Emotion Review recent issues

Preface

Stearns, P. N. — 2009-09-16

Emotions as Cognitive-Affective-Somatic Hybrids

Harre, R. — 2009-09-16

One way of studying emotions which is sensitive to cultural differences is to analyze the vocabularies people use to describe their own and other’s emotions, which can be called the local emotionology. Wittgenstein’s concepts of language game and family resemblance can be used in this project. The result of research in this mode is a three-factor account of emotions, involving bodily perturbations, judgments of meanings, and the social force of emotion displays. This treatment of a psychological phenomenon is typical of recent conceptions of psychology as a hybrid science, linking cognitive, cultural, and physiological phenomena. It can be seen as a further development of the cognitive account of emotions that has appeared in the last century.

Historical Research on the Self and Emotions

Reddy, W. M. — 2009-09-16

Research on this topic in Europe and North America has reached a new stage. Prior to 1970, historians told a story of progress in which modern individuals gradually gained mastery of emotions. After 1970 this older approach was put into doubt. Since 1990 research into the history of emotions has increasingly relied on a new methodology, based on the assumption that emotion is a domain of effort, and that it is possible to document variance between emotional standards, on the one hand, and the greater or lesser success of individuals in conforming to them, on the other. Emotional standards are now assumed to display a history that is not progressive, but reflects distinctive features of each period.

Reconstructing the Past: A Century of Ideas About Emotion in Psychology

Gendron, M., Feldman Barrett, L. — 2009-09-16

Within the discipline of psychology, the conventional history outlines the development of two fundamental approaches to the scientific study of emotion—"basic emotion" and "appraisal" traditions. In this article, we outline the development of a third approach to emotion that exists in the psychological literature—the "psychological constructionist" tradition. In the process, we discuss a number of works that have virtually disappeared from the citation trail in psychological discussions of emotion. We also correct some misconceptions about early sources, such as work by Darwin and James. Taken together, these three contributions make for a fuller and more accurate account of ideas about emotion during the century stretching from 1855 to just before 1960.

The Sociology of Emotions: Basic Theoretical Arguments

Turner, J. H. — 2009-09-16

In this article, the basic sociological approaches to theorizing human emotions are reviewed. In broad strokes, theorizing can be grouped into several schools of thought: evolutionary, symbolic interactionist, symbolic interactionist with psychoanalytic elements, interaction ritual, power and status, stratification, and exchange. All of these approaches to theorizing emotions have generated useful insights into the dynamics of emotions. There remain, however, unresolved issues in sociological approaches to emotions, including: the nature of emotions, the degree to which emotions are hard-wired neurological or socially constructed, the relevance of analyzing the biology and evolution of emotions, the relationship between cognition and emotions, the number of distinctive emotional states produced by humans, and the relationship between emotions and rationality.

Affective Neuroscience: Past, Present, and Future

Dalgleish, T., Dunn, B. D., Mobbs, D. — 2009-09-16

The discipline of affective neuroscience is concerned with the underlying neural substrates of emotion and mood. This review presents an historical overview of the pioneering work in affective neuroscience of James and Lange, Cannon and Bard, and Hess, Papez, and MacLean before summarizing the current state of research on the brain regions identified by these seminal researchers. We also discuss the more recent strides made in the field of affective neuroscience. A final section considers different hypothetical organizations of affective neuroanatomy and highlights future directions for the discipline.

Ten Perspectives on Emotional Experience: Introduction to the Special Issue

Reisenzein, R., Doring, S. A. — 2009-06-10

Communications to Self and Others: Emotional Experience and its Skills

Oatley, K. — 2009-06-10

According to the Communicative Theory of Emotions, we experience emotions when events occur that are important for our goals and plans. A method of choice for studying these matters is the emotion diary. Emotions configure our cognitive systems and our relationships. Many of our emotions concern our relationships, and empathy is central to our experience of them. We do not always recognize our emotions or the emotions of others, but literary fiction can help improve our skills of recognition and understanding.

