The Psychological Construction of Emotion – A Non-Essentialist Philosophy of Science

Advocates for the theory of psychological construction of emotion have at one time or another opined that many emotion researchers have misconceptions about the theory of psychological construction. They contend that these misconceptions occur, in part, because the theory of psychological construction challenges fundamental, although typically unarticulated, background assumptions shared by many other scientific research programs on emotions. Several of these assumptions about emotions, that psychological constructionists challenge, also belong to the common-sense psychology of emotion, having face validity and intuitive plausibility. In the constructionists’ view, these assumptions are so entrenched that to challenge them is to fight an uphill battle.

In her description of ten common misconceptions about psychological constructionism, Barrett (2015) argues that an assumption of “essentialism about emotions” lies at the root of six misconceptions. This suggests that a central part of the uphill battle for psychological constructionism is to make non-essentialism about emotions more intuitively plausible. A first step in this enterprise involves clarifying what psychological constructionists mean by “essentialism” and what their opposing “non-essentialist” viewpoint exactly amounts to. This is the goal of the present article.

Let me state at the outset that I have favorable views of both psychological construction and non-essentialism; however, it is not the purpose of this article to argue for the competitive superiority of psychological constructionism in affective science. Rather, given the psychological constructionists’ worries about misconceptions and misunderstandings of their position, the purpose of this article is to take a deeper dive into non-essentialism with the aim of explicating this key philosophical assumption of the psychological constructionist perspective.

To attain this goal, I will describe the ideas of the early empiricist philosophers such as Locke and Mill, who introduced non-essentialist considerations into modern philosophy. I will compare these ideas with those of modern psychological constructionists focusing on two of its main proponents, Russell (2003) and Barrett (2013, 2017). This comparison will primarily emphasize issues related to the philosophy of science and to classification. Along the way, I will also describe how Russell's and Barrett's theories of the psychological construction of emotions have diverged over time and are now, arguably, in competition with each other on some key assumptions. I will also discuss the possibility that both Russell and Barrett have smuggled essentialist assumptions in the backdoor. My position is that while there is no once and for all, definitive answer to the back door question (mainly because “essence” is an abstract and vague metaphysical concept), there are good reasons for believing that both Russell and Barrett remain reliable non-essentialists about emotions.

Non-Essentialist Psychological Construction Versus Essentialist Basic Emotion Theory

In classical Greek philosophy, “essence” referred to the nature of a kind that is equally present in all members of the kind. The essence, or nature of a thing is what makes something be what it is. For example, Plato in his dialogue Meno argues that although many different kinds of bees may make up a swam, they all share the exact same essence of beehood. During the scientific revolution, Locke (1689/1997) modified this classical view by defining the “real essence” as the unknown, underlying constitution of a kind upon which all of its discoverable properties causally depend. As we will see below, Locke believed that real essences are not only typically unknown, but unknowable.

Traditional basic emotion theory argues that the emotion realm includes discrete emotions, such as fear and happiness, that have a privileged status. These “basic emotions” are the products of evolved, emotion-specific mechanisms, sometimes called “affect programs” (Ekman & Cordaro, 2011). Affect programs play both a causal and a classificatory/diagnostic role in basic emotion theory. They are causes because the activation of an affect program automatically initiates the coordinated features that characterize types of emotion such as fear. And they are diagnostic because the ultimate criterion for correctly identifying the kind of emotional episode that a person is in, is to know which affect program has been activated. Because affect programs are considered to play both causal and classificatory roles, one possible interpretation of basic emotion theory is that affect programs are the essences of emotions.

Psychological constructionists, in contrast, assert that affect programs—specialized mechanisms specific to each basic emotion that play the mentioned causal and classificatory roles—have not been identified, and in fact do not exist. A main argument for this claim is that researchers have not been able to confirm “fingerprints” for basic emotions, meaning patterns of neurological, cognitive, physiological, behavioral and subjective features that, according to the affect program view, are specific to each basic emotion (Barrett, 2017).

