Ideas and Realities of Emotion

Brian Parkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134971770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A clear and concise overview of state-of-the-art reasearch into emotion focusing on cognitive appraisal, bodily changes, action tendencies and expressive displays.

Part I

Individual emotion

1 Conceptualizing emotion

OVERVIEW

Because all of us know what emotion is from the outset, or at least believe that we do, it might seem as if the ground is already clear for development of a scientific analysis in this area. In this chapter, I consider whether the common understanding of emotion provides firm foundations for construction of a psychological framework of investigation. More generally, I attempt to introduce the topic of emotion by discussing how the domain should be conceptualized, taking common-sense thinking into account. My concern, as in the rest of the book, is with how ideas and realities of emotion overlap and how they are separate from one another. In the first part of the chapter, I argue that the everyday delineation of emotion provides at best a provisional demarcation of the field of interest rather than well-defined theoretical boundaries for psychological exploration. In other words, common sense allows us to section off some phenomena that are clearly irrelevant to emotion, and to capture others that are of more obvious direct concern. Developing this approach in the second section, I show how psychologists have staked out a scientific territory by sharpening and tightening the everyday idea of emotions as evaluative mental states directed at intentional objects. Unfortunately, however, common sense is a source of confusion as well as clarification concerning emotion and how it works. In the third part of the chapter, I examine in general terms how the concept is currently operationalized in scientific practice and call attention to the restrictiveness of this research focus. Three levels of phenomena have been distinguished in studies of emotion, relating to its individual experience, interpersonal communication and consensual representation. The traditional assumption, derived from common sense, is that the primary source of emotion knowledge comes from private experience and that communicative and representational emotional phenomena are derivative and secondary. I shall argue that this view is oversimplistic. The three varieties of evidence are neither as diverse nor as distinct as commonly assumed, and by fixing attention singlemindedly on each in isolation, researchers are missing out on the broader picture. Finally, I question the traditional assumption that private experience provides the only direct access route to emotion, and suggest instead that the relevant phenomena can often be interpreted in interpersonal rather than individual terms. Although this revised approach is directed at conceptual objects picked out and partly constituted by common sense, it adopts a radically different perspective with respect to these objects.

ORIENTATION

One thing that is certain about ‘emotion’ is that it is not an entity or substance in the world in the same way as, say, a thunderstorm or rainbow, milk or honey. It is not something that you can easily put your finger on. ‘Emotion’, to be sure, is a word used in psychological discourse as well as in everyday conversation, but this does not mean that there is a simple object, event or process that is referred to whenever the word is used. Then again, it is not just a word either. Emotion is a concept, a social practice, a way of being-in-the-word. All this and more. In this book, I want to explore some of the things that emotion is and is not in order to try to get a clearer sense of how phenomena relating to the concept fit in with our ways of speaking when we speak emotionally. In short, I will be concerned with emotion as an idea and as an individual as well as interpersonal reality. My conclusions will not provide a simple or complete answer to the question of what emotion is, but rather may help to understand why, despite its deceptively straightforward wording, this is actually not such a good question in the first place.

One thing needs to be made clear before I begin. Many people assume that emotions are just intact and uncomplicated internal feelings which are immediately distinguishable in terms of their felt quality. In this case, not only would definition be no problem, but also there would be little interest in studying emotions in psychology because the only thing to do with phenomena of this nature would be to catalogue meticulously their variety (cf. James, 1898). Unless emotions are bound up in cognitive, motivational or more general psychological processes, they can only be of peripheral interest to analysts of human action. There are a number of reasons why the idea of emotions as individual feelings does not bear up to close scrutiny, many of which should become clear in the course of the chapter. For now, I only want to point out that whatever is usually connoted by the term ‘emotion’ is something more intricate, involved, and involving than directly felt qualities of consciousness. Whatever else they might be is the specific concern of this chapter and much of the rest of the book.

STATUS OF EMOTION AS TOPIC

The traditional and obvious way to begin a discussion of the present topic would be to attempt to answer the question ‘What is emotion?’ Indeed, the modern psychological approach to emotional phenomena started with an article written over a hundred years ago which had as its title a very similar question (James, 1884). As yet no one has been able to come up with a completely satisfactory answer (one paper on this topic listed ninety-two distinct definitions organized in eleven separate categories; Kleinginna and Kleinginna, 1981). Much of the content of the present book addresses this fundamental conceptual (as well as practical) issue in one way or another, but before confronting the question head on, I think it is first worth asking a shorter and possibly simpler question: namely, ‘Is emotion?’ (alternatively, ‘What emotion?’). To be more explicit, I shall start by considering whether whatever phenomena are picked out by the ordinary language word ‘emotion’ have any necessary common defining features, and if it is correct from a scientific view to use the concept of ‘emotion’ as part of a general analysis of how human beings act in the real world. Does emotion actually exist, in a psychological sense?

