A Relational Conception of Emotional Development

In this article, I outline a relational-developmental conception of emotion that situates emotional activity within a broader conception of persons as holistic, relational beings. In this model, emotions consist of felt forms of engagement with the world. As felt aspects of ongoing action, uninhibited emotional experiences are not private states that are inaccessible to other people; instead, they are revealed directly through their bodily expressions. As multicomponent processes, emotional experiences exhibit both continuity and dramatic change in development. Building on these ideas, I describe an intersubjective methodology for studying developmental changes in the structure of emotional experience. I illustrate the approach with an analysis of developmental changes in the structure of anger from birth to adulthood.

Emotions in Context: A Sociodynamic Model of Emotions

We propose a sociodynamic model of emotions, in which emotions are seen as dynamic systems that emerge from the interactions and relationships in which they take place. Our model does not deny that emotions are biologically constrained, yet it takes seriously that emotions are situated in specific contexts. We conceive emotions as largely functional to the sociocultural environment in which they occur; this is so because sociocultural environments foster the emergence of emotions that positively contribute to social cohesion. The role of the social context includes actual, online shaping—affordances, constraints, and reward structures—and thus goes beyond merely providing the content of cognitive representations (e.g., goals, concepts).

The many faces of emotional contagion

Emotional contagion—emotions being linked across people—has captured psychologists’ attention yet little is known about its mechanisms. Early influential treatments focused on primitive mimicry. Later accounts emphasized (a) social comparison, whereby people compare their feelings with compatriots’, (b) emotional interpretation, where others’ expressive displays serve as information, and (c) empathy, or imagining another person’s feelings. This paper introduces affective process theory (APT), which unifies these mechanisms and identifies others. Using a rule-governed theoretical process, APT reveals 10 distinct mechanisms that connect people’s affective states, which fall into three types. Convergent linkage occurs when individuals share the same vantage point and interpretations of emotionally evocative stimuli. Divergent linkage occurs with a shared vantage point but different interpretations. Complementary linkage occurs when the other person is itself the stimulus. APT integrates past findings on moderating factors such as social closeness and cooperation. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

Comment: Journeys to the Center of Emotion

Does appraisal co-ordinate emotional responses? Are emotions usually reached via mental representations of relational meaning? This comment considers alternative causal routes in order to assess the centrality of appraisal in the explanation of emotion. Implicit and explicit meaning extraction can certainly help steer the course of emotion-related processes. However, presupposing that appraisals represent the driving force behind all aspects of emotion generation leads to inclusive formulations of appraisal or restrictive formulations of emotion.