From Instincts to Love: Testing the Framework
How broad claims in the book might become smaller research questions.
The book is not presented as a formal research program, but it may resonate with researchers looking for promising questions that can grow naturally from their existing work. Its broad claims can be turned into smaller questions by asking whether behaviors can be divided into stages with distinct cues, responses, and regulatory emotions, and by asking how innate systems acquire learned cues, expectations, and responses.
Other questions concern how emotions relate to the status of active systems: progress, obstruction, danger, success, loss, or conflict. Development also becomes a central issue, because an early pathway may acquire a later function as the system matures. In this way, the book suggests ways to test a framework in which multiple adaptive systems develop, learn, regulate one another, and contribute to adult behavior.