Common-sense concepts have an ambiguous status within psychology. On the one hand, several theorists argue that ordinary language contains a psychological category system that has evolved into a powerful and sensitive descriptive instrument over the course of cultural history. In this case, the fact that people talk about each other's and their own psychological functioning in emotional terms is ample reason for taking the idea of emotion seriously (e.g. Harré and Secord, 1972). On the other hand, there are also psychologists who believe that the cultural evolution of common-sense categories follows a quite different logic from that of proper scientific development, and that it would be unwise to import a vernacular idea such as that of emotion with all its associated baggage wholesale into our scientific accounts of behaviour. As Mandler (1975) reasoned: ‘It seems useful not to fall into the trap of trying to explain what an emotion is, that would be to follow the error of trying to explicate the common language’ (p. 2). Some of the more extreme proponents of this critical view have even suggested doing away completely with explanations phrased in terms of emotion, and relying instead on more ‘objectively’ defined concepts. Duffy (1941), for example, argued as follows:

I am aware of no evidence for the existence of a special condition called ‘emotion’ which follows different principles of action from other conditions of the organism. I can therefore see no reason for a psychological study of ‘emotion’ as such. ‘Emotion’ has no distinguishing characteristics. It represents merely an extreme manifestation of characteristics found in some degrees in all responses.

(p. 292)

Imagine Admiral Nelson as a latterday psychologist wearing a misplaced conceptual eyepatch and remarking ‘I see no emotion’.

More commonly, theorists begin their analyses with a relatively undefined and off-the-peg common-sense version of the emotion concept but reserve the right to adjust or tailor its fabric to suit their scientific needs should this become necessary. In this third view, ‘emotion’ is accepted provisionally as a valid scientific concept, in order to get the analysis under-way.

I too believe that there are good reasons for taking the common-sense concept of emotion seriously, but I also feel that many of its intuitive connotations are unhelpful for constructing a complete psychological picture of what goes on when people ‘get emotional’.

Taking the plus side first, it can easily be claimed that the workability of the common-sense concept is continually reasserted by its apparently successful everyday usage. However, this article of faith is of little practical use without guidelines for deciding which aspects of the idea map directly onto the psychological phenomena of concern and which do not. In any case, when people actually use emotion representations, the psychological process never ends with a simple descriptive characterization of an independent emotional world. This is because deployment of emotion ideas always exerts some effect on the way that psychological reality is formulated: even if consciousness actually provided a neutral running commentary on what was going on, such a process would have little point unless it changed the ways that people reacted to and dealt with the objects and events characterized in this internal monologue. Thus, thinking about emotion in certain ways is bound to affect as well as reflect the conduct of emotional life in the real world. The consequence of this conclusion is that the common sense of emotion cannot be assessed in a simple way in terms of its correspondence with a separable realm of application. Rather, common sense helps to define and constitute the very reality with which it is compared.

This analysis of how emotional ideas intrude into emotional reality does, however, suggest a different reason for making use of the common-sense concept in psychological analysis. As attribution theorists have argued, the fact that people use certain psychological concepts when describing and accounting for their own and other people's behaviour is itself a phenomenon of interest (e.g. Heider, 1958; Kelley, 1992; and see Chapter 9). In other words, even if there were no such thing as ‘emotion’ in ‘scientific’ terms, people's usage of the idea might still make some kind of difference to the way they acted on the social world. Indeed, to the extent that the idea of emotion helps to constitute a set of relevant phenomena, it may prove helpful in theory development.

The impact of common-sense ideas of emotion on the realities of psychological functioning becomes even more obvious when the conceptual focus is broadened to encompass the interpersonal world. Emotion concepts are part of the accepted currency of social transactions and their value is difficult to undermine. Our relative interpersonal positions are culturally predefined in emotional terms, and can be reproduced (deliberately as well as automatically) in any ongoing encounter. For example, when a lover betrays us, we know from countless books and films what our reaction should be and how other people are supposed to deal with us when we are like this. We play out the preformulated roles, sometimes in a quite self-conscious way, and construct emotional realities between us during the course of our interpersonal encounters. More generally speaking, I want to claim that the cultural availability of interpersonal identity positions based on emotion, where, for example, one person gets angry and another is thus encouraged to apologize, makes it likely that in some circumstances people will actually take on the relevant roles with the requisite level of identification. In certain social situations, then, believing in emotion can make it real.

