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The premise of this chapter is that principles of self-organization provide the necessary tools for bridging emotional time scales. In the first part of the chapter, the author introduces general principles of self organization that apply at any scale. Next, emotional self-organization is discussed at each of 3 scales: the microdevelopment of emotion episodes, the mesodevelopment of moods, and the macrodevelopment of personality. Emotional self-organization at each scale is modeled as an emergent cognition–emotion interaction, using the following format. First, conventional approaches to cognition–emotion interactions at that scale are summarized; second, these approaches are critiqued from current psychological and neurobiological perspectives; third, principles of self-organization are used to fashion an alternative model; and fourth, preliminary support for this model is drawn from contemporary theory and …