The Emotional Self

A Sociocultural Exploration

Deborah Lupton

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9780761956020, 9780761956013
• eBook ISBN: 9781446237939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

`This addition to a growing number of texts which approach emotions and emotionality from a social constructionist perspective is well written, scholarly, accessible and interesting....

There is both breadth and depth to this work.? - Feminism and Psychology

This broad-ranging and accessible book brings together social and cultural theory with original empirical research into the nature of the emotional self in contemporary western societies.

The emphasis of the analysis is on the emotional self as a dynamic project that is continually shaped and reshaped via discourse, embodied sensations, memory, personal biography and interactions with others and objects. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Deborah Lupton draws on a number of sociocultural approaches that adopt a post-structuralist perspective. She strongly emphasizes language and discourse as they construct and express concepts of the self and the emotions, whilst also acknowledging the sensual, embodied and unconscious dimensions of emotional experience.

1

Thinking Through Emotion: Theoretical Perspectives

This chapter discusses some of the major ways in which the emotions have been conceptualized and researched in the humanities and social sciences, serving in part to locate the theoretical position from which I have undertaken my own research. Any attempt to review approaches to the emotions is bedevilled by a certain lack of clarity and conceptual confusion in the literature. Similar approaches may be given different names in psychology compared with sociology or anthropology, for example, and even within these disciplines there is a lack of consensus about how to label or categorize the various approaches. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify two broad tendencies in the humanities and social scientific literature. For my purposes here I have termed these the ‘emotions as inherent’ and the ‘emotions as socially constructed’ perspectives respectively. I emphasize, however, that the approaches I have grouped under these rubrics represent more of a continuum rather than two discrete categories, and that there is a significant degree of overlap between them.

The chapter begins with a discussion of the theories and research within these two perspectives. More time is spent on describing the social constructionist position and its various versions because it is this approach that underpins the rest of the discussion in this book. As I note, however, it is important not to take too relativistic an approach to the emotions, neglecting their sensual, embodied nature. The chapter ends with an analysis of how the emotional self is always also an embodied self, for it is inevitably through the body that we construct, live and make sense of emotion.

Emotions as Inherent

For exponents of what Bedford (1986: 15) has termed ‘the traditional theory of the emotions’, an emotion is an internal feeling, or an experience involving such a feeling. While it is generally acknowledged that social and cultural features may shape the expression of emotions in various ways, the belief is maintained that at the centre of the emotional self there is a set of basic emotions with which all humans are born. Even though it may be accepted that the expression of these emotions may differ from society to society, this does not detract from the fact that such emotions are always pre-existing. Emotional states are therefore located within the individual. They are genetically inscribed, and thus are inherited rather than learnt. Research from this perspective, which is sometimes referred to as the ‘positivist’, the ‘essentialist’ and the ‘organismic’ as well as the ‘traditional’ approach, is generally directed towards such tasks as identifying the anatomical or genetic basis for the emotions, showing how emotions are linked to bodily changes, seeking to explain the function served by inherent emotions in human survival and social interaction or identifying which emotions are common to all human groups.

Some exponents of the ‘inherent’ perspective view emotional states as physiological responses to a given set of stimuli: for example, the ‘flight or fight’ response to a fearful situation. An emotion, in this view, is equivalent to the embodied sensation or a collection of sensations, such as flushes, visceral clutches, raising of the hair on the neck, that occur as a response to a stimulus. They argue that one becomes angry, for example, in response to an anger-provoking situation, and this feeling of anger generates physical sensations which enables one to deal with the situation to protect oneself. There is the suggestion in much writing within this perspective that the physical sensations provoked by an emotion, as ‘instinctive reflexes’, are relatively uncontrollable, although the extent to which they are subsequently acted upon may be mediated by conscious will. As the writer of a medical encyclopaedia put it:

Civilization demands self-control, and self-control is learning not to act as emotion dictates. Even this is more than anyone can manage at all times, and reflex physical responses to emotion can hardly be controlled at all. A man can more or less learn not to punch someone on the nose whenever he is angry, but he cannot stop his pulse from racing, or a host of internal adjustments of which he is not even aware. (Wingate, 1988: 166)

As this quotation suggests, for many advocates of the ‘emotions as inherent’ perspective, the emotions are viewed as part of the animalistic legacy in human development, subject less to thought and reason than to impulse. Charles Darwin’s theory of emotions, which viewed them as common to both animals and humans and based upon primitive states of physiological arousal involving innate instinctual drives, is highly influential to this conceptualization. Darwin published a book entitled The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, in which he sought to establish a continuity of emotional expressions, as represented physically, from lower animals to humans. He theorized that the emotions were central to survival, by constituting reactions to threats and dangers in the immediate environment, as well as signalling future actions or intentions.

