Constructivism

AVERILL [Constructivism]

James Averill argues in his Anger and Aggression: An Essay on Emotion (New York: Springer, 1982) that while emotions are based on genetic elements in humans they involve cultural experiences and so are in the main social constructions or what he calls syndromes. Averill thus also holds what is called a constructivist theory of the emotions. Emotions are cultural creations that shape our assessment of various transitory syndromes. Hence though there is a passive element people adjust behavior to bit cultural categories. 

Averill argues that emotions differ between cultures, and involve social interactions and relational situations, rather than just responses to particular stimuli or personal situations. Moreover a culture can frame how one should react or express one’s emotions via syndromes and such cultural systems or can become part of one’s habitual nature. So though emotions are social constructs one interprets them as passive responses to a given situation. Hence for Averill, an emotion is a transitory social role (a socially constituted syndrome) that includes an individual’s appraisal of the situation and that is interpreted as a passion rather than as an action (1980, p. 312). Such emotional syndromes are created by social norms and expectations. Social norms, along with beliefs about the nature of the eliciting stimulus, create frameworks and principles that determine ways in which emotions can be constructed. For example, social norms dictate what things should elicit grief and what should not. One can and should be upset over the loss of a loved one, a misplaced valuable item, loss of a job, a break-up, etc., and it is allowable to respond by crying, shock, depression, etc. But on other occasions social norms dictate that grief can be excessive or misplaced and that one should keep a stiff upper lip such as when one’s favorite sports team loses a championship. Or to take another example, people should get angry at intentional misdeeds or carelessness and hold persons and institutions responsible for them but should not displace anger onto an innocent third party or non-accountable agency. Moreover, such anger per Averill should have as its goal the correction of the situation and preventing its reoccurrence and not that of revenge and inflicting injury or pain on responsible parties. 

[N.B. Averill’s description of proper emotional response is highly influenced by his own particular viewpoints and is not necessarily how all persons or even intellectuals would view them or their proper expression.]

[N.B. Averill is right to note how societal expectations and norms can influence emotions (i.e. ‘There’s no crying in baseball!’ or ‘Real men don’t cry!’). However, there are also ethical norms as well that can be reflected upon and found out. And Averill underemphasizes the biological nature and sources of the emotions.]

[N.B. Other writings of Averill on emotions are: Averill, James R., A constructivist view of emotion, in R. Plutchik and H. Kellerman, eds., Emotion: Theory, Research, and Experience (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 305-339; Averill, James R., Emotion & Anxiety: Sociocultural, Biological and Psychological Determinants, in Rorty, Amelie O., ed., Explaining Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 37–72; Averill, J.R., The social construction of emotion: With special reference to love, in Kenneth J. Gergen and Keith E. Davis, eds., The social construction of the person (Dordrecht: Springer, 1985), 89-109; Averill, J. R., The acquisition of emotions during adulthood, in R. Harré, ed., The Social Construction of Emotions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 98-118; Averill, James R., Inner Feelings, Works of the Flesh, the Beast within, Diseases of the Mind, Driving Force, and Putting on a Show: Six Metaphors of Emotion and their Theoretical Extensions, in David E. Leary, ed., Metaphors in the History of Psychology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 104–132; Averill, James R., The structural bases of emotional behavior, Emotion 13 (1992): 175-212; Averill, James R., Illusions of Anger, R. B. Felson an d J. T. Tedeschi, eds., Aggression and Violence: Social Interactionist Perspectives (Washington: American Psychological Association, 1993), 171-192; James R. Averill, The Emotions: An Integrative Approach, in R. Hogan, J. A. Johnson, & S. R. Briggs, eds., Handbook of personality psychology (Academic Press, 1997), p. 513–541; Averill, James R., Individual Differences in Emotional Creativity: Structure and Correlates. Journal of Personality 67, no. 2 (1999): 331–371.]

HARRÉ (Constructivism)

Rom Harré, in his edited work The Social Construction of Emotions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), also argues that cultural and social practices including one’s moral views have a significant role in the formation of emotions. Social norms and values hence influence what things should make one angry or sad and which should not and how one should express one’s emotions. Hence for the medieval monks boredom [accidie] was a vice whereas this is not the case for most people today. 

[N.B. See also Harré, R., An outline of the social constructionist viewpoint, and Emotion talk across times (with R. Finlay-Jones), in R. Harré, ed., The social construction of emotions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 2-14, 220-233; Harré, R., Emotion and memory: The second cognitive revolution, in A. P. Griffiths, ed., Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychiatry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 25-40.]