Emotional Experience in the Computational Belief-Desire Theory of Emotion

Reisenzein, R. — 2009-06-10

Based on the belief that computational modeling (thinking in terms of representation and computations) can help to clarify controversial issues in emotion theory, this article examines emotional experience from the perspective of the Computational Belief–Desire Theory of Emotion (CBDTE), a computational explication of the belief–desire theory of emotion. It is argued that CBDTE provides plausible answers to central explanatory challenges posed by emotional experience, including: the phenomenal quality, intensity and object-directedness of emotional experience, the function of emotional experience and its relation to cognition and motivation, and the relation between emotional experience and emotion. In addition, CBDTE avoids most objections that have been raised against cognitive theories of emotion. A remaining objection, that beliefs are not necessary for the emotions covered by CBDTE, is rejected as empirically unsupported.

The Cognitive-Motivational Compound of Emotional Experience

Castelfranchi, C., Miceli, M. — 2009-06-10

We present an analysis of emotional experience in terms of beliefs and desires viewed as its minimal cognitive constituents. We argue that families of emotions can be identified because their members share some of these constituents. To document this claim, we analyze one family of emotions—which includes the feeling of inferiority, admiration, envy, and jealousy—trying to show that the distinctiveness of each emotion is due to the specific compound of beliefs and desires it implies, whereas the kinship among related emotions is due to their sharing of cognitive or motivational components. Finally, we address the gestalt problem, that is, the question of how it is possible that emotions, although consisting of several "atomic" elements, are felt as unitary experiences.

Getting Feelings into Emotional Experience in the Right Way

Goldie, P. — 2009-06-10

I argue that emotional feelings are not just bodily feelings, but also feelings directed towards things in the world beyond the bounds of the body, and that these feelings (feelings towards) are bound up with the way we take in the world in emotional experience.

The Logic of Emotional Experience: Noninferentiality and the Problem of Conflict Without Contradiction

Doring, S. A. — 2009-06-10

Almost all contemporary philosophers on the subject agree that emotions play an indispensable role in the justification (as opposed to the mere causation) of other mental states and actions. However, how this role is to be understood is still an open question. At the core of the debate is the phenomenon of conflict without contradiction: why is it that an emotion need not be revised in the light of better judgment and knowledge? Conflict without contradiction has been explained either by difference in content between emotion and judgment, or by a difference in the respective attitude towards content. I argue that conflict without contradiction is due to both differences, where difference in content is prior to difference in attitude.

Emotions as Evaluative Feelings

Helm, B. W. — 2009-06-10

The phenomenology of emotions has traditionally been understood in terms of the bodily sensations they involve. This is a mistake. We should instead understand their phenomenology in terms of their distinctively evaluative intentionality. Emotions are essentially affective modes of response to the ways our circumstances come to matter to us, and so they are ways of being pleased or pained by those circumstances. Making sense of the intentionality and phenomenology of emotions in this way requires rejecting traditional understandings of intentionality and coming to see emotions as a distinctive and irreducible class of mental states lying at the intersection of intentionality, phenomenology, and motivation.

Mood Experience: Implications of a Dispositional Theory of Moods

Siemer, M. — 2009-06-10

The core feature that distinguishes moods from emotions is that moods, in contrast to emotions, are diffuse and global. This article outlines a dispositional theory of moods (DTM) that accounts for this and other features of mood experience. DTM holds that moods are temporary dispositions to have or to generate particular kinds of emotion-relevant appraisals. Furthermore, DTM assumes that the cognitions and appraisals one is disposed to have in a given mood partly constitute the experience of mood. This article outlines a number of implications of DTM (e.g., regarding the noncognitive causation and rationality of moods) and summarizes empirical results supporting the theory.

Emotion Experience and its Varieties

Frijda, N. H. — 2009-06-10

Emotion experience reflects some of the outcomes of the mostly nonconscious processes that compose emotions. In my view, the major processes are appraisal, affect, action readiness, and autonomic arousal. The phenomenology of emotion experience varies according to mode of consciousness (nonreflective or reflective consciousness), and to direction and mode of attention. As a result, emotion experience may be either ineffable or articulate with respect to any or all of the underlying processes. In addition, emotion experience reflects the degree to which the emotion processes control perception, thought, action and bodily arousal.