The neurophysiological approach takes up this individualistic and biological perspective by focusing its attention at the micro-level of human anatomy. Neurophysiological models of emotion have been very dominant in psychological research, underpinning the efforts of psychologists since the foundation of the discipline to achieve recognition as a science by engaging in research involving observable phenomena (Gergen, 1995). Research from within this approach focuses on brain functioning, with emphasis placed on identifying the biological factors that relate perception to physiological response in humans, often by using animal models (such as rats or cats). Specific parts of the brain are identified as the sources of different types of emotion: the limbic system for ‘primitive’ or ‘instinctive’ emotions (such as fear or disgust), the frontal cortex for ‘thinking’ emotions (or those that are seen to be mediated by experience and cultural understandings, such as jealousy or embarrassment). For example, research has been carried out comparing male and female brains using imaging techniques in the attempt to identify differences between men’s and women’s brain function and the relationship of such anatomical features to gender differences in emotional expression (Douglas, 1996). Other research has attempted to discover how brain lesions or other damage of parts of the brain might affect emotional expression. Attention is also paid in neurological research to identifying the pathways by which the chemicals involved in transmitting impulses to various parts of the brain work to incite emotional response (see several of the chapters in Strongman (1992) for examples of this type of research).

Recent writings in the field of what has been called ‘evolutionary psychology’ have reformulated the Darwinian emphasis on the role played by emotion in human survival. It is suggested in this literature that the evolution of humans via natural selection favoured genotypes that supposedly fostered social co-operation and reciprocal altruistic tendencies, including the propensity for affection, gratitude and trust. It is argued that unpleasant emotions, such as anxiety or anger, also serve to enhance survival. Fear and its associated ‘flight’ behaviour, for example, are seen to act to separate the individual from the source of danger, while anger is viewed as destroying a barrier to the satisfaction of a need (Plutchik, 1982: 546). Emotions are thus portrayed as functional, ‘total body reactions to the various survival-related problems created by the environment’ (1982: 548).

Some theorists adopting this approach have attempted to systematize the emotions. Plutchik (1982), for instance, attempts what he terms a ‘psychoevolutionary structural’ theory of emotion. He defines an emotion as ‘an inferred complex sequence of reactions to a stimulus’, including ‘cognitive evaluations, subjective changes, autonomic and neural arousal, impulses to action, and behavior designed to have an effect upon the stimulus that initiated the complex sequence’ (1982: 551). Plutchik suggests that ‘there are eight basic adaptive reactions which are the prototypes, singly or in combination, of all emotions’, including incorporation (of food or new stimuli), rejection (the expelling of something seen to be harmful), protection, destruction, reproduction, reintegration (response to the loss of something deemed to be important), orientation and exploration. He argues that these are all adaptive behavioural patterns related to survival, and that there is a set of ‘primary’ emotions which correspond to these patterns: ecstasy, vigilance, adoration, terror, amazement, grief, loathing, rage, anger, annoyance, disgust, boredom, sadness, pensiveness, surprise, distraction, fear and apprehension.

Appraisal and Emotion: Cognitive Theory

Cognitive theories of emotions, found mostly among social and behavioural psychologists and philosophers, are less biologically essentialist than several other ‘inherent’ approaches. While exponents of this approach maintain the conviction that there are some emotions that are universal to all humans, and that emotions have their basis in physiology, they have sought to identify the extent to which emotional behaviour is mediated through judgement and assessment of the context. From the cognitive approach it is argued that humans make judgements in relation to the physical sensations they feel when deciding what emotional state they are in. This approach builds on the writings of the early psychologist William James in his The Principles of Psychology, first published in 1890. James claimed that emotion begins with an initial bodily sensation (or set of sensations) in response to an event which is evaluated cognitively and labelled as a particular emotion: ‘we feel sorry because we cry, afraid because we tremble’ (James, quoted in Gergen, 1995: 8). From this perspective, therefore, the physical response is seen to precede the emotion and is interpreted in certain ways based on judgement of the situation. This is clearly a different approach from those perspectives I described above, which generally begin with the premise that emotion causes or is equivalent to physical sensation.