The alternative proposed by psychological constructionists is that emotion episodes are composites constructed on the fly out of a set of components. These components include cognitive appraisals, physiological changes, and behaviors, as well as what Russell (2003) called “core affect” (defined by the dimensions of pleasure vs. displeasure and activation vs. deactivation).

It should be noted that basic emotion theorists and psychological constructionists are broadly in agreement about the typical components of emotion episodes; the difference between them concerns the causes of these components. Psychological constructionists criticize basic emotion theorists for contending that the components of an emotion and their coordination have a shared cause, the affect program. ¹ In contrast, according to the psychological constructionists, the components of emotion are not orchestrated by an affect program; they each have a separate causal pathway (although they can influence one another). For example, consider William James's (1890) example of a person who unexpectedly encounters a bear in the woods and displays a complete fear pattern: She makes a fearful expression, yells out, gets physiologically aroused, runs away, and feels afraid. For basic emotion theory, the expression, vocalization, physiological changes, behavior and subjective experience are products of the same shared cause, the triggering of the fear program. In contrast, for psychological constructionists, the fearful expression, specifically the widening of the eyes that is part of it, may result from information gathering in time of uncertainty, yelling out may be an automatic reaction that was selected because it potentially warns others of danger, the running away may stem from the perception of danger that evoked a quick plan to save oneself, and the physiological arousal may be generated to support the execution of this plan.

Another important difference between basic emotion theorists and psychological constructionists concerns the role variation plays for emotion. According to psychological constructionists, the individual components that make up emotional episodes occur in ever-shifting patterns. Individual instances of fear can vary greatly. Furthermore, a large variety of patterns of components are not labeled by any ordinary language term. Occasionally, however, the components (cognitions, behaviors, and subjective feelings) shift into a pattern that resembles what a local language refers to as a particular emotion.

Non-Essentialism and Nominalism

In this section I will dive deeper into non-essentialism by looking at its historical roots in the nominalism of the early empiricists. For the early empiricists, the opposite of essentialism was nominalism.

Those thinkers who in the mid-19^th century were eventually grouped together as philosophical empiricists shared a skepticism about speculative, metaphysical concepts. For instance, in the 17^th century John Locke wrote:

Vague and insignificant forms of speech, and abuse of language, have so long passed for mysteries of science; and hard or misapplied words, with little or no meaning, have, by prescription, such a right to be mistaken for deep learning, and height of speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade, either those who speak, or those who hear them, that they are but covers of ignorance, and hindrance of true knowledge (Locke, 1689/1997, p. 11)

‘The height of speculation’ included beliefs in the divine right of kings and papal infallibility; but for Locke's chosen profession - the study of medicine and chemistry - it referred to essences.

Although Locke, as mentioned earlier, wrote about the real essences of kinds, he himself did not advocate for essentialism because he believed that the posited real essences of kinds were forever beyond human knowledge. As an alternative theory, he advocated for (as did Pierre Gassendi before him) a non-essentialist perspective, nominalism.

Nominalism is sometimes defined as the view that the only property that members of a kind or class such as the class of extroverts have in common is their name—here, the name “extroverts.” However, this definition of nominalism is slightly misleading. Nominalism readily grants that the different members of a class (e.g. extroverts) share many and varied properties in common; but the only property that they all share (i.e. that is equally present for all) is the name (e.g., “extrovert”). That is to say, kinds do not have essences as understood by traditional essentialist thinking.

Psychological constructionism is nominalist in this sense. According to psychological constructionists, the term “emotion” and terms for specific emotions, such as “fear” and “happiness” are used to name so many different mental-behavioral episodes that their extensions are heterogenous clusters rather than homogeneous classes (Russell & Barrett, 1999). Included in the fear cluster, for example, are long-term states such nervousness, medium-term states such as fear, short-term episodes such as fright, and momentary occurrences such as startle. Russell (2003) argues that, for this reason, the general concept “emotion” and specific emotion concepts such as “fear” can still be used to denote broad topics of study, but they should be seen as a figureheads, analogous to a constitutional monarch, and denied any real power to determine borders in the psychological landscape.

