Patterns of Emotions

Book excerpt: Patterns of Emotions: A New Analysis of Anxiety and Depression provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of anxiety and depression phenomena experienced in some degree by everyone and in crippling intensity by many. This book is a sequel to The Face of Emotion (Izard, 1971), which presented a general conceptual framework for the study of the personality, a theory of the emotions, and evidence for the universality of the fundamental emotions of interest, joy, surprise, distress, anger, disgust, contempt, shame, and fear. The book defines the problems of anxiety and depression, in the framework of differential emotion theory, as combinations or patterns of interacting fundamental emotions and bodily feelings. The differential emotion theory of anxiety and depression is compared with psychoanalytic theory, cognitive theory, and biogenetic theory. A number of studies are presented which support the differential emotion analysis of anxiety and depression. The book also presents studies of various life situations in which a particular fundamental emotion is dominant. What has been found repeatedly is that, in each such situation, the dominant emotion occurs in a pattern of dynamically related fundamental emotions. The patterns for a variety of commonly experienced and universal emotion situations are presented and discussed.