Meaning and the mediation of emotional experience: Placing mediational meaning at the center of psychological processes

Abstract

This paper outlines a framework to understand and further study how meaning mediates psychological processes. Central to this paper is the concept of mediational meaning: a representation of “me in the world,” socially distributed as a cultural artifact, that “encodes” emotion and motivates social activity. It is suggested that the emotional encoding of mediational meaning can be understood through the study of its structure, which is conceptualized on two levels: a conceptual level, called the “view,” and a narrative level, called the “narrative structure.” This paper proposes an operationalization of both structural levels and hypothesizes specific relationships between certain structural aspects of mediational meaning and certain dimensions of emotional experience: valence, action readiness, and some aspects of the quale.