Essentialism and Natural Kinds

In this second part of my deeper dive into non-essentialism, I will look at the theory of natural kinds. As noted above, real essences were understood by Locke (and are so understood by many modern philosophers as well) as causal properties of a kind that determine a kind's observable features and that can be used to accurately identify members of the kind. In modern philosophy, kinds of this sort are typically called “natural kinds.”

It should be noted that, beyond the properties just mentioned, several other features of natural kinds have been proposed (e.g., Bird & Tobin, 2018; Khalidi, 2013; Zachar, 2014). These include: Being naturally occurring; supporting generalizations about the members of the kind, being demarcated by nature rather than by human concepts, being definable by necessary and sufficient properties, and subject to the authority of science (as to what they are). ²

Barrett (2013, 2015) argues that basic emotions are not natural kinds because they lack essences. Interestingly, Barrett supports her argument by referring to Darwin's theory of evolution. This is remarkable, as well as being a clever argumentative strategy, because Darwin's theory of evolution is the basis of basic emotion theory, and Darwin (1872) himself is often co-opted by basic emotion theorists as a forerunner, if not the main ancestor, of their theory.

As Barrett (2015) emphasizes, to argue against basic emotion theory does not mean one opposes evolutionary accounts of emotion. Psychological constructionists do not oppose evolutionary accounts of emotion, they only oppose the particular evolutionary account advocated for by basic emotion theorists.

Drawing upon the biological systematist Mayr (1988, 1993), Barrett argues that an important innovation of Darwin's theory of evolution was the rejection of essentialism about species. According to classical (Aristotelian) essentialism about species, the number and nature of species is fixed. For Aristotle, an essence or a nature was like the pattern on a signet ring that imparts a form to formless wax. Being stamped with an essence made something be the kind (i.e., species) it is. In the Aristotelian cosmology, only a fixed number of essences had been designed – and they could not be blended together. The classification of species by such essences would indeed be a privileged classification! As Mayr points out, Darwin rejected this view of species as fixed entities defined by shared essences. Instead, Darwin saw them as populations of individuals that vary and whose features can change over time. Rather than having shared essences, the members of a species belong to the species in virtue of be able to interbreed with each other.

Barrett (2015) proposes that Mayr's biological species concept (species are populations of individuals that vary) can analogously be applied to types of emotions. For example, the concept of fear encompasses a population of instances that resemble each other more or less. This too, is a non-essentialist view. Indeed, Mayr (1982) himself suggested that the non-essentialism and nominalism of the early empiricists anticipated population thinking.

Psychological Construction and Folk Psychology

In his articulation of psychological constructionism, Russell (2003) claimed that the entrenched use of familiar, common-sense psychological concepts stands in the way of scientific progress. In learning how to think about ourselves and others, we acquire a psychological vocabulary that (at least for most languages) includes concepts for emotion. Folk psychological concepts are so familiar and ubiquitous that it is difficult for psychologists to alter or update them for scientific use.

The view that folk or common-sense psychological concepts are barriers to scientific progress and therefore need to be supplanted by more scientifically adequate concepts is known as eliminativism. It is important, however, to recognize that there are different versions of eliminativism. In particular, borrowing a phrase from Bickle (2012), one can distinguish between eliminativism with a big “E” and eliminativism with a little “e”. “Big E” eliminativism views folk psychology as wrongheaded and argues that it should best be disposed with. In contrast, “little e” eliminativism views folk psychology as a useful approximation of the functioning of our mental lives, but holds that it is not well suited to promoting scientific progress.

