This is a theoretical essay. The purpose of this essay is that you learn to identify the main principals of a theory and use them to critically evaluate how different theories would approach the same phenomena, in this case, a specific emotion. The theoretical perspectives that you will combine in your essay will be covered in the lectures, e.g. biological approaches, sociological approaches, emotion talk, group psychology, and affect studies. You will use these theoretical perspectives to analyse your chosen emotion from at least two different perspectives
You are free to organize your essay in any way you want, just make sure the following three elements are explicitly present somewhere in your essay:
1. Introduce your emotion. Offer a minimum literature review informing from what kind of perspectives your emotion has been studied and what have other researchers found about it. You can also discuss what are the limitations on the study of such an emotion? What would psychology gain from a deeper, better, or different understanding of this emotion?
2. Introduce your theories. Explain what the main theoretical principles of each of the theories you will use in your essay. Offer notes on the philosophical bases of the theories and their empirical approach.
3. Analyse your emotion using at least two theoretical perspectives. Imagine how the principles of each theory could be used to study your chosen emotion and reflect on what are their resources and limitations on exploring such an emotion. Offer examples, even if speculative, on how each theory would address your emotions. What kind of questions they would ask?, what procedures will they implement? To be clear, for example, if your emotion is love, you could for example explain how biological approaches to emotion would study love, and then how affect theory would study love etc. You will compare, contrast, analyse, discuss the differences, advantages, disadvantages,
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