On the kinds of things that are emotions: A reply to Scherer, and Fischer and Frijda

Abstract

I am honored that such distinguished emotion researchers as Professor Scherer, and Professors Fischer and Frijda have offered their comments on my paper “The social constitution of emotion.” I am also gratified that they acknowledge the main thesis of the paper, namely that in whatever respects some emotions may be said to be socially constituted, they are not constituted by the employment-by actor or observer-of socially learned and negotiated emotion labels. I thought this important to stress since too many psychologists do seem inclined to reject or neglect social analyses of emotion (and of other psychological phenomena) just because they associate them with the sort of epistemological relativism advocated by theorists such as Ken Gergen. My aim was to establish that the legitimate respects in which some emotions may be said to be socially constituted poses no threat to the objectivity of psychological theories of emotion. Professors Fischer and Frijda are concerned that I may be jousting with windmills. My paper was primarily directed against the social constructionist analysis of emotion offered by Gergen and his disciples. I do not know how representative his position is with respect to other social constructionist theorists and emotion researchers, but it does appear to be taken seriously in many quarters. Fischer and Frijda regret my neglect of “weak”,or “realist” constructionist views, such as those offered by Harre, Armon-Jones, and Coulter, and Scherer regrets my neglect of the work of those who advance cognitive appraisai theories of emotion, some of whom recognize the social origins of such appraisals. Although I consider the work of such theorists to be of direct relevance to the issues discussed in the paper, it frequently remains ambiguous with respect to the role of the cognitive labeling of emotions. Thus I neither felt comfortable citing such theorists in support of my own position, or as further exemplars of the type of position advanced by Gergen. Indeed it was precisely because I found many social and cognitive theories of emotion highly ambiguous with respect to the role of cognitive labeling that I felt obliged to author a paper arguing that cognitive labeling plays no constitutive role with respect to emotions, including those emotions that may be said to be socially constituted. Scherer is, however, correct to chide me for a crucial ambiguity of my own, with respect to the closing sentences of the paper, where it is claimed that “many