An example of “big E” eliminativism is eliminative materialism in philosophy. This is the view that the concepts of folk psychology, such as “belief”, “desire”, and “emotion” completely misrepresent our internal states. For instance, according to Churchland (1984), “our common-sense psychological framework is a false and radically misleading conception of the causes of human behavior and the nature of cognitive activity” (p. 42) … “folk psychology is a hopelessly primitive and deeply confused conception of our internal activities” (p. 45).

Identifying the “little e” eliminativism of the psychological constructionists with the “big E” eliminative materialism of the philosophers begets misunderstanding. The philosophers’ favorite examples of what has been eliminated in science include epicycles in astronomy, caloric in thermodynamics, and the ether. These are all scientific constructs that referred to things that, as it turned out, do not exist – they were never real. When psychological constructionism is assimilated to the “big E” eliminativism of the philosophers, one could easily conclude that psychological constructionism holds hat emotions do not exist or are not real, i.e., that constructionism is an anti-emotion theory. ³

This is misleading. Although psychological constructionists such as Russell (2003) argue against folk psychology, they do not endorse “Big E” eliminativism but only “little e” eliminativism. Russell, for instance, contends that folk emotion concepts are rough approximations of our psychological processes, but are not suited for supporting the explanatory goals of scientific psychology. An analogy is the concept of air. The ancient Greeks believed that the universe was composed of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Today, air is no longer considered by scientists to be an element; rather, the atmosphere is a composite of different gases, mostly nitrogen and oxygen. The concept of air, however, still refers to something, and is a useful concept for everyday discourse: we continue to speak of air, of hot air balloons, of air-fryers and airplanes. For psychological constructionists, the emotions of folk psychology are more like air than like epicycles.

In another example, Russell (2003) compares discrete emotions to astronomical constellations such as Leo or Aquarius. Astrologers, he notes, believe that the relative positions of the constellations at different seasons of the year play a causal role in human affairs, but according to modern astronomy, the constellations are just happenstance patterns. The constellation of Aquarius is a real pattern that people can learn to see, but it is not a causal entity that governs human affairs. Analogously, according to psychological constructionism, there is no psychological entity named “fear” that causes people to act afraid. But to deny that fear is a cause in a scientific sense is not to say that when people talk about fear, they are talking about something that does not exist. There are patterns of components that people learn to name as fear.

Psychological constructionists thus do not advocate for eliminating folk-psychological terms and descriptions absolutely. Rather, they believe we need to introduce new scientific psychological concepts that better suit our scientific goals. Internal to psychological science, making this shift requires critiquing folk psychological concepts, to loosen their hold on us. It is in this light that one should view Russell's (2003) decomposition of the concept of emotion into more fine-grained concepts such as core affect, affective quality, attributed affect, emotional episode, and emotional-meta-experience. These concepts are not to be directly equated with any possible folk psychological counterparts, but are proposed as scientific concepts that are to be further defined and honed through research.

Being a “little e” eliminativism, psychological constructionism allows that our everyday emotion concepts may continue to function as a useful linguistic framework even in some scientific research programs. For example, self-report questionnaires use everyday words because these are what research participants understand. Furthermore, we can expect that even after the successful introduction of new technical terms for affective science, psychologists will continue to use folk concepts like fear and happiness alongside the newly technical terms, just like chemists still talk about air. Over time, folk emotion concepts may evolve to be more similar to the scientific concepts, but that is not required for the advancement of science. This is eliminativism with a little “e.”

As noted above, Russell (2003) does not consider discrete emotion concepts such as fear and happiness to be workable scientific concepts because, in his view, they are not produced by dedicated emotional mechanisms. In agreement with Ortony and Turner (1990), he claims that the components of a discrete emotional episode are dissociable elements that occur in emotional and non-emotional states. Each component has its own, separate causal pathway (i.e., mechanism). For Russell, once decomposed down to the simplest level, these components of emotions are the appropriate targets for scientific causal explanation.

