Cinderella in Psychology: The Problem of Integration of the Knowledge about Emotions

The article discusses the problem of emotions from the standpoint of substantiating the urgent need to integrate it with psychological knowledge. The latter is explained by the presence of a set of problems associated with the continuous growth of the knowledge we have about emotions (phenomenological problems), a significant number of explanatory conceptual constructs (theoretical problems), a variety of methodological tools (methodological problems), and the insufficiency of targeted attempts to integrate the knowledge about emotions over a long period of study (historical and psychological problems). A brief review of spontaneous and targeted methods of integrating knowledge about emotions allowed us to assert that the methods effectiveness is hampered by a number of unproductive attitudes in the psychological community - the popularity of the cumulative approach, the dominance of the disciplinary approach, and the attitude toward the incomparability of concepts and theories of emotions. A new approach to integrating knowledge about emotions is substantiated, based on the model of the relationship between theory and method in psychology (V.A. Mazilov). The model allows to correlate concepts, the subject of which is the problem of emotions, at the level of their pre-theories as a complex of initial ideas about the phenomenon preceding the empirical research and guiding it. The concepts are correlated at the level of the model components: the research problem, the modeling idea, the idea of the method, the basic category and the organizing scheme. The subjects of integration are the well-known evolutionary concepts of: C. Darwin, the motivational concept of emotions by K. Izard, the cognitive concept of S. Schechter and J. Singer, the psychophysiological concept of P.V. Simonov, the neuropsychological concept of E.D. The results of correlating the concepts are: demonstration of their fundamental comparability at the level of pre-theories; assertion of the demand for an interdisciplinary and level approach to the study of emotions; assumptions about the need to change the analytical attitude to a synthetic one in the study of emotions, as well as changing the attitude of the psychological community to the function of emotional phenomena in the structure of the psyche (S.L. Rubinstein). In general, the implementation of the model of the relationship between theory and method provides more comprehensive knowledge about emotional phenomenology, and also allows us to determine the prospects for solving this problem in psychology.

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