Makes explicit a reconceptualization of the nature of emotion that over the past decade has fostered the study of emotion regulation. In the past, emotions were considered to be feeling states indexed by behavioral expressions; now, emotions are considered to be processes of establishing, maintaining, or disrupting the relation between the organism and the environment on matters of significance to the person. When emotions were conceptualized in the traditional way as feelings, emotion regulation centered on ego-defense mechanisms and display rules. The former was difficult to test; the latter was narrow in scope. By contrast, the notion of emotions as relational processes has shifted interest to the study of person/environment transactions in the elicitations of emotion and to the functions of action tendencies, emotional "expressions" language, and behavioral coping mechanisms. The article also treats the importance of affect in the continuity of self-development by documenting the impressive stability of at least two emotional dispositions: irritability and inhibition.As Dodge (1989) noted in his comments opening this special section on emotion regulation, it has proved very difficult to define the inclusion and exclusion criteria that characterize human emotions. As a result, consensus about the definition of emotion eludes us. Nevertheless, working assumptions about the characteristics of emotion do determine the questions that researchers ask. Such assumptions illuminate certain phenomena and leave others in the dark; moreover, changes in such assumptions permit novel approaches to important yet neglected issues.In this article, we will argue that major changes are taking place in the conceptualization of emotion and will point out that some of the implications of these changes are not yet widely recognized. These changes focus on new ways of considering how emotions are elicited, what the functions of emotion are in the adaptation of humans to their social and nonsocial world, and how emotions lay the basis for important enduring personality dispositions (Malatesta, in press). Because Dodge has provided an excellent and succinct summary of the five articles that constitute this special section in his opening article, and because he has documented the interrelations among the five articles very clearly, the objective of this commentary will be to describe what we think is the Zeitgeist of which these articles are a part and to which they add impetus. We will also highlight important emergent issues in the area of emotional regulation that were either underemphasized in the articles or left out altogether. Our purpose, therefore, is to complement the other articles in this special section, rather than to review them.Emotion: From Structure to Function We mentioned above that even in the absence of consensus, working definitions determine the nature of the questions asked Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Joseph J. Campos,

There is a major change taking place in the manner that emotions are conceptualized. The change is one in emphasis, from structuralism to functionalism. Structuralism is marked by several defining features, including attempts to derive a taxonomy of basic emotions, the search for autonomic, facial, or central nervous system responses that have close to a one-to-one relation with internal emotional states, and a relative neglect of the role of intentionality in the generation of emotion. In contrast, functionalists propose that one cannot understand the nature of emotion without understanding what the person is trying to do, and how events in the external or internal environment have an impact on such strivings. Functionalists also stress the importance of conceptualizing facial, vocal, and gestural behaviors as signals that affect the behavior of other persons, and not just as outward signs of internal states. Because emotions are manifested in very flexible ways, functionalists steer their investigations away from the search for a "gold standard " by which an emotion can be operationalized. Functionalism also has major implications for studying how feeling and emotion are interrelated, and understanding how culture influences emotion and emotional development. Functionalist Perspective on the Nature of Emotion The field of emotion is changing rapidly and, in the process, shifting its philosophical

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European American, Japanese, and Chinese 11-month-olds participated in emotion-inducing laboratory procedures. Facial responses were scored with BabyFACS, an anatomically based coding system. Overall, Chinese infants were less expressive than European American and Japanese infants. On measures of smiling and crying, Chinese infants scored lower than European American infants, whereas Japanese infants were similar to the European American infants or fell between the two other groups. Results suggest that differences in expressivity between European American and Chinese infants are more robust than those between European American and Japanese infants and that Chinese and Japanese infants can differ significantly. Cross-cultural differences were also found for some specific brow, cheek, and midface facial actions (e.g., brows lowered). These are discussed in terms of current controversies about infant affective facial expressions.Over 25 years ago, Ekman, Sorenson, and Friesen (1969) conducted a landmark study demonstrating that preliterate New Guinea tribespeople identified a number of emotional facial expressions similar to participants in three literate cultures: Japan, Brazil, and the United States. These findings stood in strong contrast to earlier anthropological descriptions of numerous cross-cultural differences in adult expressive behavior (e.g., Birdwhistell, 1970;LaBarre, 1947). To resolve this apparent conflict, Ekman (1972) proposed that a species-specific set of

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