[N.B. Again there is some truth here. Social practices can influence how one experiences and expresses emotions, though it is not the whole of the story.]

[N.B. Such constructivist views are highly influenced by anthropological studies but such studies are not always clear-cut as to the evidence they provide or how to interpret the findings. Some such studies include: Birdwhistell, R. L., Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body Motion Communication (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970); Briggs, J., Never in Anger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); Rosaldo, Michelle, Knowledge and passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Boucher, J. D. & Brandt, M. E. (1981). Judgment of emotion: American and Malay antecedents. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 12, 272–283; Rosaldo, Renato, Grief and a headhunter’s rage: On the cultural forces of emotions, in E. M. Bruner, ed., Text, play, and story: The construction and reconstruction of self and society(Washington: American Ethnological Society, 1984), 178-195; Morsbach, H., & Tyler, W. J., A Japanese emotion: Amae, In R. Harré, ed., The Social Construction of Emotions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 289–307; Lutz, Catherine, and White, G.M., The Anthropology of Emotions, Annual Review of Anthropology 15, no. 1 (1986): 405–436; Wierzbicka, Anna (September 1986). “Human Emotions: Universal or Culture-Specific?”. American Anthropologist. 88 (3): 584–594; Lutz, Catherine, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Russell, James (1991). “Culture and Categorization of Emotions,” Psychological Bulletin. 110 (3): 426–450; Mesquita, Batja and Nico H. Frijda, Cultural Variations in Emotions: A Review, Psychological Bulletin 112, no. 2 (1992): 179–204; Shaver, Phillip R.; Wu, Shelley; Schwartz, Judith C. Cross-cultural similarities and differences in emotion and its representation,” in Clark, Margaret S. (Ed), (1992). Emotion. Review of personality and social psychology, No. 13., (Thousand Oaks, CA, US: Sage Publications, 1992), 175-212; Wierzbicka, Anna, 1999, Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Eid, Michael; Ed Diener (November 2001). “Norms for experiencing emotions in different cultures: Inter- and intranational differences”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 81 (5): 869–885; Moisi, Dominique (2009). The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation and Hope are Reshaping the World. London: Bodley Head;; González, Ana Marta (2012). The Emotions and Cultural Analysis. Burlington, VT: Ashgate; Mesquita, Giovana Reis, Vygotsky and the Theories of Emotions: in search of a possible dialogue, Psicol. Reflex. Crit. vol.25 no.4 2012; Delgado AR, Prieto G, Burin DI. Agreement on emotion labels’ frequency in eight Spanish linguistic areas. PLoS One. 2020 Aug 18;15(8):e0237722; Maria Gendron, Katie Hoemann, Alyssa N. Crittenden, Shani Msafiri Mangola, Gregory A. Ruark & Lisa Feldman Barrett, Emotion Perception in Hadza Hunter-Gatherers, Scientific Reports volume 10, Article number: 3867 (2020).] 

[On the interpretation of such anthropological studies see John Leavitt, Meaning and Feeling in the Anthropology of Emotions, American Ethnologist 23, no. 3 (1996): 514-539; Andrew Beatty, How Did It Feel for You?: Emotion, Narrative, and the Limits of Ethnography, American Anthropologist 112, no. 3 (2010): 430-443; Gammerl, B., Nielson, P., and Pernau, M., eds., Encounters with Emotions: Negotiating Cultural Differences since Early Modernity (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019).] 

ARMON-JONES AND PARKINSON [Constructivism; Social Functionalism]

Claire Armon-Jones (1986) and Brian Parkinson, Ideas and Realities of Emotion (1995), take things one step further and argue that not only are emotions creations of society but that they in turn help reinforce society’s norms and values. So emotions are created to assist in the regulation of socially undesirable behavior and the promotion of attitudes which reflect and endorse the interrelated religious, political, moral, aesthetic and social practices of a society (1986, p. 57).  

Envy in this way assists in helping people to work harder to have the success they are envious about and guilt helps reduce the amount of cheating in society. Armon-Jones also admits that there may be subcultures that form emotions in individuals that may be out of alignment with what society as a whole prescribes, such as finding joy in graffiti or other works of public art.

[N.B. See Armon-Jones, C., Prescription, explication and the social construction of emotion, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 15 (1985): 1–22; Armon-Jones, C., The thesis of constructionism, and The social functions of emotions, in R. Harré, ed., TheSocial Construction of Emotions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 32–56 and 57-82.] 

