Variety is the spice of life: A psychological construction approach to understanding variability in emotion

Barrett, Lisa Feldman

doi:10.1080/02699930902985894

Cited by 275 publications

(258 citation statements)

References 117 publications

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“…It consists of continuous cycles of bodily responses, changes in representations of body states, consciousness of feelings likely to trigger new embodied responses and so on. Experimental psychologists Barrett (2009) and Russell (2003) equally suggest a contingent, plastic and flexible, constructive feedback process, as core affects (core embodied, psycho-physiological states) are simultaneously perceived, organized, categorized, labelled and communicated becoming socially recognizable 'emotions'. Any initial bodily hit, in other words, is always already occurring within an ongoing stream of meaning-making or semiosis.…”

Section: Affect and Discourse -The Emergence Of An Impassementioning

confidence: 99%

Affect and discourse – What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice

2013

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The recent 'turn to affect' in social and cultural research has been built on the notion of affect as a kind of excess. Affect is contrasted with the discursive and the cognitive, and distinguished from 'domesticated' emotion. The focus is on the presumed direct hit of events on bodies and on what is sensed rather than known. This formulation in combination with the need for new methods has disconnected discourse studies from research on affect. In common with other recent critics, I argue that the formulation of affect as an excess is unsustainable. I focus here, however, on the methodological consequences. The objective of affect research is to produce textured, lively analyses of multiple modes of engagement and to understand the working of power through patterns of assemblage. Intriguingly, fine-grain studies of discursive practice might realize these aims more effectively than some new, 'non-representational' methodological approaches. I contrast one example of non-representational empirical investigation with an example of discursive research on normative episodic sequences. My general aim is to build a more productive dialogue between rich traditions in discourse studies and new lines of research on affect and emotion.

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Section: Affect and Discourse -The Emergence Of An Impassementioning

confidence: 99%

Affect and discourse – What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice

2013

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“…Finding that they were more consistent than nonmusicians in using structural cues to respond accords well with this hypothesis. Barrett and colleagues (Barrett, 2006(Barrett, , 2009Lindquist & Barrett, 2010) have suggested that individual differences in emotional responses and experience might reflect differences in the granularity of emotion concepts, which could be trained. According to this theoretical framework, individuals with higher emotional granularity are more precise, specific, and differentiated in categorizing affective states, while those with low granularity experience and describe emotions in a more global and less differentiated way.…”

Section: Musical Expertise and Emotion Recognition In Musicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age and Musical Expertise Influence Emotion Recognition in Music

Castro

Lima

2014

Music Perception

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WE INVESTIGATED HOW AGE AND MUSICAL EXPERTISE influence emotion recognition in music. Musically trained and untrained participants from two age cohorts, young and middle-aged adults (N ¼ 80), were presented with music excerpts expressing happiness, peacefulness, sadness, and fear/threat. Participants rated how much each excerpt expressed the four emotions on 10-point scales. The intended emotions were consistently perceived, but responses varied across groups. Advancing age was associated with selective decrements in the recognition of sadness and fear/threat, a finding consistent with previous research (Lima & Castro, 2011a); the recognition of happiness and peacefulness remained stable. Years of music training were associated with enhanced recognition accuracy. These effects were independent of domain-general cognitive abilities and personality traits, but they were echoed in differences in how efficiently music structural cues (e.g., tempo, mode) were relied upon. Thus, age and musical expertise are experiential factors explaining individual variability in emotion recognition in music.

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“…Social emotions, which from the outset were constructed by cultural traditions, became more varied and context-dependent. For modern humans, E. F. Barrett and her colleagues have convincingly argued that even emotion-words such as 'afraid' or 'angry' act as 'place holders', categorizing and crystallizing the fuzzy feelings associated with particular behaviours [63][64][65].…”

Section: How Language Changed Human Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The co-evolution of language and emotions

Jablonka

Ginsburg

Dor

2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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We argue that language evolution started like the evolution of reading and writing, through cultural evolutionary processes. Genuinely new behavioural patterns emerged from collective exploratory processes that individuals could learn because of their brain plasticity. Those cultural-linguistic innovative practices that were consistently socially and culturally selected drove a process of genetic accommodation of both general and language-specific aspects of cognition. We focus on the affective facet of this culture-driven cognitive evolution, and argue that the evolution of human emotions coevolved with that of language. We suggest that complex tool manufacture and alloparenting played an important role in the evolution of emotions, by leading to increased executive control and intersubjective sensitivity. This process, which can be interpreted as a special case of self-domestication, culminated in the construction of human-specific social emotions, which facilitated informationsharing. Once in place, language enhanced the inhibitory control of emotions, enabled the development of novel emotions and emotional capacities, and led to a human mentality that departs in fundamental ways from that of other apes. We end by suggesting experimental approaches that can help in evaluating some of these proposals and hence lead to better understanding of the evolutionary biology of language and emotions.

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Variety is the spice of life: A psychological construction approach to understanding variability in emotion

Cited by 275 publications

References 117 publications

Affect and discourse – What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice

Affect and discourse – What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice

Age and Musical Expertise Influence Emotion Recognition in Music

The co-evolution of language and emotions

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