Comment: Collective Epistemic Emotions and Individualized Learning: A Relational Account

Abstract

This comment considers some potential implications of both the appraisal approaches and the framework proposed by Mascolo in regard to a mechanism that is particularly important for development: learning. More specifically, I discuss Mascolo’s account of emotion with respect to how appraisal processes can be considered relational, automatic, social, as well as the drivers of learning amplification.

Keywords

concern-relevance epistemic emotions learning social appraisal

Understanding emotional development is both an important research endeavor in itself and a crucial way to constrain theories of emotions (see Dukes, Samson, & Walle, in press; Pollak, Camras, & Cole, 2019). Mascolo (2020) proposes a framework aimed at understanding how emotions develop, with a particular focus on the development of anger. The proposed framework is also aimed at orienting theories of emotion toward strong relational and social accounts of emotions. In doing so, Mascolo adopts an approach that shares key aspects with appraisal theories, for instance, the notion that emotion is a multicomponential system and that it is typically elicited by the processing of a motive–event relation between an organism and the world (e.g., Sander, Grandjean, & Scherer, 2005, 2018). With a focus on the social dimensions of emotion and on intersubjectivity, Mascolo explores ways in which theories of emotion could remain rigorous and include more systematic analyses of the feeling component of emotion, without relying on self-reports but rather on expressions during social interactions. This comment considers some potential implications of both the appraisal approaches and the framework proposed by Mascolo in regard to a mechanism that is particularly important for development: learning. More specifically, we discuss Mascolo’s account of emotion with respect to how appraisal processes can be considered relational, automatic, social, as well as the drivers of learning amplification.

Relational, Automatic, and Social Appraisals

Although specific definitions of emotion vary across disciplines and approaches, Sander (2013) proposed that the field may have reached a consensus in globally defining an emotion as an event-focused, two-step, fast process consisting of (a) relevance-based emotion elicitation mechanisms that (b) shape a multiple emotional response (i.e., action tendency, autonomic reaction, expression, and feeling).

Appraisal theories of emotion would further expand this definition by considering that the elicitation mechanisms are a series of appraisal processes that are relational (Lazarus, 1991) and may operate automatically (see Moors, 2010), even when social information is integrated during these context-dependent appraisals (see Mumenthaler & Sander, 2015). If appraisal, including social appraisal, can operate automatically, then it can certainly contribute to the many developmental stages described by Mascolo, without the need to differentiate between higher order appraisals versus the more basic idea of motive–event relations when considering how event significance (i.e., primary appraisal) is processed (Mascolo, 2020). Expressions, such as those discussed by Mascolo in the 11 examples of anger, are the social signals observers typically use to attribute a feeling to a person who expresses an emotion. Moreover, they guide specific behaviors of the observers at various ages (Walle & Campos, 2012). Emotion recognition is an emotional competency that strongly develops with age (see Widen, 2013) and is sensitive to many contexts of development, such as early life adversity (e.g., Pollak, Messner, Kistler, & Cohn, 2009) and maybe even to school pedagogy (Denervaud, Mumenthaler, Gentaz, & Sander, in press). It seems to me that the appraisal framework—when automatic and social appraisals are included—is well equipped theoretically to explain how emotions are not only elicited but also recognized in a social-sensitive way (e.g., de Melo, Carnevale, Read, & Gratch, 2014; Mumenthaler & Sander, 2012; Mumenthaler, Sander, & Manstead, 2020).

Collective Epistemic Emotions

Some emotions such as interest, confusion, surprise, admiration, wonder, or awe relate so strongly to knowledge and knowing that they have been called epistemic emotions (see e.g., Candiotto, 2019; Silvia, 2010). How does a given topic elicit strong interest in an individual but only low interest in another individual? This question has been extensively studied in relation to learning and development (see e.g., Hidi & Renninger, 2006). A recent complementary approach to this question is the one suggested by Clément and Dukes (2019), who developed the notion of affective social learning. The idea is that there are processes subserving the transmission of information between individuals about how to value a particular object. In this regard, social appraisal is a process that contributes to affective social learning. For instance, a person may feel and express stronger interest in a given topic if other individuals in his or her social group also feel this emotion for the same topic. The emphasis Mascolo (2020) puts on emotions being coregulated between individuals is inspiring with respect to how teacher–learner interactions may contribute in generating what one may call collective epistemic emotions (e.g., in a classroom). An example of such a collective epistemic emotion could correspond to student(s) and teacher(s) simultaneously sharing the emotion of interest in a given topic and being aware that they share this emotion. Going beyond the idea that emotional climates may emerge through emotional contagion, future research may consider how Mascolo’s perspective can indeed reinforce the study of the actual mechanisms underlying the emergence of collective emotions (see Goldenberg, Garcia, Halperin, & Gross, 2020; von Scheve & Ismer, 2013). In particular, further research may study how collective epistemic emotions develop in infancy and childhood to encourage exploration and learning.

