The Social Constructionist Perspective in Psychology of Emotion

2. PSYC18 - Psychology of Emotion Lecture 7 Professor: Gerald Cupchik cupchik@utsc.utoronto.ca S-634 Office Hours: Thurs. 10-11, 2-3 T.A.: Michelle Hilscher hilscher@utsc.utoronto.ca S-150 Office Hours: Thurs. 10-11, 2-3 Course Website: www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~cupchik

3. The Social Constructionist Perspective Jim Averill Emotions are “products” of cultures. The ways that emotions are embodied in a culture’s social practices, including its language, participates in and partially constitutes the moralorder of the culture and serves to maintain it. Averill sees emotions as a special kind of “social role”. Emotions are a “socially constructed syndrome” that includes an individual’s appraisal of the situation which is interpretedas a passion rather than as an action. Averill says that emotion is experienced as an action because we play an active role in creating situations that are then experienced emotionally. He also says that emotion is experienced as a passion because when we experience emotions we often ignore our active role in having created them and feel overwhelmed and taken over by them. We feel like we have lost control.

4. The Social Constructionist Perspective • Jim Averill • Syndrome = a set of events that occur together in a systematic fashion. • Components that tend to occur together: • Subjective Experiences – particular feeling qualities associated with emotions. • Expressive Reactions – facial expressions and bodily postures that accompany an emotion. • Patterns of Physiological Response – autonomic nervous system and other changes. • Coping Reactions – behaviour we engage in while we are emotional.

5. The Social Constructionist Perspective • Jim Averill • NOTE: • Not every emotion is associated with all the components. • For example: Fear = Yes, Hope = No [Fear has a bodily and cognitive component; Hope has only a cognitive component.] • 2. Not every instance of a particular emotion need include all the components. • For example: Anger with or without a facial expression like a scowl. • There is no single response, or subset of responses, which is essential to an emotional syndrome. • Emotional syndromes are “polythetic” or not definable in terms of a limited number of characteristics.

6. The Social Constructionist Perspective EMOTIONS ARE “TRANSITORY SOCIAL ROLES”. A role is a socially prescribed set of responses to be followed by a person in a given situation. Emotions as social roles – temporary enactment of a prescribed set of responses in which a person may be seen as following a set of rules that tell him or her the “proper” way to appraise a situation, how to behave in response to the appraisal, how to interpret his or her bodily reactions to the appraisal, and so on.

7. The Social Constructionist Perspective THE RULES OF EMOTIONS ARE LEARNED! We learn from our society the sets of rules that implicitly govern our emotional performances. This approach emerges from the social constructionist perspective of the 1970s which focused more on the social self than the personal self. Emotions are associated with attitudes, beliefs, judgments, and desires reflecting the cultural values of particular communities. So appraisals are not seen as innate responses to evolutionarily significant events. Emotions reflect moral judgments about events in the world.

8. The Social Constructionist Perspective As we know, emotions used to be referred to as “passions”, a word that implies the experience of passivity, as if emotions were alien forces which overcome and possess an individual. “GRIPPED” BY FEAR “SEIZED” BY ANGER Averill’s approach to emotion is primarily metaphorical. He sees emotions as ACTIONS rather than passions. Emotional behaviour is engaged in to realize particular social and individual goals. Emotions don’t just happen to us but they are things we do willfully. The experience of emotions as passive passions is an interpretation or attribution we make about our own behaviour. We thereby disclaim responsibility for what we do when we are emotional.

9. According to Frijda, the experience of passivity is part of what it means to be emotional in our culture. Social functions of emotions: Fear can be seen as one of the means by which social norms are maintained in the regulation of social behaviour. We can compare the emotional lexicons of different cultures to get a sense for which emotions are important in that culture. (e.g., absence of fear in a warrior culture) The acquisition of a culturally appropriate lexicon by children is central to the socialization of emotion and is a major determinant of changes in children’s experiences of emotion.

10. Basic Emotions and Darwinian Survival Fear and a situation of danger. Anger and the need for defense. Love and the need for caring attention. Complex Emotions and Social Construction Shame, embarrassment, guilt and so on… more emphasis on situational interpretation.