Cognitive theorists are thus interested in the interrelationship between bodily response, context and the individual’s recognition of an emotion. They focus in particular on the ways in which environmental conditions are appraised, leading to an emotional reaction, but may also be regulated (controlled or voluntarily enhanced) in response to individual experience and the sociocultural system of norms about emotional expression in which an individual is located. This process of appraisal is represented as being related to the individual’s understandings of how events might affect her or his well-being. Appraisal, therefore, may be viewed as a product of socialization, for how a situation is appraised by an individual from one culture may differ from the appraisal given by another individual from a different culture. The physiological responses that are produced in response to the appraisal, however, are generally regarded as fixed and universal across cultures and times: it is the interpretations of the context that are variable.

Like the psychoevolutionary perspective, the cognitive approach tends to see emotions as functional, as coping responses. Mesquita and Frijda, for example, describe appraisal processes in functional terms as ‘a series of checks with respect to a set of dimensions such as positive or negative valence, causation by someone else or the self, blameworthiness, outcome uncertainty, controllability, and modifiability. A series of such checks describes the emotional significance of an event’ (1992:180). They go on to state how various emotions prepare individuals for ‘action’, impelling them to respond in certain ways to the situation: for instance, the readiness to protect oneself from danger as part of the experience of fear.

Folkman and Lazarus (1988: 310) give the examples of anger, which they see as usually including an appraisal of a harm or a threat in the immediate environment, and happiness, which they describe as including an appraisal that ‘a particular person-environment condition is beneficial’. They define two types of cognitive appraisal, the primary form involving the question ‘What do I have at stake in this encounter?’, contributing to the quality and intensity of emotional response, and the secondary form of appraisal taking the form of the question ‘What can I do?’. According to Folkman and Lazarus, the answer to the second question influences the kinds of coping strategy that will be used to deal with the demands of the situation. Problem-focused forms of coping will be more likely to be used if the situation is appraised as amenable to change, while emotion-focused forms of coping are more likely to be used if the outcome is appraised as unchangeable (Folkman and Lazarus, 1988: 310).

Most models of emotion proposed by cognitive theorists still tend to treat emotion as states of physiological arousal. While the cognitive approach does take into account social norms and contexts around emotional states, it has been criticized for drawing too artificial a distinction between emotion and thought, or between a feeling or bodily sensation and the accompanying interpretation of that feeling or sensation as ‘an emotion’. There is therefore a tendency in these accounts for the ‘private’, individual world of sensation to be contrasted with the ‘external’ world of observation, intellect and calculation (Jaggar, 1989: 149–50). The cognitive approach may also be criticized for holding too linear and rationalistic a perspective on how emotions are experienced. The ways that the emotions are described in some of this literature represents them as somewhat sterile entities, the outcomes of a logical sequence of information processing such as is performed by computers. There is little sense given of the details of the sociocultural context in which the meanings of emotions are developed, including such aspects as power relations, historical conditions or individuals’ membership of social groups. Rather, emotion is treated dominantly as the experience of a self-interested, atomistic individual.

Emotions as Sociocultural Constructions

The other major approach to emotions I have identified in the humanities and social sciences adopts a social constructionist perspective. To describe emotion as socially constructed means that it is always experienced, understood and named via social and cultural processes. Social constructionists, therefore, tend to view the emotions to a greater or lesser degree as learnt rather than inherited behaviours or responses. At a general level, social constructionists tend to be interested in identifying and tracing the ways in which norms and expectations about the emotions are generated, reproduced and operate in specific sociocultural settings, and the implications for selfhood and social relations of emotional experience and expression.

Within the perspective offered by social constructionist approaches to the emotions, however, there are a number of different foci and inflections. The ‘weak’, or less relativistic thesis of social constructionism concedes that there is a limited range of ‘natural emotion responses’ that are biologically given and thus exist independently of sociocultural influences and learning (Armon-Jones, 1986: 38). Exponents of the ‘weak’ thesis, therefore, although taking more of an interest in the social and cultural aspects of experiences and understandings of the emotions than many of the researchers I have grouped under the ‘emotions as inherent’ perspective, have some things in common with these researchers (and this is where the distinction between the two tends to blur).

One exponent of the ‘weak’ thesis is the sociologist Theodore Kemper. He contends that the emotions are ‘rooted in our evolutionary nature’ which is also ‘ineluctably social’ and goes on to assert that ‘there are no emotions that are purely internal or context-free’ (1991: 301). In his own research, Kemper (1987) has identified four physiologically grounded ‘primary’ emotions: fear, anger, depression and satisfaction/happiness. He sees these emotions as universal to all humans, as manifested very early in human development and as having survival value, emerging from evolutionary processes. Kemper (1987) describes such emotions as guilt, shame, pride, gratitude, love and nostalgia as ‘secondary’ emotions which are acquired through ‘socializing agents’. He claims that the ‘primary’ emotions are altered in some ways through ‘socializing agents’ to become ‘secondary emotions’. Kemper views guilt, therefore, as a form of ‘socialized’ fear (of punishment for inappropriate behaviour), while shame is anger (with the self) which has been ‘socialized’ and pride is ‘socialized’ satisfaction.