Emotion Experience, Rational Action, and Self-Knowledge

Lambie, J. A. — 2009-06-10

This article examines the role of emotion experience in both rational action and self-knowledge. A key distinction is made between emotion experiences of which we are unaware, and those of which we are aware. The former motivate action and color our view of the world, but they do not do so in a rational way, and their nonreflective nature obscures self-understanding. The article provides arguments and evidence to support the view that emotion experiences contribute to rational action only if one is appropriately aware of them (because only then does one have the capacity to inhibit one's emotional reactions). Furthermore, it is argued that awareness of emotion increases self-knowledge because it is a source of information about our biases.

Emotional Consciousness and Personal Relationships

Roberts, R. C. — 2009-06-10

Three kinds of emotional consciousness are distinguished in this article: feeling awareness, intellectual awareness, and bare awareness. All are important to three moral properties that emotions may have: epistemic, practical, and relational. The bulk of this article is devoted to the third dimension of moral value, that emotions are constitutive of personal relationships such as friendship, enmity, good and bad parenthood, and collegiality. The conception of emotions as concern-based construals (Roberts, 2003) is put to work to explain how felt and intellectually conscious emotions are constitutive of the qualities of such relationships. The relational value of emotions interacts with their epistemic and practical values.

Remembering the Details: Effects of Emotion

Kensinger, E. A. — 2009-03-30

Though emotion conveys memory benefits, it does not enhance memory equally for all aspects of an experience, nor for all types of emotional events. In this review, I outline the behavioral evidence for arousal's focal enhancements of memory and describe the neural processes that may support those focal enhancements. I also present behavioral evidence to suggest that these focal enhancements occur more often for negative experiences than for positive ones. This result appears to arise because of valence-dependent effects on the neural processes recruited during episodic encoding and retrieval, with negative affect associated with increased engagement of sensory processes, and positive affect leading to enhanced recruitment of conceptual processes.

Towards Understanding Emotion's Effects on Memory

Hamann, S. — 2009-03-30

Emotion can exert powerful influences on memory for events. The recent surge of behavioral and functional neuroimaging studies of emotional episodic memory has produced a wealth of new findings and theoretical approaches. Kensinger (2009) reviews recent studies, focusing on two key questions: what factors determine the particular aspects of an event that will be influenced by emotion, and, what is the role of valence in modulating emotional memory effects? This commentary touches on some points raised in this thought-provoking and timely review and attempts to place them in a broader context.

Motivational Relevance as a Potential Modulator of Memory for Affective Stimuli: Can We Compare Snakes and Cakes?

Larson, C. L., Steuer, E. L. — 2009-03-30

Consideration of affective dimensions beyond arousal may be useful for a more precise understanding of the effects of emotional events on episodic memory. As highlighted by Kensinger (2009), the valence of an event may differentially impact the accuracy of its recall. Paralleling work on attention, we propose that the relevance of an event or stimulus for survival may also importantly modulate memory accuracy. However, few memory studies to date have accounted for motivational relevance, and the stimuli employed in most studies are not matched on this dimension.

Disentangling the Effects of Arousal and Valence on Memory for Intrinsic Details

Mather, M., Sutherland, M. — 2009-03-30

Kensinger (2009) and Mather (2007) both argue that intrinsic features of emotional items are remembered better than intrinsic features of non-emotional items. However, Kensinger attributes these effects to negative valence whereas Mather attributes them to arousal. In this paper, we note several reasons why arousal may be the driving factor even when a study reveals more detailed memory for negative items than for positive items. We also reanalyze previous data (Mather & Nesmith, 2008) to show that although both arousal and negative valence were correlated with memory accuracy, enhanced memory accuracy was accounted for by arousal rather than valence.

What Factors Need to be Considered to Understand Emotional Memories?

Kensinger, E. A. — 2009-03-30

In my original review (Kensinger, 2009), I proposed that to understand the effects of emotion on memory accuracy, we must look beyond effects of arousal and consider the contribution of valence. In discussing this proposal, the commentators raise a number of excellent points that hone in on the question of when valence does (and does not) account for emotion's effects on memory accuracy. Though future research will be required to resolve this issue more fully, in this brief response, I address some of the concerns outlined by the commentators and suggest a few steps that may help to elucidate the dimensions that should be incorporated in models of emotional memory.

