What is Social in a Social-Constructionist View on Emotion?

Boiger and Mesquita offer a broad spectrum of the many ways in which emotions are shaped by and shape social interactions and relationships, ranging from in-the-moment interactions to cultural models of self and relationships. In portraying the different social levels of analysis, they highlight the genuine social nature of emotions, giving credit to emotions as truly relational phenomena (which emotion research so often fails to capture; e.g., Fischer & van Kleef, 2010). Moreover, rather than constructing emotions as one-shot experiences, Boiger and Mesquita compellingly argue for conceiving emotions as dynamic processes and relational patterns.

While Boiger and Mesquita set the stage for a truly social account of emotions, the scope of their (social) constructionist approach risks being too all-inclusive, too all-encompassing, and obscuring the different meanings of “social” in the paradigms they include. For example, interactions shaped by the social anxiety of an interaction partner certainly make anxiety a social experience, but do not implicate a social-constructionist concept of anxiety. A social-constructionist view would imply that anxiety is understood, for example, as enacting a transient social role (Averill, 1980) or as an emotional performance (Gergen, 2009), the elements of which are socially constituted. Similarly, the prevalence of positive or negative affect likely shapes relationships and partly determines their fate—but this does not mean that the affective experiences are understood as being socially constructed.

Certainly, there is no privileged reading of social constructionism, and, in fact, approaches subsumed under this heading form a rather loose collection of perspectives, most notably differing in whether they presume emotions to be of genuine social origin or to be merely shaped by culture (Turner, 2009). But they do share the basic assumption that culture specifies how to appraise, feel, and act when experiencing—or performing—a certain emotion. Such a view should be distinguished from social accounts of emotions that posit that emotions are elicited, reacted upon, negotiated, talked about, or taught within social contexts, thus constructing or shaping interactions and relationships. In fact, the notion of the social nature of emotions is to some extent mute to the concept of emotion adopted. For example, appraisal theories and psychological construction models of emotion can easily account for relational phenomena.

Distinguishing between the different conceptualizations of emotions as social phenomena is essential because of their theoretical and empirical implications. To illustrate, what knowledge about emotions do we gain by analyzing rapid affective changes due to mutual interactions or by analyzing emotions as the enactment of social roles? And what are the predictions derived from the different perspectives and the possible empirical paradigms that are applied to test them? For example, Boiger and Mesquita outline a promising line of research on how affective relationship dynamics can be studied in situ (however fleeting the emotional experiences and the rapidly changing affective exchanges may be), given the appropriate methodological tools.

But how do we study emotions from a social-constructionist viewpoint at a microanalytical level that is favored in psychological research on emotions, formulating assumptions that can be tested (rather than providing post hoc descriptions and anecdotal evidence)? One particularly promising approach may be to focus on one of most prominent features of the social-constructionist approach, namely, that emotional behavior, deriving its features from ensuring the social functions it is meant to serve, is functional and therefore normative (Averill, 1980; Weber, 2004). In this view, the proper enactment of socially constituted emotional roles can be expected to be socially controlled and sanctioned if violated.

For example, one assumption derived from the presumed normative status of emotional behavior is that enacting the proper emotional behavior should be socially rewarded. Confirming this assumption, we showed that presumably normative anger-related behavior (i.e., voicing one’s anger to correct another persons’ wrong-doing; Averill, 1982) leads to a more positive evaluation of the actor’s personality, intelligence, and attractiveness than submissive behavior (Geisler, Wiedig-Allison, & Weber, 2009).

Another implication of the social-constructionist approach is that normative emotional behavior is more likely when it is subject to observation. In support of this assumption, we have recently shown in studies using the Ultimatum Game that participants were more likely to sanction unfair behavior—according to Averill (1982), an essential element of anger, understood as a transitory social role—when observed than when alone (Weber, Studtmann, & Reisenzein, 2012).

In short, while an essential part of a social level of analysis, the social constructionist view on emotions should be distinguished from other social accounts of emotions, specifying the features that are unique to this approach and the perspectives it offers that other approaches fail to offer. However, in order to find its place in a highly competitive theoretical and empirical environment in which alternative models of emotion abound, the social-constructionist approach will prevail only with powerful experimental paradigms at its side.