11. The Aesthetics of Action Theory: Reaction model of aesthetics. • The main idea is that cultural materials are chosen which embody particular qualities that modulate feeling dimensions like pain-pleasure and calm-excitement. • Want to manipulate a dimension of experience like pleasure or excitement. • Choose films, books, so on, which embody properties that will modulate these bodily states. • Romantic film or book and the need for sentimental positive feelings. • Horror or suspense movies and the need for excitement.

12. Experience oriented approaches to emotion: William James & Peripheralism Now we begin the BIG TRANSITION from the Action Approach to a more Experience Oriented Approach that encompasses James’s PERIPHERALISM, PSYCHODYNAMICS, & PHENOMENOLOGY. Let me review the transition we are about to make… The first phase of the course focused on Action Theory which has been with us in various guises since the British Enlightenment of the 1700s. This theory shaped both our ideas about emotion and even extended to an explanation of how drama works. Philosophers of the Enlightenment, like John Locke, emphasized a practical approach to life in which we attempt to realize goals and evaluate events in the environment in terms of how beneficial they are to us. Our experience of pleasure or pain is an index of whether or not we have succeeded.

13. Philosophers of the Enlightenment favoured a kind of Classical approach to art and drama which emphasized the manipulation of people’s emotion through the author’s control over action, place and time. In the 1800s, the Darwinian perspective emphasized challenges posed by the physical and social worlds and this carried over into the early 1900s with McDougall’s emphasis on our “capacity to strive toward an end or ends, to seek goals, to sustain and renew activity adopted to secure consequences beneficial to the organism or the species.” Walter Cannon, the great American physiologist, extended this idea with his Emergency Response theory, the mobilization of our Sympathetic Nervous System as part of Fear or Anger responses to threat or frustration.

14. Duffy and Schachter, among others, continued this tradition of separating a planful mind, on the one hand, from a body whose function was to provide energy and focus for the problem at hand. It is crucial to remember that, among other things, this Action Theory approach involves a separation of mind and body. The mind does the planning and the body helps execution or can hinder it if the state of excitation becomes too great.

15. The EXPERIENCE APPROACH should be placed in the tradition of Romanticism which emphasized the role of imagination and interpretation both in everyday life and in relation to art, poetry and drama. Recall their focus on critical life episodes or scenes that reveal something special about the nature of our lived-world. WILLIAM JAMES (1842-1910) and the Peripheral Approach: EMOTION = The Experience of Bodily Changes James’s basic principle was that the body is central to the generation and experience of emotion. While Darwin was primarily concerned with the expression of emotion, James was interested in the experience of emotion.

16. Common sense leads us to say the following about the sequence of emotional events: • We PERCEIVE an emotion eliciting stimulus • We EXPERIENCE emotion • We EXPRESS it • For example: • We lose our fortune, are sorry and weep. • We are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. • We meet a bear, are frightened and run.

17. James argued that this sequence is wrong… “BODILY CHANGES FOLLOW DIRECTLY FROM THE PERCEPTION OF THE EXCITING FACT AND OUR FEELING OF THESE SAME CHANGES AS THEY OCCUR IS THE EMOTION.” In other words: 1. We feel sorry because we cry. 2. We feel angry because we strike. 3. We feel afraid because we tremble. These changes are automatic responses of the body and the experience of these changes is the emotion.

18. James listed three kinds of bodily changes: • Expressive behaviour • Instrumental acts such as running away • Physiological “changes” in the heart & circulatory system • The modern interpretation is that: • “Bodily changes” = “Visceral changes” The increase in sympathetic nervous system activity controls the functioning of the glands and other internal organs such as the heart and stomach. These changes are expressed as sweating, salivation, shedding tears, secreting digestive juices and stomach motility. Implication: Different emotions are accompanied by recognizably different bodily states. James’s theory permits an almost infinite number of emotions because it associates individual emotions with specific physiological states. Each emotion would be characterized by a specific physiological package.

