Emotion Template Matrix Analysis
Emotion Template Matrix Analysis (ETMA) builds on the ideas about the key role emotions play in our life, yet it derives its inspiration from a philosophical line of inquiry that goes back to American pragmatism and explores emotions from a sociological rather than a psychological perspective. Psychologists start with the premise that our feelings, actions, and thoughts reflect relatively stable, predictable personality patterns which persist over time and manifest themselves across situations. Psychological testing tends to privilege tools that reveal enduring personality traits and discriminate against personal qualities which attest to the volatility of our actions and sentiments.
ETMA finds such indeterminacy to be a normal reflection of conflicting social pressures. It treats human beings as nonclassically propertied objects akin to particles in micro physics: when we don’t look at a particle, it is everywhere at once, it is a bundle of probabilities that require a measurement event to materialize as a particle with a definite mass, position, momentum, and other properties. In a similar fashion, our affect continuously and subconsciously scans the world for saliency; it generates conflicting feelings, it is pulled in different directions at once, and it takes a special occasion for a human agent to adopt an emotional attitude. Predictable though such an attitude might be, it is only a matter of probability that a person will show this or that affective stance in any given situation.
This is how an article published in the New York Times described George Steinbrenner, owner of the Yankees baseball team: “As always, there are at least two distinct sides to him: brash bully and charitable gentleman. . . . He is a loyal friend who turns distrustful. He’s the calm and the storm. Kindness turns to cruelty. He is just as apt to tear