GRIFFITHS AND SCARANTINO [Biological View and Cultural View; Motivational Theory; Situationism]

The psychologist Paul Griffiths in his What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) criticizes attempts to group all emotions together as a natural kind. There cannot be a unified psychological approach to emotions, rather we must appeal to biological and constructivist views. There are biological affect programs as Ekman noted, but also some emotions are cognitively mediated or socially constructed. 

Basic emotions are biological and at bottom affect programs (a la Ekman) that evolved in animals a long time ago and involve analogous physiological reactions and reflex behaviors. Basic emotions are valenced appraisals that are built upon aversive or appetitive mechanisms that are useful for animal survival. Hence facial expressions are posited to have initially served non-communicative function that later on was adapted for social purposes. So fear caused widening of eyes which increased visual field and increased heart rate prepared for flight. And Disgust caused wrinkled nose that limited intake of potentially dangerous air. Later on these expressions became coopted for communication purposes and fear responses could be communicated within social groups. 

Such systems can be quite conservative. For example humans can easily fear snakes but poisonous flowers less so. And they are hard to control. When the appropriate stimulus is presented to an affect system the triggering of the response is automatic and cannot be interfered with or stopped (they are cut off from the cognitive systems). Such a system can also have a memory storage unit storing information about classes of stimuli previously assessed as meriting emotional response (1997, p. 92).

However, emotions can take different forms in different species and with humans there are also socially-constructed emotions such as guilt. So just as limb bones can be adapted into fins, legs, and wings, so anger can give rise to threat displays in the apes and forms of violence in humans. Humans possess homologues of these genetic behavioral syndromes inherited from our mammalian ancestors.

Griffiths identifies six basic affect program emotions: surprise, anger, fear, sadness, joy, and disgust. These are natural kinds in the senses that they are projectible and share causal properties that are sufficiently well-correlated to sustain generalizations. However, the higher cognitive emotions, such as envy, regret, and shame, cannot be grounded into a natural kind with the six basic emotions. These further emotions arise in humans due to societal influences and are socially constructed.

Andrea Scarantino joins Paul Griffiths and expands upon his work in noting how emotions play a key role in interpersonal communication in social contexts. Emotions then as behavioral programs can help signal cues and wishes for behavior to fellow organisms. Fear in this way involves the selective potentiation of options for avoiding an object appraised as dangerous; anger involves the selective potentiation of options for mitigating a certain target appraised as offensive, guilt involves the selective potentiation of options for repairing a damaged relationship, etc.

Scarantino, influenced by situationism in social psychology, also stresses the importance of external factors in the communication of emotions. Hence in contrast with the Jamesian view and cognitivism emotions are not merely internal processes but produces of relationships of organisms with their environment and with each other. Indeed on emotional situationism conceptual thought is not inherent to emotion as emotion has evolved to coordinate interaction with the world and so give rise to action tendencies (New Basic Emotion Theory). So any content attached to emotions is more a matter of teleology than representational thought. And though emotions can give rise to feelings, such emotional operation need not be felt; they are defined by what they accomplish.

Scarantino also accepts Frijda’s view that action tendencies must have control precedence to become emotional. In other words there must be a central control that interrupts competing processes and focuses the mind on matters pertaining to the emotional goal at hand. In this way emotional action tendencies can be modified in terms of what activates the behavioral program and what responses it brings about. So there may not be many physiological reactions common to emotions.

[N.B. Griffiths overstresses the lack of link between cognition and basic affect programs.]

[N.B. Some of the theories about the non-communicative use of emotions are quite speculative such as tears reducing vision to show appeasement or pride causing impressive and visible vigor displays.

[See also Griffiths, Paul E., Is emotion a natural kind?, in R. C. Solomon, ed., Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 233-249; Griffiths, Paul., Towards a ‘Machiavellian’ Theory of Emotional Appraisal, in Evans, Dylan and Pierre Cruse, eds., Emotion, Evolution, and Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 89–105; Griffiths, Paul and Andrea Scarantino, Emotions in the Wild: The Situated Perspective on Emotion, in Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 437–453; Scarantino, Andrea, and Paul Griffiths, Don’t Give Up on Basic Emotions, Emotion Review 3, no. 4 (2011): 444-454; Griffiths, Paul, Current Emotion Research in Philosophy, Emotion Review 5, no. 2 (2013): 215-222.]