Embodied Emotion Considered

Niedenthal, P. M., Maringer, M. — 2009-03-30

Conceptual Metaphors of Affect

Crawford, L. E. — 2009-03-30

Emotional experiences are often described in metaphoric language. A major question in linguistics and cognitive science is whether such metaphoric linguistic expressions reflect a deeper principle of cognition. Are abstract concepts structured by the embodied, sensorimotor domains that we use to describe them? This review presents the argument for conceptual metaphors of affect and summarizes recent findings from empirical studies. These findings show that, consistent with the conceptual metaphor account, the associations between affect and physical domains such as spatial position, musical pitch, brightness, and size which are captured in linguistic metaphors also influence performance on attention, memory and judgment tasks. Despite this evidence, a number of concerns with metaphor as an account of affect representation are considered.

Reach For What You Like: The Body's Role in Shaping Preferences

Ping, R. M., Dhillon, S., Beilock, S. L. — 2009-03-30

The position of individuals' bodies (e.g., holding a pencil in the mouth in a way that either facilitates or inhibits smiling musculature) can influence their emotional reactions to the stimuli they encounter, and can even impact their explicit preferences for one item over another. In this article we begin by reviewing the literature demonstrating these effects, explore mechanisms to explain this body-preference link, and introduce new work from our lab that asks whether one's bodily or motor experiences might also shape preferences in situations where the body is not contorted in a particular position, or when there is no intention to act. Such work suggests that one consequence of perceiving an object is the automatic and covert motor simulation of acting on this object. This, in turn, provides individuals with information about how easy or hard this action would be. It transpires that we like to do what is easy, and we also prefer objects that are easier to act on. The notion that judgments of object likeability are driven by motoric information furthers embodied cognition theories by demonstrating that even our preferences are grounded in action.

Gender, Emotion, and the Embodiment of Language Comprehension

Glenberg, A. M., Webster, B. J., Mouilso, E., Havas, D., Lindeman, L. M. — 2009-03-30

Language comprehension requires a simulation that uses neural systems involved in perception, action, and emotion. A review of recent literature as well as new experiments support five predictions derived from this framework. 1. Being in an emotional state congruent with sentence content facilitates sentence comprehension. 2. Because women are more reactive to sad events and men are more reactive to angry events, women understand sentences about sad events with greater facility than men, and men understand sentences about angry events with greater facility than women. 3. Because it takes time to shift from one emotion to another, reading a sad sentence slows the reading of a happy sentence more for women than men, whereas reading an angry sentence slows the reading of a happy sentence more for men than for women. 4. Because sad states motivate affiliative actions and angry states motivate aggressive action, gender and emotional content of sentences interact with the response mode. 5. Because emotion simulation requires particular action systems, adapting those action systems will affect comprehension of sentences with emotional content congruent with the adapted action system. These results have implications for the study of language, emotion, and gender differences.

Neuroscientific Evidence for Simulation and Shared Substrates in Emotion Recognition: Beyond Faces

Heberlein, A. S., Atkinson, A. P. — 2009-03-30

According to simulation or shared-substrates models of emotion recognition, our ability to recognize the emotions expressed by other individuals relies, at least in part, on processes that internally simulate the same emotional state in ourselves. The term "emotional expressions" is nearly synonymous, in many people's minds, with facial expressions of emotion. However, vocal prosody and whole-body cues also convey emotional information. What is the relationship between these various channels of emotional communication? We first briefly review simulation models of emotion recognition, and then discuss neuroscientific evidence related to these models, including studies using facial expressions, whole-body cues, and vocal prosody. We conclude by discussing these data in the context of simulation and shared-substrates models of emotion recognition.

Embodied and Disembodied Emotion Processing: Learning From and About Typical and Autistic Individuals

Winkielman, P., McIntosh, D. N., Oberman, L. — 2009-03-30

Successful social functioning requires quick and accurate processing of emotion and generation of appropriate reactions. In typical individuals, these skills are supported by embodied processing, recruiting central and peripheral mechanisms. However, emotional processing is atypical in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Individuals with ASD show deficits in recognition of briefly presented emotional expressions. They tend to recognize expressions using rule-based, rather than template, strategies. Individuals with ASD also do not spontaneously and quickly mimic emotional expressions, unless the task encourages engagement. When processing emotional scenes, ASD individuals show atypical basic motivational responses, despite intact ability to verbally determine stimulus valence. We discuss how these findings highlight the contribution of both embodied and disembodied mechanisms to typical and atypical emotional functioning.

