Emotion as a Three-Valued Variable

Abstract

Historically emotions have usually been treated as bipolar dyads such as Henry Murray's acceptance-rejection, dominance-submission. The concept of emotions as three-valued variables, ranging across a central tendency between two extremes, was advanced as early as Aristotle, e.g., cowardly-courageous-rash, and identified as the Golden Mean. Recent treatments of emotions as three valued variables have demonstrated this approach as ideal for classifying a wide variety of emotions and structuring the classification into the form of a cybernetic model of the emotional system. Articulated grid models of this type are revealing as effective display devices for training and psychotherapy. This new approach to observational personality assessment and selective behavior modification is called psychovector analysis.