These assumptions of Russell (2003) raise the possibility that, while rejecting scientific essentialism with respect to emotions such as fear or happiness, he may be sympathetic to scientific essentialism with respect to the components of emotions. It is hard to know how far these sympathies go, however, because Russell does not theorize about how the components are produced and maintained. In his view the study of the mechanisms that produce the components of emotion should be farmed out to those already established research traditions that study these components. In his nominalism and his views about the ever-shifting patterns of components within types of emotions, however, Russell is resolutely non-essentialist about emotions.

Essentialism and Faculty Psychology

The psychological constructionists also view the rejection of faculty psychology as part and parcel of their non-essentialist research program. Traditionally, “faculty psychology” refers to a boxology model of the mind that divides it into independent abilities such as the faculty of desire, the faculty of reason, and the faculty of will. Historically, faculty psychology has been contrasted with the “associationism” of the late 18^th and early 19^th century empiricists, particularly in psychiatry (Berrios, 1996). In psychiatry, 19^th century faculty psychology emphasized innateness, biological reductionism, canalization-fixity, modularity, and reflexivity. Associationism, in contrast, emphasized development, causal pluralism, plasticity, domain generality, and spontaneity. In the emotion realm, faculties are “pre-organized functions” that emerged in evolution, in contrast to the acquired behaviors of the associationists which emerge in experience (Gregory, 1987). Overall, then, faculty psychology is traditionally essentialist, whereas associationism is traditionally constructionist in spirit.

The psychological constructionists argue that, by rejecting emotion as a basic psychological process that is segregated from sensation, perception, and cognition, they are thereby also rejecting faculty psychology. Also, in their view, disputing that basic emotions are caused by hard-wired brain circuits or are mental modules amounts to rejecting the view that basic emotions are distinct faculties. Psychological constructionists accept that there are “basic psychological processes,” but according to them, neither emotionality in general nor discrete basic emotions are among them.

Instead of associationism, Barrett and Russell (2015) propose that psychological constructionism should be considered the new contrast to faculty psychology. Indeed, it does seem that the historical contrast between faculty psychology and associationism has outlived its usefulness. Nested under this contrast, as noted, are the oppositions of innate (nature) versus acquired (nurture) and canalized-fixed versus plastic. The views of contemporary psychological scientists can however rarely be sorted clearly into one or the other side of these dichotomies. To illustrate this, let us look at core affect (Barrett, 2006; Russell, 2003).

Psychological constructionists consider core affect to be a basic psychological process. Core affect refers to feelings of displeasure and pleasure in combination with feelings of arousal (or activation/deactivation). Similar to body temperature, core affect is pre-linguistic and is not always consciously experienced, but it is accessible to consciousness (Russell, 2009; Russell & Barrett, 1999). Furthermore, rather than being specific to emotion, core affect is automatically present in all psychological episodes, emotional or otherwise—we are always in some state of core affect. In addition, the ability to have states of displeasure and pleasure and to be aroused are capacities shared with other animals, and these capacities are innate rather than acquired. Therefore, for psychological constructionists, the emotional episodes that are constructed from core affect do have some automatic and innate features.

It could also be argued that the role assigned to core affect in the theory of psychological construction represents a sneaking-in of essentialism through the back door, because it seems that for psychological constructionists, core affect is in one sense “essential” to emotions: Without core affect, there would be no emotion. In fact, Barrett (2006a) claims that core affect is a natural kind.

I am not, however, persuaded that in making these claims about core affect, the psychological constructionists allow essentialism about emotions to sneak in through the back door. The reason is that core affect is not an essence as classically understood, i.e., a property of emotions that makes emotions be what they are. Rather, it is what in psychiatric classification would be called a sensitive but non-specific property of emotions, i.e., it helps detect emotions but does not distinguish between emotions and non-emotions. Furthermore, while core affect is necessary for emotions, this does not rule out, consistent with population thinking, that core affect varies in different instances of the same emotion (e.g., different instances of fear and different instances of happiness). The theory of psychological constructions’ continual emphasis on “variation” is what makes it a non-essentialist perspective.

