Explaining emotion co-occurrence: Comparison of parsimonious, formal theories using multimodal, within-person data

Emotion theories should explain when and how emotions co-occur. Investigating emotion co-occurrence, Lange and Zickfeld (2023) found support for the network theory of emotions. This theory suggests that emotions co-occur because the networks of interacting components that represent emotions partly overlap. However, Lange and Zickfeld's evidence is limited to self-reports and between-person analyses. We substantially extended their work by applying between- and within-person network analytic tools to self-report, physiological (i.e., heart rate, respiration rate, skin conductance, goosebumps), and facial expression data of awe and fear. We compared five parsimonious, formalized theories of emotion co-occurrence derived from distinct emotion, network, and dimensional approaches to emotions. Consistent with Lange and Zickfeld's findings, between-person analyses showed that the network theory best explains the co-occurrence of awe and fear. In contrast, the within-person analyses did not allow definitive conclusions regarding the competing theories. We discuss the utility of theory formalization and highlight the need for the collection of within-person, multimodal emotion data for advancing research on emotion co-occurrence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).