19. This indirectly leads to the idea that the voluntary arousal or manifestation of bodily changes should produce emotions (e.g., “put on a happy face”). James was influenced by his own introspections: 1. “Unmotivated emotion” – attacks of anxiety, panic or fear in the absence of an appropriate cause. Also, anxiety attacks could sometimes be alleviated by controlling one’s breathing and changing one’s posture. 2. Persons who could not experience any feelings from his or her body (corporeal anaesthesia).

20. Carl Lange (1834 – 1900) developed a similar theory… the bodily concomitants come first, followed by the experience of emotion. James also distinguished between COARSE and SUBTLE emotions. 1. COARSE EMOTIONS are fixed action patterns and are wired-in. 2. SUBTLE EMOTIONS are learned or acquired (e.g., resentment). They can be moral, intellectual or aesthetic emotions and feelings.

21. Walter B. Cannon (1871 – 1945), the great American physiologist, offered a critique of William James’s theory which led to a rejection of his work for a period of time. Cannon did his research on the physiology of digestion and disturbances of digestion which led him to reject James’s ideas about “autonomic specificity”. The 1920s was a period in medical history when psychosomatic medicine was established as a separate discipline… for example in the area of stress.

22. Critiques: 1. Total separation of the viscera from the CNS does not alter emotional behaviour. 2. The same visceral changes occur in very different emotional states and non-emotional states. 3. The viscera are relatively insensitive structures. 4. Visceral changes are too slow to be a source of emotional feeling. 5. Artificial induction of the visceral changes typical of strong emotion does not produce them. This is where he applied the data from Maranon’s study about the 79% who received an injection but did not experience an emotion. The most important points are Number 2 and 3! * * *

23. Cannon assumed that the cerebral cortex constantly inhibits emotional expressions that are integrated in the thalamus. Perception of an emotion evoking situation produces cortical disinhibition and frees the thalamic centres from their normal restraint. When disinhibition occurs, the emotional expression automatically appears. Incoming sensory impulses from the viscera and skeletal muscles arrive at the thalamus and are relayed to the cortex. This gives conscious experience an emotional quality. Cannon therefore argued that emotional reactions are coordinated at subcortical levels. This is an example of the Centralist Approach to emotion. James had argued that there are no special brain centres for emotion. So James’s peripheral approach to emotion can be contrasted with the centralist approach in which cognition filters perception and selects behaviour. IMPLICATIONS: THE FACIAL FEEDBACK HYPOTHESIS: “Awareness of one’s own facial expressions is the emotion.”

24. Floyd Allport (1890 - 1978) argued in 1924 in support of James’s idea that feedback from facial expressions could help differentiate emotions. Accordingly, afferent (incoming) feedback from the face differentiates anger from fear. Sylvan Tomkins (1911-1991) maintained in the 1960s that feedback from facial muscles differentiates emotions. Accordingly, affect is primarily facial behaviour and secondarily it is bodily behaviour, outer skeletal and inner visceral activity.

25. On what basis does Tomkins maintain this position? 1. A newborn exhibits greater responsiveness to facial and head stimulation than to bodily stimulation. 2. The rapid development of head movement, visual fixation and eye-hand coordination. Standing and walking appear later. 3. The greater density of afferent-efferent channels moving information between the face and the brain. 4. The facial muscles show greater resistance to habituation. 5. The face is the centre of affective expression.

26. Ekman and Friesen (1960s) also emphasized the high sending capacity of the face. 1. Greater number of discriminable stimulus patterns due to the relative anatomical independence of the brow-forehead, eyes-lid-bridge of nose and lower face including cheeks, nose, mouth, chin and jaw. (Science Centre) 2. Physical potential for rapid muscular change or “low transmission time” permits facial displays to evolve drastically over short periods of time. This relates to the concept of “micro-momentary affect displays” as brief as 1/50th of a second. Primary Affect List: Happiness, interest, surprise, fear, anger, disgust and sadness

27. Summarizing: The face is the place for emotion!! 1. Afferent-efferent routes 2. Anatomical independence 3. Rapid muscular change