Some readers may still ask: Isn’t core affect (i.e. some pattern of pleasure and arousal) “essential” for emotions according to the psychological constructionists? Previously I argued that this question may be based on an equivocation (Zachar & Bartlett, 2001). People sometimes use the word “essential” as a synonym for “necessary”, e.g., “it is essential that you understand calculus to be a physicist.” However, necessary properties are not co-extensive with putative essences. For example, having neutrons is necessary for being gold, but having neutrons is not part of the putative essence of gold (which is having 79 protons). ⁴ Analogously, according to psychological constructionists, one is always in a state of core affect, but one is not always in an emotional state: core affect is necessary for emotions, but it is not the essence of emotions. Other components are also required. Psychological constructionism leaves it open, however, exactly which other components in addition to core affect are required to make a mental episode an emotional state. In this sense, the theory of psychological construction is again non-essentialist.

The Constructed Theory of Emotion (Conceptual act Theory)

When I identified what could be considered the hard core of the psychological constructionist research program, I noted that Barrett and colleagues might also include the assumption that emotions are situated conceptualizations of core affect. Moreover, these psychological constructionists are not only saying that core affect plus a conceptual act is necessary for emotion, they make a stronger claim regarding “constituting emotions” (Barrett et al., 2015). Let us examine this viewpoint more closely.

Barrett's (2006a, 2006b) “conceptual act theory” began as an ambitious project to broaden the psychological constructionist theory of emotion by integrating it with research on color perception, person perception, and constructionist perspectives on memory and concepts. As the theory developed. it increasingly aspired to offer a grand synthesis across different levels of description in psychological science, culminating in what is now called by her the “constructed theory of emotion,” which encompasses social construction, psychological construction, and neuro-construction (Barrett, 2017).

Drawing on Barsalou's (2009, 2016) theory of “situated conceptualization”, Barrett (2017) emphasizes that the concepts brought to bear on a state of core affect are always tailored to a particular situation. This view is consistent with nominalism's emphasis on particulars, individuation, and variation. Rather than assimilating a situation to a generic prototype, the unique features of the current situation (e.g., a growling dog off his leash) automatically reactivate in our mind a population of past, similar situations we have encountered. The features of the current situation guide a selection of the most relevant resemblance relations across these past situations, and the resulting concepts that are actively constructed on the spot (e.g., danger, injury, fear) include both local concepts that are uniquely tailored to the particular situation and general concepts that integrate the dynamically shifting local concepts.

According to Barrett (2017), the generation of emotions includes the perception of a causal relation between sensory information about what is going on in our body (i.e., core affect) and sensory information about events outside the body. When internal and external events are thus linked, conceptual information is brought to bear to understand the situation and make it meaningful. If the concepts brought to bear are emotion concepts, and the focus is on what is occurring in the body, an integrated conceptual-affective state named an “emotion” (or “fear,” “happiness,” etc.) emerges, which then guides both action and the further conceptualization of the situation.

Barrett (2017) further claims that this conceptual activity (the categorization of patterns of core affect as emotions) constitutes emotions. The “constituting” of emotional experiences can be interpreted in several different ways. The first interpretation is a mereological or part-whole sense of constituting. For instance, according to Ortony and Clore (2015), an emotion such as fear is not caused by an appraisal of a situation. Nor is the emotion of fear the cause of feeling afraid or fearful behaviors. Rather, cognitive appraisals, physiological states, behaviors and subjective feelings are all parts of the emotional episode.

Barrett's theory, however, suggests a stronger sense of constituting than a part-whole relationship. There is a long history of constitutive perspectives in philosophy, that can be traced back to Immanuel Kant (1873/1997) and that has been revived by recent neo-Kantian philosophers of science (Fellowes, 2021; Massimi, 2008). Barrett's stronger sense of constituting resembles these neo-Kantian notions of constituting. The “situated conceptualization” is doing more than drawing our attention to a ready-made phenomenon, that we interpret as an instance of an emotion. The situated conceptualization provides not just the concepts for classifying an emotion, it constructs the phenomenon of emotion itself.

