Abstract
In Critical Approaches to the Psychology of Emotion, Simone Belli maps and synthesises diverse critical perspectives in research on emotions that challenge mainstream psychology. The book is divided into five chapters, each of them dealing with one critical turn in the psychology of emotion: (1) Emotions and language: The discursive turn; (2) Emotional affordance: The socio-material turn; (3) The gamification of emotions: The digital turn; (4) Between the collectivity of emotions and emotional contagion: The social turn; and (5) Working with emotions: The management turn. The central thesis of the book stems from the social constructionist paradigm: since our emotions are discursively and socially constructed, the study of emotions has to take account of the social and cultural contexts in which they occur. In other words, moving away from any positivist discipline such as neuroscience or basic psychology, a critical social psychology of emotion must be interdisciplinary, that is, it must bring psychology and other disciplines of the social sciences together.
In the first chapter (the discursive turn), Belli looks through the works of different authors that tackle the close bond between emotions and language. In this view, emotions are internalised through intersubjective discursive practices, through communication which in turn is based on verbal and nonverbal language. Belli also draws on the relationship between performance and discourse to shed light on the constantly evolving, iterative dimension of emotions that makes them emerge, change, and eventually disappear from the discursive arena. In the second chapter (the socio-material turn), Belli builds upon the concept of affordance, key to understanding how materiality affects the practice of the users, while introducing the term “emotional affordance” to better grasp how technological environments shape the emotions that a subject can experience. In this respect, the final aim here is to produce more nuanced theories at the intersection of the social and the technological. In the third chapter (the digital turn), the focus is on the transformations that online communication and digital social networks have brought to the way we interact, express our emotions, and build new types of social relationship since the beginning of this century. In the fourth chapter (the social turn), the author examines collective emotions and emotional contagion, which are both structurally complex and socially distributed, and may happen in all spheres of social life and at different levels, especially in periods of social change or crisis, when there is a more pressing need to share experiences. Collective emotions and emotional contagion are subject to interpersonal cognitive processes, such as social comparison, enabling intersubjective connection and reinforcing collective identity.
In the fifth and last chapter (the management turn), Belli deals with the role of emotions in organisational and professional contexts, with particular emphasis on emotional management in academia and research settings, a subject matter that the author has studied in depth in recent times (López Carrasco & Belli, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c; Lorca & Belli, 2023). In contemporary science, collaboration is both a fundamental requirement and a complex endeavour that demands a considerable amount of emotional work from researchers themselves. Such emotional work entails a combination of various emotional strategies that move back and forth between the individual and the group dimension so as to adjust professional interactions, and it can be fostered or hindered by leadership positions. Thus, scientific leaders’ emotional work consists of combining two leadership styles—ego-centred and group-centred—to strike a balance between individual needs and collective interests and, hopefully, to make the best of their research groups while ensuring the well-being of team members (López Carrasco & Belli, 2023a; Lorca & Belli, 2023).
Overall, this book provides a very worthwhile review of influential investigations and critical perspectives to the psychology of emotion. Moreover, Belli identifies some emerging theoretical trends and methodological challenges for the present and the near future of research in the field of psychology of emotion, especially with respect to emotion analysis in digital environments. In line with the interdisciplinary spirit that inspires Critical Approaches to the Psychology of Emotion, this is essential reading not only for students, scholars, and practitioners of social psychology, but also for researchers from other related disciplines such as sociology, sociolinguistics, anthropology, and philosophy.