The ‘strong’ thesis of the social constructionist approach is that emotion is an irreducibly sociocultural product, wholly learnt and constructed through acculturation. For exponents of the ‘strong’ thesis, emotional states are viewed as purely contextual and cannot be reified as separate entities: they are not inherent or pre-existing, waiting to be studied by the researcher. They claim that the words we use to label a set of phenomena such as internal states, thoughts and behaviours as an ‘emotion’ are generally selected in relation to a particular situation and are often used to rationalize reasons and actions. It is in bringing together these understandings, feelings and behaviours with the logic of situation and rationale that the sense of which emotion is involved begins to emerge (Griffiths, 1995: 100). Emotion is thus viewed as an intersubjective rather than an individual phenomenon, constituted in the relations between people.

Exponents of this perspective see emotions as self-reflexive, involving active perception, identification and management on the part of individuals, and indeed, as created through this reflexiveness. Lutz describes emotions as ‘culturally constructed judgments, that is, as aspects of cultural meaning systems people use in attempting to understand the situations in which they find themselves’ (1985: 65). As such, emotions are viewed as dynamic, changeable according to the historical, social and political contexts in which they are generated, reproduced and expressed. Attention is paid to the ways in which emotional phenomena are given different meanings which have wider social and political implications.

One of the most prolific exponents of the ‘strong’ social constructionist approach is the social psychologist Rom Harré, who has asserted that ‘there is no such thing as “an emotion”. There are only various ways of acting and feeling emotionally, of displaying one’s judgements, attitudes and opinions in an appropriate bodily way’ (1991: 142; see also Harré, 1986). He suggests, therefore, that an emotion is not an entity unto itself, separate from the bodily experience and expression of the emotion. Harré emphasizes the moral meanings of emotions. In relation to the emotion of ‘anger’, for example, he contends that:

By reifying ‘anger’, we can be tempted into the mistake of thinking that anger is something inside a person exercising its invisible and inaudible influence on what we do. But to be angry is to have taken on the angry role on a particular occasion as the expression of a moral position. This role may involve the feeling of appropriate feelings as well as indulging in suitable public conduct. The bodily feeling is often the somatic expression to oneself of the taking of a moral standpoint. (Harré, 1991: 142–3)

There is also an implication of self-assessment in this description. That is, Harré suggests that individuals do not ‘spontaneously’ feel and express an emotion. One ‘does’ an emotion instead of ‘having’ an emotion.

Cultural anthropologists have played an integral role in the ‘strong’ social constructionist project by conducting cross-cultural comparisons of emotional expression and understanding, with an emphasis on small-scale, non-western cultures. Such research is directed at demonstrating the lack of universality of emotions across cultures (see Heelas (1986) for a comprehensive review of this literature). It therefore points to the fragile nature of the category of ‘emotion’ by emphasizing that emotions are understood in various ways in different cultural milieux: ‘The prevalent assumption that the emotions are invariant across cultures is replaced here with the question of how one cultural discourse on emotion may be translated into another’ (Lutz, 1988: 5). Lutz (1988) notes that for anthropologists studying cultures other than their own, the difficulty of attempting to identify and understand the emotional lives of people in that ‘strange’ culture is related to the difficulty of understanding their moral system. If it is assumed that the expression of emotion is not simply a matter of drawing from a common pool of emotions shared by all humans, as the ‘inherent’ approach would have it, then the research question becomes oriented to identifying cultural views and expressions of ‘that which is real and good and proper’ (Lutz, 1988: 8).

Social historians of emotion have taken a similar approach, but have directed their attention towards the ways in which conventions around emotions have changed over different historical periods within rather than across cultures. For instance, Stearns (1995) has shown how grief has undergone several reformulations in Anglo-American societies in the past two centur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Thinking Through Emotion: Theoretical Perspectives
• 2 Recounting Emotion: Everyday Discourses
• 3 Emotions, Bodies, Selves
• 4 The ‘Emotional Woman’ and the ‘Unemotional Man’
• 5 Emotions, Things and Places
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Sociodemographic Details of the Interview Study Participants
• References
• Index