Comment: Constructionisms?

Biological Constructionism (BC)

BC is the thesis that emotions are “modes of functioning, shaped by natural selection [emphasis added]” (Nesse & Ellsworth, 2009, p. 129). Thus, for all forms of BC, natural selection is crucially responsible for the particular shape of discrete emotions.

Strong Biological Constructionism (SBC)

SBC asserts that some emotions (basic emotions) are some sorts of “modules,” where a module is understood as an adaptive computational mechanism which is elicited by automatic appraisals and which generates optimal behavioral and physiological responses in an automatic and mandatory fashion.

Basic emotions theories, such as Ekman’s (1999; see also Levenson, 2011), are of the SBC variety. According to Ekman, basic emotions (anger, fear, disgust, etc.) are characterized by the following:

Distinctive (1) universal signals, (2) physiology, (3) universal antecedent events, (4) thoughts, memories, images (5) subjective experience, (6) appearance developmentally, as well as (7) quick onset, (8) brief duration, (9) unbidden occurrence, (10) automatic appraisal mechanism, tuned to: (11) distinctive appearance developmentally, (12) presence in other primates. (Ekman, 1999, p. 56)

Thus according to Ekman’s theory of basic emotions, emotion components (or at least their configurations; Levenson, 2011) are emotion-specific.

Two elements of the previous list deserve a comment in the context of our discussion. First, for advocates of SBC, basic emotions packages are underlain by distinct neural structures, circuits, or networks (Levenson, 2011; Panksepp & Watt, 2011), the existence of which could be revealed by selective patterns of breakdown. Second, our subjective experience is “largely constructed from the interoceptive and proprioceptive information that becomes available when emotions … produce changes in autonomic and somatic nervous system activity” (Levenson, 2011, p. 383).

Two predictions follow from the SBC (according to Scarantino, in press): (a) there should be coordinated packages of components with a one-to-one correspondence to anger, fear, happiness, etc. and (b) there should be neural networks with a one-to-one correspondence to anger, fear, happiness, etc.

Weak Biological Constructionism (WBC)

WBC is also evolutionary-inspired, but instead of rigid and invariable emotions, it is premised on the idea that emotions vary according to situational demands. Randolph Nesse could be seen as an advocate of that form of constructionism when he wrote that:

If different emotions correspond to different kinds of situations, different subtypes of fear may have been shaped to deal with several kinds of threats [emphasis added]. . . . Not only do the subtypes of fear correspond to the threats humans face, but many details of these subtypes can be analyzed as design features that protect against particular threats. (1990, p. 270)

Not only are discrete emotions that exist within a family of emotions distinct, but different emotions might also differ according to aspects of the situation responded to: “Far more useful than fixed patterns of response are patterns and regulatory mechanisms that adjust to the needs of the current environment” (Nesse, 1990, p. 280).

Inspired by a bottom–up evolutionary approach, LeDoux (2012) has recently proposed studying emotions from the point of view of survival circuits, an approach that led him to conclusions similar to Nesse’s. As LeDoux puts it,

there is no anger/aggression circuit in the present scheme. . . . [because] aggression is not a unitary state with a single neural representation [emphasis added]. Distinct forms of aggression (conspecific, defensive, and predatory aggression) might be more effectively segregated by the context in which the aggression occurs. (2012, p. 655)

As for neural circuitry, LeDoux does not see a problem with the fact that the same structures could be involved in different emotions. He writes, for instance, that “[t]he fact that the amygdala contributes to appetitive states as well as defense does not mean that the amygdala processes food- and threat-related cues in the same way” (2012, p. 658; for a similar conclusion, see Hamman, 2012, p. 462).

Psychological Constructionism (PC)

In its generic form, PC could be understood as endorsing two theses: (a) emotions are constructed from elements that are not specific to emotions (such as valence and perception) and (b) emotions are not modules, so variations in emotional expression, physiology, etcetera, of different tokens of a same type of emotion are the result of the fact that emotions are “events that are created in the mind of a perceiver to fit a certain situation” (Lindquist, 2013, p. 356; see also Russell, 2003).

Weak Psychological Constructionism (WPC)

According to advocates of WPC, such as James Russell (2003, p. 148), core affect (a combination of “the object-less dimensions of pleasure–displeasure [pleasure or valence] and activation–deactivation [arousal or energy]”) and the perception of the affective quality of an object or an event (the perception of an object or an event as having the property of being able to alter core affect, i.e., such as being scary, boring, etc.) are what count “alone or combined with information processing [like the attribution of a core affect to a particular cause] and behavioral planning [including affect regulation], … for all the myriad manifestations and influences called emotional” (Russell, 2003, p. 148).

One important element of WPC that distinguishes it from the stronger form of PC is the distinction between conscious experience and emotional meta-experience (Scarantino, in press). As Russell (2005) puts it, a person can experience fear without perceiving that they are having an experience of fear, so his claim “is not that emotional meta-experience is necessary to the occurrence of fear, but rather that when one has a subjective experience of fear, that experience is an emotional meta-experience … [the] emotional meta-experience does not produce the emotions they are experiences of [emphasis added]” (Russell, 2005, p. 35). To be more precise, one does not simply experience the discrete emotion of fear as such, one experiences a global core affect, as well as perceptual, cognitive, and behavioral processes. To experience these different experiences as fear, one has to gestalt this “constellation” of experiential elements in a particular way, which fits a particular script for fear. This gestalt is what produces emotional meta-experience, which is a form of “secondary consciousness.” Now, because “emotional meta-experiences rely on concepts that can vary historically, developmentally, culturally, and perhaps individually, [emphasis added] there exists a large number of categories of emotional experiences” (Russell, 2005, p. 35).