Moving to the disadvantages of the common-sense idea of emotion, it is obvious that not all of our common-sense ideas about emotion are entirely accurate, even when evaluated as simple one-way descriptions, mapping onto a putative independent psychological reality. Words and concepts are shaped by ideological rather than perfectly realistic forces, and serve to justify and mystify interpersonal relations as well as directly describe them. For example, Sampson (1977) has argued that much of psychological theory and experimentation is misguided by a cultural prejudice that individual functioning is primary. Because in Western capitalist society, every person is taught to take responsibility for his or her own actions, and to account for himself or herself as an origin of intentions, personal causes come to be seen as all-important. A similar situation emerges from the ideology of emotion. The emphasis of common-sense as well as scientific accounts of emotion tends to fall on private and intrapsychic aspects of the phenomenon, often at the expense of interpersonal factors. One of the main aims of the present book is to redress this misemphasis.

To summarize this section, I have argued that it is reasonable to start out by accepting with due scepticism the existence of a divisible portion of psychology loosely bounded by the common-sense category of emotion. The aim is to extend this analysis so that we can find out what factors underlie the manifestations that we call emotion, and revise our analysis accordingly. Furthermore, it is important to see the everyday idea of emotion as part of the phenomenon in which we are interested rather than as a separable categorization of an independent psychological reality. In this book, I shall consider common-sense ideas as topics as well as resources for investigation.

It may turn out, over the course of history, that the present idea of emotion becomes redundant and unnecessary or simply misguided. In this case, it is possible to foresee a time when psychologists as well as other people (assuming that such a distinction also continues to hold) cease to speak in emotional terms. For now, however, the idea serves its scientific and everyday purposes.

In much the same way as common-sense ideas influence everyday realities of emotion, the traditional psychological concept of emotion (itself derived partly from common sense) also shapes the practice of psychological research in this area, and partly determines how the events and episodes that count as emotions are constituted in laboratory and naturalistic settings. The main focus of this chapter will shift from common-sense to psychological ideas of emotion in the sections that follow (although, as it turns out, the division between these two areas is far from clear-cut). In the next section, I show how the implicit theory of emotion suggested by the ordinary language concept can be translated into a working definition for the psychologist. This discussion also serves the purpose of making clear what phenomena fall under the general heading of emotion in traditional psychological research into the topic.

Although I believe that the realities of emotion are complex and multifaceted, the basic idea of emotion that underlies most psychological research is at heart a simple one. As in common sense, it is assumed that emotion is an individual experience typically caused by something that has happened to the person in question. Much of the existing research on emotion which I review in subsequent chapters implicitly accepts this common-sense definition of emotion, although it is rarely spelt out in detail by investigators. To repeat, the view of emotion offered in the next section should in no sense be taken as a final and definitive analysis, but rather as a way of getting a fix on the kinds of things that psychologists and other people mean by emotion. As the book progresses, I will be drawing attention to the way that this limited individualistic and representational view of what emotion is fails to tell the whole story.

COMMON-SENSE DEFINITION OF EMOTION

It has often been remarked that everyone knows perfectly well what emotion is, but no one can define it (e.g. Fehr and Russell, 1984). In fact, as with many paradoxes, this is not entirely true. On the one hand, not everyone agrees about what emotion is. Although people have their own intuitive understanding of emotion, there is nevertheless some uncertainty about what counts as an emotion, and even how various different emotional conditions such as anger, embarrassment, pride, and so on are manifested. People from different cultures and different eras sometimes have very different conceptions of emotions (e.g. Heelas, 1986; Lutz and White, 1986) and their lists of individual states that come under the general heading may differ quite substantially. Indeed, in some cultures, there is no word that directly translates as ‘emotion’ at all (Lutz, 1988). Furthermore, the same person can adopt different and incompatible formulations of emotion at different times and in different circumstances, at one moment characterizing emotion as distorting presentation (‘I wasn't myself’) and at another as providing a direct and heartfelt access to the authentic self (‘No matter how it seems to you, this is how I really feel’). It appears that the implicit unanimity about emotion is an illusion, and even if everyone does know what emotion is, they often still disagree about it sometimes even with themselves (cf. Billig, 1987).

On the other hand, there are at least some words, such as ‘happiness’ and ‘anger’ (or their respective translations), that few people in Western culture would leave outside the category of emotion names. Similarly, there is some degree of consensus about how to define the phenomenon in question. When we look at the phenomena that most people (including psychologists) want to call emotions, it becomes clear that they share certain common features to a greater or lesser extent and this certainly allows some sort of provisional demarcation of what kinds of things fall under this general heading. What, then, do these conditions that people think of as emotional have in common with one another?

First, people tend to see emotions as characteristically intent...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Part I Individual emotion
• Part II Social emotion
• References
• Name index
• Subject index