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Swimmer963 comments on Emotional regulation Part II: research summary - Less Wrong
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Agreed 100% that the definitions are not very rigorous. Social sciences and psychology are like that. It's annoying, but I just kind of ignore it.
Still, I don't think valence and arousal are the same concept. They don't necessarily correlate, even...you can have intense negative emotions, intense positive emotions, mild positive emotions, etc, anywhere along a two-dimensional continuum. I agree that approach-avoidance isn't the same kind of categorizer...emotions don't really fit into a continuum of being more or less approach-avoidance, whereas they do fit into a continuum of being more positive or negative. But based on the Wikipedia page I turned up (the original article assumed I was an expert in the field and didn't define its vocabulary, damn them), it's not exactly the same concept as valence. Unless that's the wrong Wikipedia page and they're talking about some other psychology concept also called approach-avoidance. I wouldn't know–this really isn't my field. Anyway, at the very least emotions can be defined in 2 dimensions, valence and arousal.
Also, though I didn't go back and check their sources for this, the article said that emotion types (I think that here they mean the naive division of emotions into anger, sadness, joy, etc) is a problematic/not rigorous way to categorize. I don't know why they decided this. (I should try to be more curious, I guess, but blaaaach it's a lot of terms to pick through in order to dig out the concrete suggestions I'm actually looking for.)
That still sounds like just one dimension to me. For two dimensions, you would need "mild very positive emotions" (contentment?) and "intense slightly negative emotions" (overpowering nostalgia?).
That "Downward social comparison" Wikipedia article seemed particularly terrible.
Maybe we can apply the virtue of scholarship in a differentiated fashion depending on the field.
For philosophy, psychology, and anything "harder" than that: do scholarship, they frequently experiment or make rigorous arguments.
For sociology: spin your own theory, that's all sociologists are doing anyway and your theory doesn't have to sound impressive so you can get tenure.
One way to get around this is to classify emotions into active and passive (or high- and low- arousal), where, for example, anger would be active/negative, and grief would be passive/negative. Like the emotion diagram I've seen around the internet lately:
Emotion Diagram
That being said, it's still interesting how vague emotional classifications can be.
The two dimensions are negative and positive: you can be both negative and positive at the same time, so your degrees of negativity and positivity can be treated as a point in a two dimensional space.
This still isn't a fully two-dimensional space -- or at least it's not a square, since extremes of either positive or negative arousal tend to suppress the other. WIthin a certain range, though, you can be both negative and positive or neither, as well as one or the other. So negative-positive isn't directions on an axis, it's a pair of sometimes but not always anti-correlated measurements.
Sounds like a plan!