Concern-Relevance and Individualized Learning

The relational aspect of emotion highlights the role of primary appraisal in emotion elicitation: only those specific events that are relevant for the major concerns (including goals, needs, and values) of the individual elicit emotions. While the idea that emotion modulates many cognitive mechanisms is acknowledged by virtually all theories of emotion, it is still highly debated which specific dimensions or components, such as valence, arousal, feeling, or appraisal, cause these effects. The idea that concern-relevance orients attention (Pool, Brosch, Delplanque, & Sander, 2016) and facilitates episodic memory (Montagrin et al., 2018) and Pavlovian conditioning (Stussi, Ferrero, Pourtois, & Sander, 2019) is consistent with the way Mascolo concludes that “The motive-relevant assessment . . . evokes affect which selects this event, amplifies its importance, and organizes it into consciousness” (2020, p. 214), but also highlights the idea that there could be direct effects of appraised concern-relevance on several cognitive mechanisms. With respect to learning, this model predicts that areas that are particularly concern-relevant (e.g., correspond to a specific domain of interest) may elicit emotions (e.g., epistemic emotions) and facilitate learning (e.g., about new knowledge). Therefore, concern-relevance could be a driver of individualized learning during development. Results suggesting that children’s interest in different natural categories shapes their word learning (Ackermann, Hepach, & Mani, 2019) are consistent with this prediction.

In conclusion, it is inspiring that Mascolo (2020) describes the concept of engagement as inherently relational, and as implying the investment of multiple organismic systems in activity that matters to the person. With this framework of engagement, further experiments could study the conditions under which individuals at different levels of development get engaged in learning.

With the measurement difficulties that it entails, a challenging research area could be to study the effects of appraised concern-relevance on individualized learning, and whether such effects could increase with the synchronous emergence of a collective epistemic emotion.

Footnotes

Author note:

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant 100019_188966/1).

ORCID iD

David Sander

References

Ackermann

Hepach

Mani

(2019). Children learn words easier when they are interested in the category to which the word belongs. Developmental Science. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12915

Candiotto

(2019). Epistemic emotions and the value of truth. Acta Analytica. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-019-00416-x

Clément

Dukes

(2019). Conclusion: Laying the foundations of affective social learning. In Dukes

Clément

(Eds.), Foundations of affective social learning: Conceptualizing the social transmission of value (pp. 234–250). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

De Melo

C. M.

Carnevale

P. J.

Read

S. J.

Gratch

. (2014). Reading people’s minds from emotion expressions in interdependent decision making. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(1), 73–88.

Denervaud

Mumenthaler

Gentaz

Sander

(in press). Emotion recognition development: Preliminary evidence for an effect of school pedagogical practices. Learning and Instruction.

Dukes

Samson

Walle

(Eds.). (in press). The Oxford handbook of emotional development. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Goldenberg

Garcia

Halperin

Gross

J. J.

(2020). Collective emotions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29(2), 154–160.

Hidi

Renninger

K. A.

(2006). The four-phase model of interest development. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 111–127.

Lazarus

R. S.

(1991). Progress on a cognitive-motivational-relational theory of emotion. American Psychologist, 46(8), 819–834.

10.

Mascolo

M. F.

(2020). A relational conception of emotional development. Emotion Review, 12, 212–228.

11.

Montagrin

Sterpenich

Brosch

Grandjean

Armony

Ceravolo

Sander

(2018). Goal-relevant situations facilitate memory of neutral faces. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 18, 1269–1282.

12.

Moors

(2010). Automatic constructive appraisal as a candidate cause of emotion. Emotion Review, 2, 139–156.

13.

Mumenthaler

Sander

(2012). Social appraisal influences recognition of emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(6), 1118–1135.

14.

Mumenthaler

Sander

(2015). Automatic integration of social information in emotion recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144, 392–399.

15.

Mumenthaler

Sander

Manstead

(2020). Emotion recognition in simulated social interactions. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 11(2), 308–312.

16.

Pollak

S. D.

Camras

L. A.

Cole

P. M.

(2019). Progress in understanding the emergence of human emotion. Developmental Psychology, 55(9), 1801–1811.

17.

Pollak

S. D.

Messner

Kistler

D. J.

Cohn

J. F.

(2009). Development of perceptual expertise in emotion recognition. Cognition, 110, 242–247.

18.

Pool

E. R.

Brosch

Delplanque

Sander

(2016). Attentional bias for positive emotional stimuli: A meta-analytic investigation. Psychological Bulletin, 142, 79–106.

19.

Sander

(2013). Models of emotion: The affective neuroscience approach. In Armony

J. L.

Vuilleumier

(Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of human affective neuroscience (pp. 5–53). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

20.

Sander

Grandjean

Scherer

K. R.

(2005). A systems approach to appraisal mechanisms in emotion. Neural Networks, 18, 317–352.

21.

Sander

Grandjean

Scherer

K. R.

(2018). An appraisal-driven componential approach to the emotional brain. Emotion Review, 10, 219–231.

22.

Silvia

P. J.

(2010). Confusion and interest: The role of knowledge emotions in aesthetic experience. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 4, 75–80.

23.

Stussi

Ferrero

Pourtois

Sander

(2019). Achievement motivation modulates Pavlovian aversive conditioning to goal-relevant stimuli. npj: Science of Learning, 4. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-019-0043-3

24.

Von Scheve

Ismer

. (2013). Towards a theory of collective emotions. Emotion Review, 5, 406–413.

25.

Walle

E. A.

Campos

J. J.

(2012). Interpersonal responding to discrete emotions: A functionalist approach to the development of affect specificity. Emotion Review, 4, 413–422.

26.

Widen

S. C.

(2013). Children’s interpretation of children’s interpretation of facial expressions: The long path from valence-based to specific discrete categories. Emotion Review, 5, 72–77.