Editorial

Russell, J. A., Feldman Barrett, L. — 2009-01-01

Language and Metalanguage: Key Issues in Emotion Research

Wierzbicka, A. — 2009-01-01

Building on the author's earlier work, this paper argues that language is a key issue in understanding human emotions and that treating English emotion terms as valid analytical tools continues to be a roadblock in the study of emotions. Further, it shows how the methodology developed by the author and colleagues, known as NSM (from Natural Semantic Metalanguage), allows us to break free of the "shackles" (Barrett, 2006) of English psychological terms and explore human emotions from a culture-independent perspective. The use of NSM makes it possible to study human emotions from a genuinely cross-linguistic and cross-cultural, as well as a psychological, perspective and thus "opens up new possibilities for the scientific understanding of subjectivity and psychological experience" (Goddard, 2007).

Lost in NSM Translation

Strauss, C. — 2009-01-01

My commentary poses two questions for Wierzbicka: one about her semantic theory, the other about her theory of emotions.

Language is Powerful

Lindquist, K. A. — 2009-01-01

As Wierzbicka suggests in her recent review, language is powerful in emotion. Wierzbicka's solution is to remove the linguistically relative aspects of emotion concepts, like icing from a cake, to reveal the universal meanings below. In the present commentary, I suggest that language is a more fundamental ingredient in emotion than Wierzbicka's solution assumes; language can be no more removed from emotion, than flour can be removed from an already baked cake. As an alternate solution, I present a constructionist view of emotion, which not only recognizes the role of language in emotion, but also predicts and models its impact as language constitutes emotion experience.

Love, Loss, and Hope Go Deeper than Language: Linguistic Semantics Has Only a Limited Role in the Interdisciplinary Study of Affect

Katz, L. D. — 2009-01-01

Human emotional experience is organized at multiple levels, only some of which are easily penetrable by or dependent on language. Affects connected with mammalian parental care seem involved in Anna Wierzbicka's example of the experience of Jesus in Gethsemane. However, such affects are not characterizable as she requires, using only NSM's short list of linguistic semantic universals. Following her methodology, even using an enriched NSM really exhaustive of linguistic semantic universals, may involve serious losses of cognitive opportunity. Specifically, it forecloses any possibility of linking language with other cognitive resources to construct novel concepts, as may be needed to understand the deep biologically-based structure of emotion—which, after all, goes far deeper in us than language does.

Overcoming Anglocentrism in Emotion Research

Wierzbicka, A. — 2009-01-01

Since English is not a neutral scientific language for the description of emotions (or anything else), then the key question is what (meta)language other than English can be used instead. I draw a distinction between "experiential meaning" which can only be acquired through lived experience, and "compositional meaning" which can be adequately portrayed in the mini-language of universal human concepts (NSM) developed through wide-ranging cross-linguistic investigations. The article rejects both the anglocentrism of emotion studies which take English concepts for granted and the "zoocentrism" which seeks to reduce human emotions to "mammalian responses," behavioral patterns or neuro-physiological states. It argues that any discourse on emotions not anchored in universal human concepts is inherently ethnocentric (more often than not, anglocentric).

An Emotion's Emergence, Unfolding, and Potential for Empathy: A Study of Resentment by the "Psychologist of Avon"

Oatley, K. — 2009-01-01

To understand human emotions we need, alongside appraisal, the concept of emergence (derivation from the expectations of relationships) and the concept of unfolding (of sequences that can be expressed as narratives). These processes can be seen in resentment, which has not been studied extensively in psychology. It is associated with envy, and it can be thought of as a kind of destructive anger. Such issues can be studied in works of literature: simulations of the social world in which emotions can be experienced by means of empathy. Shakespeare's Othello enables us to understand the emergence and unfolding of resentment in Iago, who is passed over for promotion and improvises a plan to destroy Othello. Iago's resentment is difficult to empathize with, and the play raises the question of whether we need to recognize in ourselves the capacity for reprehensible emotions.

Resentment Rising

Neu, J. — 2009-01-01

Oatley's discussion of "resentment" in Othello works with an unfortunately impoverished notion of resentment, and the narrative of emergence and unfolding that he offers suffers from it. As explicated by Bishop Butler, John Rawls, and other philosophers, resentment rests on moral claims and is to be distinguished on that basis from envy and Nietzschean ressentiment. W. H. Auden, in "The Joker in the Pack," provides more persuasive insight into the dark destructive malicious envy that motivates Iago. Such destructive aims are as characteristic of humans as "relational goals," and must be attended to if we are to learn from literature about ourselves.