One important neo-Kantian feature of Barrett's (2017) constructed theory of emotion is her reference to the theory of predictive coding (e.g., Friston, 2010). She proposes that conscious mental life (experience) is generated by a process in which the brain formulates expectations about imminent sensory input by simulating it. That is, the brain does not passively react to the world, it predicts and simulates (i.e., conceptualizes). These computations occur on a time scale that is too rapid to be consciously accessible. In every instant, so the theory goes, many competing predictions are being made. Not just predictions about subjective experiences, but about body states, about actions, about objects and so on – and our brain starts to prepare the mind-body for what it anticipates is coming next. In comparing its multiple simulations with actual sensory input, the brain selects which predictions (or conceptualizations) best fits the input – and those simulations become actual in the mind-body state that emerges.

The current distinction between Russell's and Barrett's varieties of constructionism is analogous to a splitting event in speciation: Two interacting groups have diverged enough to become distinct lineages that nevertheless share a common origin and a family resemblance with each other. Rather than claiming a “constitutive construction” of emotions, Russell argues for an “interpretive construction.” For him, emotion prototypes are concepts that people use to classify a ready-made cluster of components as an emotion. Categorizing these clusters with emotion concepts, however, does not “constitute” emotional episodes. Emotional episodes are created on the fly by the co-occurrence of potential emotion components – and some of these clusters resemble the emotion prototypes available in one's particular society. Russell would agree, however, that once an episode has been classified as a particular emotion, this recognition becomes a part of the emotion episode, and how it develops from there on may be altered by this recognition.

In contrast to Russell's interpretivist view, in Barrett's (2017) theory of constitutive construction, the distinction between how we conceptualize something and how it really is, or between how something appears and how it really is, does not always sort things the way common sense would indicate. As Barrett puts it when describing an instance of seeing a snake in the woods and running away:

I did not see a snake and categorize it. I did not feel the urge to run and categorize it. I did not feel my heart pounding and categorize it. I categorized sensations in order to see the snake, to feel my heart pounding, and to run (p. 109–110).

For Barrett, we may construct our perception of the snake, but the snake's existence does not depend on it's being perceived by us as a snake. In contrast, the existence of an emotion does depend on its’ being categorized as an emotion. Without the situated conceptualization, there is no phenomenon of emotion. ⁵ Barrett's view here resembles Michela Massimi's (2011) neo-Kantian philosophy of science in which Massimi argues that there are no “ready-made phenomena” in the world, rather, all the phenomena that we know are “conceptually determined appearances.”

Is the situated conceptualization process identity-determining for an emotion? It could appear so. For example, Barrett claims that because animals do not have situated concepts for emotions, they lack the capacity to construct experiences of emotion. For her, situated conceptualizations are specific properties that distinguish between emotions and whatever it is animals have when humans interpret them as afraid or happy. From Russell's perspective, one might say that Barrett has taken it too far. In Russell's view, animals may lack emotional meta-experiences, but they still have the kind of patterning of components that resemble our emotion prototypes.

An important question raised by these considerations is whether Barrett's constitutive construction amounts to a claim that core affect plus a situated conceptualization is the essence of emotion? Doubtlessly, many readers will judge that “core affect  +  a situated conceptualization” is playing the same role that traditional essences played, and is thus the essence of emotions.

Of course, this all turns on what one means by “essence.” Abstract concepts such as “essence” are indeterminate and partly defined by stipulations. Which stipulations seem best will often depend on one's background assumptions and commitments, suggesting that there are no framework-free facts of the matter that can resolve disagreements about what counts as an essence once and for all. ⁶ This is why some philosophers would claim arguments about essences are merely verbal disputes.

