It is easy to envision marked progress in biological and physiological approaches to emotion, due to technological advances in imaging and other recording techniques. The future of social-constructionism appears more hazy: Progress will likely depend as much on new ideas as on new empirical discoveries. The most fruitful breeding ground for new ideas is where disciplines meet. Hence, the contributors to this special section represent diverse disciplines: biology, computer science, and the arts, as well as areas more traditionally associated with (...) the social construction of emotion, for example, interpersonal relations, cultural influence, and individual development. (shrink)

Attempts to explain emotion typically emphasize the interaction of evolutionary and socialization processes. However, in describing this interplay the role of the person is typically underemphasized or unaccounted for. This paper lays out empirical and theoretical rationale for considering the person as a major contributor to emotion generation and development.

To emphasize the importance of “the social” for the construction of emotions, Parkinson distinguishes three time-scales: a phylogenetic one, an ontogenetic one, and a time-scale which focuses on real-time interactions. As far as the sociology of emotions is concerned, the last time-scale is of special interest. The following commentary deals with some questions of the sociology of emotions and draws special attention to the third time-scale Parkinson has suggested.

This reply considers how my article’s approach might be extended by attention to individual, contextual, and ecological processes. I agree that individual learning and agency play important roles in ontogeny; that sociologists have conducted informative work about the interpersonal and institutional contexts shaping on-line emotion construction; and that consideration of the relational niches in which discrete emotions consolidate can help to clarify their abstract structure. Emotion construction works with nonsocial as well as social materials.

Does appraisal co-ordinate emotional responses? Are emotions usually reached via mental representations of relational meaning? This comment considers alternative causal routes in order to assess the centrality of appraisal in the explanation of emotion. Implicit and explicit meaning extraction can certainly help steer the course of emotion-related processes. However, presupposing that appraisals represent the driving force behind all aspects of emotion generation leads to inclusive formulations of appraisal or restrictive formulations of emotion.

Emotion-related words differ across societies and eras. Does this mean that emotions themselves differ in similar ways? Three perspectives on language-emotion relations suggest alternative answers to this question. A referential approach implies that any language's emotion concepts provide a potentially perfectible mapping of the emotional world. Constructionist approaches suggest that linguistic concepts shape culturally different emotion perceptions. By contrast, a pragmatic approach emphasizes the performative functions served by conversational uses of emotion words. From this perspective, emotional language is attuned to (...) culture-specific requirements for aligning relations between people and objects. Thus, emotional utterances may be constituents of socially functional emotions rather than separate commentaries on them. Full understanding of cultural variation requires investigation of naturalistic emotional conversations in different societies. (shrink)

We propose a sociodynamic model of emotions, in which emotions are seen as dynamic systems that emerge from the interactions and relationships in which they take place. Our model does not deny that emotions are biologically constrained, yet it takes seriously that emotions are situated in specific contexts. We conceive emotions as largely functional to the sociocultural environment in which they occur; this is so because sociocultural environments foster the emergence of emotions that positively contribute to social cohesion. The role (...) of the social context includes actual, online shaping—affordances, constraints, and reward structures—and thus goes beyond merely providing the content of cognitive representations (e.g., goals, concepts). (shrink)

In this article, I outline a relational-developmental conception of emotion that situates emotional activity within a broader conception of persons as holistic, relational beings. In this model, emotions consist of felt forms of engagement with the world. As felt aspects of ongoing action, uninhibited emotional experiences are not private states that are inaccessible to other people; instead, they are revealed directly through their bodily expressions. As multicomponent processes, emotional experiences exhibit both continuity and dramatic change in development. Building on these (...) ideas, I describe an intersubjective methodology for studying developmental changes in the structure of emotional experience. I illustrate the approach with an analysis of developmental changes in the structure of anger from birth to adulthood. (shrink)