Strong Psychological Constructionism (SPC)

As was just explained, while WPC distinguishes between emotional experience (a form of primary consciousness) and meta-experience (a form of secondary experience), in SPC this difference collapses. For instance, according to Lindquist, the interpretative component is constitutive of the emotion (2013, p. 360), by which she means that “emotions emerge in consciousness when people categorize [emphasis added] ambiguous internal (i.e., bodily) and external (i.e., visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) sensations as instances of discrete emotion categories (e.g., anger)” (Lindquist, 2013, p. 360).

Not only does SPC endorse a radical view of experience, it also endorses a radical view of concepts (see Barrett & Lindquist, 2008). Instead of thinking of concepts as abstract and amodal structures, SPC sees concepts as both embodied and situated. For instance, the concept of anger is multimodal, including sensory, motivational, motor, and somato-sensory features typical of episodes of anger. It will also include information about situations in which anger is typically produced. Lindquist (2013) describes one way these representations are tied together:

Emotion categories might be acquired in childhood by bootstrapping situations and core affective feeling [emphasis added] to the words used by adult caregivers (e.g., when mom and dad tell Joey not to be “sad,” because of a broken toy, Joey learns that negative feelings following a loss are associated with a category “sadness” in his culture). (Lindquist, 2013, p. 362)

All these representations form a “simulator” which creates “on the fly” concepts adapted to particular instances of a category. For example, in some context, anger might include a strong visceral reaction, but not include it in other contexts. Situated conceptualizations of anger will include only properties that are contextually relevant.

Thus, because concepts are basic elements of emotional experience and because concepts are situated, emotional experience is also situated.

Most of the authors in this special section adopt SPC, and most of their proposals focus on describing how concepts should be understood. Lindquist (as we just saw) and Clore agree with the concept as embodied and situated. For instance, Clore writes:

Emotions are states that emerge when psychologically significant situations are represented in multiple modes at more or less the same time … the co-occurrence of multiple representations of the same evaluation of a psychological situation results in the emergence of an emotional state [emphasis added]. (Clore, & Ortony, 2013, p. 338)

For their part, Cunningham, Dunfield, and Stillman (2013) accept SPC but try to improve upon the notion of valence representation by introducing further complexity. Central to their iterative reprocessing (IR) model is the idea that “evaluative processing occurs on a continuum from relatively automatic to relatively reflective processing; additional reprocessing enables a stimulus to be constructed vis-à-vis [emphasis added] a wider range of contexts and considerations” (Cunningham & Zelazo, 2007, p. 97). The more elaborate the processing, the less automatic it is, the more the evaluation resulting from it is integrated with higher level (sometimes conscious) goals and motivations. One of the ways evaluation is changed in the function of reprocessing is, for example, by modifying the construal of the stimulus (by seeing a person not as a member of a social group, but as an individual).

It is these evaluative states, which might take several iterations to construct, that serve as the basis on which emotion is built:

On this view, a pattern of valence information regarding the past, the present, and the anticipated future prime our cognitive systems toward a particular emotional state … this information needs to be combined with our interpretations of the environment (appraisals) and the different behavioral options that are available at the moment. A predicted bad event that can have the potential for escape is likely experienced quite differently from one when trapped. (Cunningham et al., 2013, p. 352)

Social Constructionism (SC)

SC emphasizes the role of social and cultural factors in the construction process of discrete emotions. In this model, the crucial elements in the construction of emotions are “nonnatural” beliefs and judgments (Armon-Jones, 1986, p. 33), that is, mental states the content of which is determined by cultural systems of belief, as well as by norms and values specific to particular communities. The core of SC is that (a) emotions are not biologically given; (b) they are not shaped by natural selection—as in BC—but by culture and society; and (c) emotions are thus culturally relative—in other words, emotional experiences and behaviors can vary from culture to culture as well as from situation to situation.

Weak Social Constructionism (WSC)

According to WSC, “[e]motions are viewed … as transitory social roles, or socially constituted syndromes” (Averill, 1980, p. 305). In this model, having a particular emotion (e.g., feeling romantic love or experiencing amae or accidie) is an improvised response (following a cultural script) to a situation that is deemed to deserve such a response. The fact that cultural scripts, norms, and beliefs play a crucial role in emotions does not mean that emotions do not have a physiological basis. For instance, Averill, Chon, and Hahn write that “emotional syndromes are constituted by social rules as well as by existential beliefs…. Without the rules of anger, say, there would be no anger, only inarticulate expressions of rage and frustration [emphasis added]” (2001, p. 168).

Cultural scripts and beliefs could then be seen as shaping basic affective responses described by PC or the basic emotions of BC (a very similar position is proposed by Levy, 1984, according to whom a type of emotion can be either hypo- or hyper-cognized; that is, certain cultures could carve up an emotion very precisely and finely, while other cultures could altogether neglect the same type of emotion, not even considering it an emotional phenomena). In other words, the physiological basis of emotion is sometimes seen in this model as an enabling condition, but it is not sufficient to delineate and fully characterize individual emotions.

Strong Social Constructionism (SSC)

A more extreme form of social constructionism (SSC) claims that there is no such thing as emotion in nature. For instance, according to what Armon-Jones (1986) has qualified as the “Strong Thesis” (basically our SSC),

for any emotion, including the primary emotions, that emotion is an irreducibly sociocultural product. From this it would follow that no emotion can be a natural state, and therefore that the complex or sophisticated emotions cannot be regarded as cultural modifications of natural states. (p. 37)

One reason that motivates the adoption of SSC is the philosophical thesis according to which “agents cannot be said to feel an emotion (E) unless they have a grasp of the concept E and can apply this concept to their own experience on appropriate occasions” (Armon-Jones, 1986, p. 38).