明三点。第一，人类能够产生大量的情感状态（确切数量尚不清楚），每种情感状态都有独特的生理、认知和行为特征，且每种都需要一个独特的名称。第二，应区分急性情绪、慢性心境以及对特定情绪状态的气质易感性。最后，对人类情感的研究将受益于回归并重新诠释弗洛伊德关于无意识情感状态的观点。这样的探究将纠正当前仅依赖问卷调查或访谈中现象状态的言语报告作为情感的唯一或主要指标的做法。继续使用这种策略将把分析局限于少数碰巧有一个通俗英文名称的异质状态，并会阻碍发现对人类功能具有重要意义的更多情感状态。发现这些状态将需要使用新的证据来源来补充常用的证据，包括面部和姿势表情、肌肉紧张度、脑电图、迷走神经张力、心率变化、血压、皮肤电反应、面部温度以及去甲肾上腺素、阿片类物质和皮质醇的血液或唾液指标。当宇宙学家詹姆斯·皮布尔斯被要求猜测一系列天文谜题的精确数字答案，比如宇宙或遥远恒星的年龄时，他回答说：“如果有人在泥板上给我答案和数字，我会失望的。我会把它扔掉，因为重大发现不会是一个最终数字，而是你用来得出那个数字的方法。”
