Temporal Interpersonal Emotion Systems

Abstract

Emotion is often framed as an intrapersonal system comprised of subcomponents such as experience, behavior, and physiology that interact over time to give rise to emotional states. What is missing is that many emotions occur in the context of social interaction or ongoing relationships. When this happens, the result can be conceptualized as a temporal interpersonal emotion system (TIES) in which the subcomponents of emotion interact not only within the individual but across the partners as well. The present review (a) suggests that TIES can be understood in terms of the characteristics of dynamic systems, (b) reviews examples from diverse research that has investigated characteristics of TIES, (c) attempts to clarify the overlapping terms that have been used to refer to those characteristics by mapping them to the statistical, mathematical, and graphical models that have been used to represent TIES, and (d) offers pragmatic advice for analyzing TIES data.