The purpose of this chapter is to outline the basic principles of a theory of the general operation of emotion. This theory synthesizes and partially extends elements from the growing body of research on emotion, and at the same time anticipates some of the ideas drawn from literature in the following chapters. Integrating this work into a largely neurocognitive framework, it argues for a multicomponent yet still constrained – or “minimal” – account of emotion.

Specifically, the chapter presents a view of emotion episodes as initiated by concrete perceptual triggers (including remembered and imagined perceptions). These triggers have their effects in relation to particular receptive states on the part of the perceiver. The receptive states, in turn, result from innate sensitivities, critical period developments, and more diffuse experiences (the last stored as emotional memories). In this way, emotion episodes do not result from probability calculations, as commonly indicated in dominant appraisal-based theories of emotion. (The confinement of elicitors to perceptual features is what makes the account minimalist.) On the other hand, appraisals do enter into this account as part of elaborative processes that trigger emotions by recruiting images and memories. One contention of the present chapter is that such a multicomponent yet still minimal theory provides a better account of emotion than mainstream appraisal theory. This is in part because it seeks to integrate the insights of appraisal theory into a more rigorously algorithmic treatment of the onset and development of emotion episodes.