[See Scarantino, Andrea, Insights and Blindspots of the Cognitivist Theory of Emotions, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61, no. 4 (2010): 729–768; Scarantino, Andrea, How to Define Emotions Scientifically, Emotion Review 4, no. 4 (2012): 358–368; Scarantino, Andrea. Basic Emotions, Psychological Construction and the Problem of Variability. The Psychological Construction of Emotion, ed. James A. Russell and Lisa Barrett (New York: Guilford Press 2014), 334–376; Scarantino, Andrea, The Motivational Theory of Emotions, in Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, eds., Moral Psychology and Human Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 156–185; Scarantino, Andrea, Basic Emotions, Psychological Construction and the Problem of Variability, in Barrett, Lisa, and Russell, James A., eds., The Psychological Construction of Emotion (New York: Guilford Press, 2015), 334–376; Scarantino, Andrea and Michael Nielsen, Voodoo Dolls and Angry Lions: How Emotions Explain Arational Actions, Philosophical Studies 172, no. 11 (2015): 2975–2998; Scarantino, Andrea, The Philosophy of Emotions and Its Impact on Affective Science, in Barrett, L., Lewis, M., Haviland-Jones, J.M., eds., The Handbook of Emotion, 3^rd edn (New York: Guilford Press, 2016): 3–48; Scarantino, Andrea, How to Do Things with Emotional Expressions: The Theory of Affective Pragmatics, Psychological Inquiry 28, no. 2–3 (2017): 165–185;] 

[Critics such as Reisenzein, Tappolet, and Prinz have pointed out that some emotional states do not appear to motivate at all, such as grief and depression or regret or joy. And the same action tendency can seemingly be linked to different emotions. See also Eder, Andreas B. and Klaus Rothermund, Emotional Action: An Ideomotor Model, in Changiz Mohiyeddini, Michael Eysenck, and Stephanie Bauer, eds., Handbook of Psychology of Emotions: Recent Theoretical Perspectives and Novel Empirical Findings (Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2013), 11-38.]

ROBINSON [Non-Cognitivism]

Jenefer Robinson defends a non-cognitive theory of emotion in her Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music and Art (2005). For the core process of emotions are non-cognitive even if they may be accompanied or even preceded and causes by cognitive processes. She writes: My suggestion is that there is a set of inbuilt affective appraisal mechanisms, which in more primitive species and in neonates are automatically attuned to particular stimuli, but which, as human beings learn and develop, can also take as input more complex stimuli, including complex ‘judgments’ or thoughts (2004, p. 41). Hence emotions can be accompanied by a great deal of thought and awareness (such as that one has been mistreated), but these are separate from the emotion. For example, one might fear poverty due to a crash in the stock market, but the basic affect program is non-cognitive. Indeed such thoughts can occur without a given emotion occurring. One may have a cognitive appraisal of being mistreated but no triggering of an emotion by the affective appraisal unit. Again a non-cognitive emotional process may be followed by cognitive labeling reflecting one’s beliefs. So one might label one’s anger response as jealousy after the fact. Nor need emotions be distinguishable by common bodily responses, except perhaps for some facial expressions. 

[See Robinson, Jenefer, “Startle,” The Journal of Philosophy 92 (1995): 53–74; Robinson, Jenefer, Emotion: Biological fact or social construction?, in Richard C. Solomon, ed., Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 28-43.] 

BARRETT AND RUSSELL [Constructivism; Circumplex model of affect; Prototype Theory; Minimal Core Affect Theory; Anti-Universalism]

Recently the most prominent defenders of constructivism have been Lisa Barrett, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017), and James Russell. They have performed various experiments which they claim show that there are no universal features of emotions whether at the physiological or facial expression level. That is there is no one to one correspondence between the basic emotions of anger, fear, happiness, sadness, etc. with physiological, expressive, or behavioral responses. Hence the latent variable model of basic emotion theory wherein there are discrete emotions and their properties should be replaced with an emergent variable model wherein there are overlapping emotion components and emotions do not cause autonomic changes and present and learned actions and facial expressions but emerge from them due to social construction. 

Emotions instead are assembled out of very basic core affects, simple non-reflective feelings of positive or negative valence (pleasure or pain) and level (energized or deenergized state) combined with social processes. This allows emotions to be put together in flexible and various ways by different individuals and societies. For example, being afraid involves categorizing a core affective state of high arousal and high displeasure with the fear label and being happy involves categorizing core affect of high arousal with high pleasure as happiness [Conceptual Act View]. Emotions then emerge as one categorizes one’s bodily sensations in light of one’s environment and culture. They are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that environment.