Mad, Bad, and Beyond: Iago Meets Qu Yuan

Sundararajan, L. — 2009-01-01

This commentary offers an alternative interpretation of Iago's resentment based on clinical psychology and a cross-cultural perspective, thereby revisiting the fundamental question of what is emotion.

On Literary Works as Simulations that Run on Minds

Reisenzein, R. — 2009-01-01

This commentary discusses Oatley's proposal that literary works considered as simulations that run on minds can fulfill similar epistemic functions as computer simulations of mental processes. Whereas in computer simulation, both the input data and the computations to be performed on these data are explicit, only the input is explicitly known in the case of mental simulation. For this reason, literary simulations cannot play exactly the same epistemic role as computer simulations. Still, literary simulations can provide knowledge (e.g., about the phenomenal quality of emotions or about possible emotional dynamics) that is relevant for emotion science: it adds to the corpus of facts about emotions that need to be explained, and it may suggest hypotheses about the constitution of the mechanisms that generate emotions. In addition, the hypotheses suggested by a literary simulation can be tested in new mental simulations. However, at least for the purpose of hypothesis testing, the simulation of a multiplicity of experimentally manipulated scenarios should be more revealing than that of a single literary work describing only one possible course of events.

How Emotions Occur: A Reply to Commentaries by Neu, Sundararajan, and Reisenzein

Oatley, K. — 2009-01-01

Response to commentaries by Neu, Sundararajan, and Reisenzein.

How the Object of Affect Guides its Impact

Clore, G. L., Huntsinger, J. R. — 2009-01-01

In this article, we examine how affect influences judgment and thought, but also how thought transforms affect. The general thesis is that the nature and impact of affective reactions depends largely on their objects. We view affect as a representation of value, and its consequences as dependent on its object or what it is about. Within a review of relevant literature and a discussion of the nature of emotion, we focus on the role of the object of affect in governing both the nature of emotional reactions and the impact of affect and emotion on cognition and action. Although emotion is always about the here and now, the capacity for abstract thought means that the human here and now includes imagination as well as perception. Indeed, the hopes and fears that dominate human lives often involve things only imagined.

New and Improved, but Still Cold and Symbolic

Winkielman, P. — 2009-01-01

My commentary applauds the authors' cognitive framework for capturing the inferential complexity and flexibility of emotion processing. The framework offers generative powers, as demonstrated by new studies, and an insightful perspective on classic studies. However, at the core, the framework is still symbolic and cold—reflecting its origins in amodal views of the mind. This leads to two troubles. First, the framework cannot incorporate evidence for embodied, modal processing of emotion. Second, the framework overemphasizes conceptual and conscious processing, leading to dismissal of unconscious emotion. I question whether simply updating a symbolic cognitive framework is sufficient to capture the recent empirical and theoretical developments in emotion research. It might be time for a new modal and embodied theory of emotion.

Varieties of Emotional Experience: Differences in Object or Computation?

Cunningham, W. A., Van Bavel, J. J. — 2009-01-01

Discovering the taxonomies that best describe emotional experience has been surprisingly challenging. Clore and Huntsinger propose that by exploring the objects of emotion, such as standards or actions, we may better understand differences in emotion that emerge for similarly valenced reactions. We are sympathetic to this idea, although we suggest here that greater attention should be given to the computations that accompany affective processing, such as the discrepancy between different hedonic states, rather than the object per se.

A Reply to Commentaries on "How the Object of Affect Guides its Impact"

Clore, G. L., Huntsinger, J. R. — 2009-01-01

Commentaries focused on the emotional appraisal part of our article. Cunningham and Van Bavel argued for distinguishing core disgust from moral disgust, and we describe how the theory might accommodate their proposal. They also suggested that temporal and other comparisons could account for emotional variety. We concur, but see such comparisons as inherent in the different emotional objects. Winkielman emphasized unconscious affect, but we suggest its power flows from the absence of situational constraints on its meaning. He characterized our appraisal model as coldly cognitive rather than embodied, but the complaint is misdirected, as the model addresses emotional structure, not emotional process. Indeed, embodied accounts will still require structural accounts to determine why one emotion rather than another is elicited.

