Understanding emotion from a superordinate dimensional perspective: A productive way forward for communication processes and effects studies

Emotion is the fuel of human communication. Researchers who have dedicated themselves to deep theoretical understanding of communication processes and effects must come to grips with just how interwoven emotion is with every phenomenon they investigate. Fortunately, our colleagues in psychology have developed extensive lines of research on human emotion that have led to rigorous theoretical models. The two models that have guided a large majority of the research are the discrete and dimensional views of emotion (Nabi & Wirth, 2008). This essay will compare and contrast the two dominant theoretical models of human emotion focusing on how a dimensional theoretical perspective on human emotion provides a superordinate organizational structure to human emotion.