[N.B. Barrett and Russell are right to criticize some of the methods of localizing emotions in discrete brain centers or as attached to universal physiological reactions. However, they seem to overemphasize the cultural aspect and not appreciate the biological or cognitive aspects of emotions enough.]

[See Russell, James A., A Circumplex Model of Affect, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, no. 6 (1980): 1161–1178; Fehr, Beverley, and Russell, James A.  Concept of Emotion Viewed from a Prototype Perspective. Journal of Experimental Psychology 113 (1984): 464–486; Russell, James A., and Fehr, B. Relativity in the perception of emotion in facial expressions. Journal of Experimental Psychology 116, no. 3 (1987): 223–237; Russell, James A., Culture and the categorization of emotions, Psychological Bulletin 110 (1991): 426–450; Russell, James A., Is There Universal Recognition of Emotion from Facial Expressions? A Review of the Cross-Cultural Studies, Psychological Bulletin 115 (1994): 102–141; Russell, J. A., and Carroll, J. M., On the bipolarity of positive and negative affect. Psychological Bulletin 125 (1999): 3–30; Russell, James. Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion. Psychological Review 110 (2003): 145–172; Yik, M., Russell, J.A., and Steiger, J.H. A 12-Point Circumplex Structure of Core Affect, Emotion 11, no. 4 (2011): 705-731; Russell, James A., From a Psychological Constructionist Perspective, in Categorical Versus Dimensional Models of Affect: A Seminar on the Theories of Panksepp and Russell, ed. Peter Zachar and Ralph D. Ellis (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins, 2012), 79–118; Zachar, Peter and Ralph D. Ellis, eds., Categorical Versus Dimensional Models of Affect: A Seminar on the Theories of Panksepp and Russell (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins, 2012).] 

[See Russell, James A., and Lisa F. Barrett, Core affect, prototypical emotional episodes, and other things called emotion: dissecting the elephant. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76, no. 5 (1999): 805–819; Barrett, Lisa Feldman, Feeling is Perceiving: Core Affect and Conceptualization in the Experience of Emotion, in Lisa Feldman Barrett, Paula M. Niedenthal, and Piotr Winkielman, eds., Emotion and Consciousness (New York: Guilford Press, 2005), 255–284; Barrett, Lisa F., Are Emotions Natural Kinds?, Perspectives on Psychological Science 1 (2006): 28–58; Barrett, Lisa F., Solving the emotion paradox: Categorization and the experience of emotion. Personality and Social Psychology Review 10, no. 1 (2006): 20–46; Barrett, Lisa F., Mesquita, B., Ochsner, K.N., Gross, J.J, The experience of emotion. Annual Review of Psychology 58 (2007): 373–403; Lindquist, K.A., and Barrett, Lisa F., Constructing emotion: the experience of fear as a conceptual act, Psychological Science 19, no. 9 (2008): 898-903; Wilson-Mendenhall, Christine D., Lisa Feldman Barrett, W. Kyle Simmons, and Lawrence W. Barsalou, Grounding Emotion in Situated Conceptualization, Neuropsychologia49, no. 5 (2011): 1105–1127; Lindquist, Kristen, Tor D. Wager, Hedy Kober, Eliza Bliss-Moreau, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review, Behavioral and Brain Science 35, no. 3 (2012): 121-143; Barrett, Lisa F. Psychological Construction: The Darwinian Approach to the Science of Emotion, Emotion Review 5, no. 4 (2013): 379–389; Barrett, Lisa F., Ten Common Misconceptions about the Psychological Construction of Emotion, in Barrett, Lisa Feldman and James A. Russell, eds., The Psychological Construction of Emotion (New York: Guilford Press, 2015), 45-79; Barrett, Lisa Feldman and Ajay Bhaskar Satpute, Large-Scale Brain Networks in Affective and Social Neuroscience: Towards an Integrative Architecture of the Human Brain, Current Opinion in Neurobiology 23, no. 3 (2013): 361–372; Clark-Polner, Elizabeth, Timothy D. Johnson, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, Multivoxel Pattern Analysis Does Not Provide Evidence to Support the Existence of Basic Emotions, Cerebral Cortex 27, no. 3 (2016): 1944–1948; Barrett, Lisa Feldman, The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 12 (2017): 1-23; Berent I, Feldman, Barrett, Lisa F., and Platt, M., Essentialist Biases in Reasoning About Emotions, Fronters of Psychology 11 (2020): e562666.]