EMOTION AS FEELING
Imagine that you are sitting at the dinner table on a visit to our family. You bear them no ill will but did not really want to make the visit, having other things you would have preferred to do. The conversation ebbs and flows in much the usual way as your parents start talking to your younger brothers about their clothes and their school grades. You eat quietly, letting the conversation lap around you, but it is impossible to remain indifferent. You feel little bursts of empathy and sympathy for your brothers, remembering what you had to go through at their age. You feel old naggings of resentment. You look at your parents and feel sad at their lack of change as they become older. You worry about the work that you have to do and keep feeling needles of concern about a relationship that might be going wrong. None of this shows on your face as you calmly eat your meal. How might different schools of psychological thought seek to appraise this scenario? Well, phenomenological psychologists, for example, emphasize the study of consciousness and subjective experience, and argue that psychologists should study what people experience, here and now, at this moment, in their present state. This is very much a holistic view, considering the whole, integrated person. Phenomenologists such as Giorgi (1970) argue that the foremost study of human beings should involve their consciousness. Of course, there are then considerable difficulties of measurement in the material of interest. How is it possible to work out what Rodin’s Thinker might be feeling (see figure 6.2)? The questionnaire as an assessment method Recently, the experiential aspects of emotion have been investigated in a series of diary studies. These either involve keeping emotion diaries (Oatley & Duncan, 1992) or analysing previously published diaries (Haviland & Goldston, 1992). But the main way of assessing emotional experience is by reports, often in response to a questionnaire.
A strong argument in favour of assessing emotional experience by questionnaire has been put forward by Scherer, Wallbott and Summerfield (1986) in a book entitled Experiencing Emotion. They focused on four of the basic universal emotions – joy, sadness, fear and anger – and asked participants to describe significant episodes involving these emotions that they had experienced during the previous few weeks. Being particularly interested in cultural differences in the experience of these emotions, Scherer et al. conducted a large-scale cross-cultural study throughout Europe (Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and West Germany) and Israel.
The research was concerned with:
1. the antecedent situation (e.g. what types of situation elicit different emotions? what are the important social settings?);
2. differentiated actions (e.g. are different behaviour patterns reported for different emotions? do the various response patterns differ in importance?);
3. person specificity (e.g. are there differences in the experience of emotion due to age, gender, social and occupational background?); and
4. social regulation and control (e.g. are different amounts of regulation or control reported with respect to the different emotions? are there individual differences in control?).
As an illustration of the investigators’ analysis, they found clear differences in the duration of the experienced emotions. Fear appears to last from a few seconds to about an hour, anger between a few minutes and a few hours, joy from an hour to a day, and sadness from a day to many days. Although there were some cultural differences in the emotional experiences, the similarities across cultures were more marked .
Imagine that you are sitting at the dinner table on a visit to our family. You bear them no ill will but did not really want to make the visit, having other things you would have preferred to do. The conversation ebbs and flows in much the usual way as your parents start talking to your younger brothers about their clothes and their school grades. You eat quietly, letting the conversation lap around you, but it is impossible to remain indifferent. You feel little bursts of empathy and sympathy for your brothers, remembering what you had to go through at their age. You feel old naggings of resentment. You look at your parents and feel sad at their lack of change as they become older. You worry about the work that you have to do and keep feeling needles of concern about a relationship that might be going wrong. None of this shows on your face as you calmly eat your meal. How might different schools of psychological thought seek to appraise this scenario? Well, phenomenological psychologists, for example, emphasize the study of consciousness and subjective experience, and argue that psychologists should study what people experience, here and now, at this moment, in their present state. This is very much a holistic view, considering the whole, integrated person. Phenomenologists such as Giorgi (1970) argue that the foremost study of human beings should involve their consciousness. Of course, there are then considerable difficulties of measurement in the material of interest. How is it possible to work out what Rodin’s Thinker might be feeling (see figure 6.2)? The questionnaire as an assessment method Recently, the experiential aspects of emotion have been investigated in a series of diary studies. These either involve keeping emotion diaries (Oatley & Duncan, 1992) or analysing previously published diaries (Haviland & Goldston, 1992). But the main way of assessing emotional experience is by reports, often in response to a questionnaire.
A strong argument in favour of assessing emotional experience by questionnaire has been put forward by Scherer, Wallbott and Summerfield (1986) in a book entitled Experiencing Emotion. They focused on four of the basic universal emotions – joy, sadness, fear and anger – and asked participants to describe significant episodes involving these emotions that they had experienced during the previous few weeks. Being particularly interested in cultural differences in the experience of these emotions, Scherer et al. conducted a large-scale cross-cultural study throughout Europe (Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and West Germany) and Israel.
The research was concerned with:
1. the antecedent situation (e.g. what types of situation elicit different emotions? what are the important social settings?);
2. differentiated actions (e.g. are different behaviour patterns reported for different emotions? do the various response patterns differ in importance?);
3. person specificity (e.g. are there differences in the experience of emotion due to age, gender, social and occupational background?); and
4. social regulation and control (e.g. are different amounts of regulation or control reported with respect to the different emotions? are there individual differences in control?).
As an illustration of the investigators’ analysis, they found clear differences in the duration of the experienced emotions. Fear appears to last from a few seconds to about an hour, anger between a few minutes and a few hours, joy from an hour to a day, and sadness from a day to many days. Although there were some cultural differences in the emotional experiences, the similarities across cultures were more marked .
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