Emotion Elicits the Social Sharing of Emotion: Theory and Empirical Review

Rime, B. — 2009-01-01

This review demonstrates that an individualist view of emotion and regulation is untenable. First, I question the plausibility of a developmental shift away from social interdependency in emotion regulation. Second, I show that there are multiple reasons for emotional experiences in adults to elicit a process of social sharing of emotion, and I review the supporting evidence. Third, I look at effects that emotion sharing entails at the interpersonal and at the collective levels. Fourth, I examine the contribution of emotional sharing to emotion regulation together with the relevant empirical evidence. Finally, the various functions that the social sharing of emotion fulfills are reviewed and the relevance of the social sharing of emotion for emotion scientists is discussed.

Emotion and Emotion Regulation: Integrating Individual and Social Levels of Analysis

Butler, E. A., Gross, J. J. — 2009-01-01

Rimé makes the important observation that the literature on adult emotion and emotion regulation has largely focused on the individual level of analysis. He argues, we believe correctly, that emotion research would benefit by addressing the fact that emotional events provoke not only individual responses, but systematic social responses as well. We present examples of our own research that are in accord with Rimé's central claims, and that demonstrate the benefits of considering the goals that are provoked and satisfied by emotions, as well as the social context of emotional responding. We conclude by advocating a dynamic systems approach that would allow an integration of individual and social levels of analysis in the study of adult emotion and emotion regulation.

On Art, Science, Metaphors, and Ghosts: A Few Thoughts to Share

Averill, J. R. — 2009-01-01

The sharing of emotional experiences, whether in face-to-face interactions or anonymously through written communications, can influence a person's psychological and physical well-being. The mediating mechanisms are, however, poorly understood. The present comment concerns ambiguities that may result when concepts from ordinary language, such as emotion, cognition, and related metaphors, are applied to presumed mediating mechanisms.

Can the Lone Ranger, Molly Bloom, and Emile Durkheim Be Friends?

Harber, K. D. — 2009-01-01

Bernard Rimé effectively reorients emotions and emotional disclosure in a more social and interpersonal direction, outlining the intricate interplay between emotion generation, emotional sharing, and social integration. However, he also takes a hard line on the intra-psychic emphasis of emotional disclosure, which he frames as the product of an individualistic "Lone Ranger" perspective. In many ways Rimé's critique is on target, but it does not fully credit research and theory demonstrating the benefits of private, self-to-self disclosure. This commentary proposes a reconciliation between Rimé's social structuralist perspective and an intra-psychic, self-based perspective. George Herbert Mead's symbolic interactionism, which suggests that the people can relate to their own selves as with another person, provides the basis for this accord.

Social Sharing of Emotion in Words and Otherwise

Kim, H. S. — 2009-01-01

The review by Rimé challenges the current individualist view of emotional regulation, and argues that emotional experiences lead to the need and action of emotional social sharing which in turn plays a role in emotion regulation. Yet, the focus of the review itself is still hinged upon another aspect of individualistic assumption, namely the importance of language as a tool to carry out the social sharing of emotion. In so doing, the review highlights only the explicit, deliberate and agentic aspects of emotion sharing that are particularly common in Western individualistic culture. The review directly and indirectly demonstrates the need for a more comprehensive reconsideration of the role of sociality in emotion.

More on the Social Sharing of Emotion: In Defense of the Individual, of Culture, of Private Disclosure, and in Rebuttal of an Old Couple of Ghosts Known as "Cognition and Emotion"

Rime, B. — 2009-01-01

Though the commentaries on my review welcomed its focus on the social dimension of emotion and emotion regulation, they also revealed important misinterpretation. The social standpoint was not developed at the expense of the individual. On the contrary, this perspective is in line with dynamic emotions systems views. Despite variations in modalities, I argue that emotion sharing is universal because it concerns culturally-shaped knowledge and constructions when they are shattered by emotional events. Predictions regarding the recovery effects of private disclosure are formulated, particularly in reference to the notions of speech styles and psychological differentiation. Finally, differentiating cognition and emotion is becoming more and more foggy and I agree that the time has come for new, less fuzzy, concepts.