As I have argued here, for psychological constructionists, similar to some philosophical empiricists, “essences” are speculative metaphysical concepts that have no place in science. Indeed, essences are considered harmful by psychological constructionists, among other reasons because they draw attention away from variation. Barrett (2017) continues to advocate for population thinking in which emotionality and specific types of emotion refer to clusters composed of members that resemble each other, but that also vary and are constructed on the fly and she even promotes non-essentialism as “A New View of Human Nature.” Thus, at least according to Barrett's own lights, the constructed theory of emotion has remained non-essentialist.

One final point for this section pertains to folk psychology. Barrett contends that episodes of core affect become real as emotions by being categorized using folk emotion concepts. This implies that folk concepts can constitute emotions as well as other learned category knowledge brought to bear. Given this implication of her theory, it is perhaps not surprising that Barrett (2017) reports that she no longer believes that folk concepts of emotion should be discarded for scientific endeavors. This change of her view about folk psychology, in combination with her adoption of a neo-Kantian, “constitutive” view of psychological construction, suggests that Russell's and Barrett's constructionist approaches have become not only divergent, but competing research programs under the larger psychological constructionist banner.

Conclusions and Future Directions

In addition to Russell and Barrett, on whose emotion theories I focused in this article, several other theorists have proposed some form of a psychological constructionist view of emotions. These theorists include, but are not limited to LeDoux (2014); Lindquist et al. (2015), Moors (2017), and Ortony and Clore (2015). The assumption that emotions are assembled as we go along from a menu of components, rather than being pre-organized by dedicated mechanisms, is common to most of these psychological constructionists. Although it would have been informative to investigate to which degree these other contributors to the psychological constructionist research program are more-or-less non-essentialist, this would have made the article unwieldy. The non-essentialist philosophy of science associated with psychological constructionism was best addressed by focusing on Russell and Barrett, emphasizing both their shared views and how they have diverged into different and potentially competing research programs.

Given that the psychological constructionist program advocated by Russell and Barrett was first proposed in 2003 and is now nearly 25 years old, it would also be useful to look at the ways in which other emotion theories have incorporated non-essentialism. Psychological constructionists advocate for non-essentialism (more or less), but non-essentialism does not entail psychological construction. For example, another theory of emotion that can also be considered non-essentialist, although it is neither a version of psychological constructionism nor of basic emotion theory, is Colombetti's (2014) theory of emotions as dynamical systems.

Another interesting extension of the present meta-theoretical study would have been to examine how basic emotion theorists have responded to the non-essentialist critiques of their position by the constructionists. Some basic emotion theorists acknowledge that that not all components of an emotion need be present in every instance of the emotion (Eickers et al., 2017; Lewis & Liu, 2011; Roseman, 2011). Relatedly, other basic emotion theorists allow that an emotion category such as fear may represent a collection of different instances that share a family resemblance (Cowen et al., 2019; Ekman & Cordaro, 2011; Scarantino, 2015). But again, exploring these issues would have made the present article cumbersome and is therefore best left for a separate contribution, possibly by advocates for basic emotion theory.

What I have attempted in this article is to articulate the non-essentialist tenets of psychological construction in a targeted way. I explained non-essentialism by looking at how it was historically introduced into modern philosophy through the nominalist views of the early empiricists. In psychology, it is more typical to consider non-essentialism with reference to Wittgenstein's family resemblance model and the prototype theory of concepts, although Barrett's (2013) drawing on Mayr's views about population thinking is in line with the approach I have adopted, focusing on the discussions of non-essentialism in the philosophy of science.

If, as advocates for psychological construction claim, people hold misconceptions about psychological construction and its non-essentialist assumptions, an accessible explication of what non-essentialism means for the psychological constructionist viewpoint was called for. To the extent that this article is successful, one may continue to disagree with the psychological constructionist viewpoint, but this disagreement should then not be based any longer on philosophical misconceptions of what psychological constructionists claim. If so, the potential problem of people talking past each other might be reduced.