Psychological and Religious Perspectives on Emotion

This article is devoted to examining theoretical issues on the interface of the psychology of religion and the psychology of emotion, something which recently has been surprisingly neglected. The broad range of psychological components involved in emotion, and the importance of emotional processes in religion, make it a particularly relevant area of general psychology as far as religion is concerned. The first issue to be examined is the centrality of emotion (or feeling ) in religion and the extent to which religion can be conceptualized as a kind of emotional state—an idea that can be found in different forms in Schleiermacher and James. Though both psychology and emotion are now seen as less private than previously supposed, the analogy remains potentially fruitful. The second issue arises from the notable tendency in the psychology of emotion to see emotion as functional, even rational, rather than disruptive. The view of Averill is endorsed that emotions can be psychologically creative when used appropriately. This leads to a review of attitudes toward emotional aspects of religion and religious attitudes to everyday emotions, where a positive but discriminating approach to emotions seems appropriate.     

Ekman's basic emotions: Why not love and jealousy?

Paul Ekman's view of the emotions is, we argue, pervasive in psychology and is explicitly shaped to be compatible with evolutionary thinking. Yet, strangely, jealousy and parental love, two emotions that figure prominently in evolutionary psychology, are absent from Ekman's list of the emotions. In this paper we examine why Ekman believes this exclusion is necessary, and what this implies about the limits of his conception of emotion. We propose an alternative way of thinking about emotion that does not exclude jealousy and parental love.     

Associations between young children's emotion attributions and prediction of outcome in differing social situations

Associations between young children's attributions of emotion at different points in a story, and with regard to their own prediction about the story's outcome, were investigated using two hypothetical scenarios of social and emotional challenge (social entry and negative event). First grade children (N=250) showed an understanding that emotions are tied to situational cues by varying the emotions they attributed both between and within scenarios. Furthermore, emotions attributed to the main protagonist at the beginning of the scenarios were differentially associated with children's prediction of a positive or negative outcome and with the valence of the emotion attributed at the end of the scenario. Gender differences in responses to some items were also found.     

Breaking apart the typical mortality salience manipulation: Two questions,two outcomes

The typical mortality salience manipulation asks participants to reflect on two questions, one about the emotions associated with the thought of death and the other about what happens after one dies. In five experiments, we separated these two questions and gave participants either one or a control question. In Experiment 1, participants' responses to the afterlife question were coded as being informed more by cultural knowledge and values compared with responses to the emotion question. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that participants responding to the afterlife question showed greater stereotype usage compared with those responding to the emotion or a control question. In Experiment 4, results illustrate that the afterlife and emotion question differ on various coding dimensions related to self‐focus, emotion, and culturally related death words, but not death‐related words. In addition, participants who responded to the afterlife question demonstrated greater cultural worldview defense by setting a higher bail for an alleged prostitute compared with those who answered the emotion or a control question. In Experiment 5, participants responding to the emotion question demonstrated a greater preference for personally endorsed values compared with those who responded to the emotion or a control question. These results suggest that the two questions used in the common mortality salience manipulation produce different results when separated. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Promoting a Brand's Emotion Benefits: The Influence of Emotion Categorization Processes on Consumer Evaluations

Research in psychology has demonstrated that people have a shared knowledge of emotion categories. Building on this research and our understanding of categorization processes, this article proposes a mechanism by which consumers utilize information about a brand's “emotion benefits” in forming attitudes. The results of 2 experimental studies show that (a) consumers’ processing of a brand's emotion benefit information is consistent with categorization processes such that emotion category congruity effects are large in basic—versus subordinate—level conditions, (b) associating a brand with certain emotions can influence brand and ad attitudes without necessarily eliciting emotions during exposure to advertising, (c) emotion category congruity “works” through attitude‐toward‐the‐ad and emotion benefit beliefs in influencing brand attitudes, and (d) subjective product category knowledge moderates the strength of these effects. Taken together, these results explicate the process by which a knowledge‐based consideration of a brand's emotional benefits can influence consumers’ beliefs about the brand and brand attitudes.     

Religion and Mestrovic's postemotional society: The manufacturing of religious emotion

Work on the social theory of emotion has been growing in the last decade, but few have considered how these studies relate to the field of religion. This article is a detailed critical examination of the work of the Croatian‐American sociologist Stjepan Mestrovic and his idea of ‘postemotionalism’. It is an exploration of the implications of his work for understanding contemporary manifestations of religion. It first unfolds the context of Mestrovic's work on postemotionalism and then explores the development and meaning of the term. It follows a series of tensions in the concept between spontaneous and produced emotion and seeks to show how postemotionalism fails to consider adequately religious history, which has continually involved the process of repackaging ‘past emotions’. Despite these difficulties, Mestrovic's idea of postemotionalism is seen to provide not only a way to rethink emotion and rationality in religion, but a way of re-conceptualising so-called ‘individual’ religious emotion as part of wider political constructions developed through late capitalistic markets and the technology of mass media. Mestrovic's lack of concern with religion is considered, and the work of the French sociologist of religion Danie` le Hervieu-Le ger on ‘chain memory’ is introduced as a way of illuminating questions of religious tradition, memory and emotion in Mestrovic's work. The final section of the paper considers the ‘revivalist’ developments of Celtic Spirituality as an example of the micro-politics of postemotional religion.     

The desirability of beliefs: preschoolers' appreciation of fact beliefs and subsequent emotions

In this study, we investigated the extent to which preschool children's own knowledge about reality biases their understanding that others' beliefs about reality govern others' emotions and not reality itself. Therefore, an increasing tension was created between the beliefs of the protagonist and the participant, by providing varying degrees of evidence about the validity of the protagonist's belief. Children of between 4 and 5 years of age were asked to predict the protagonist's emotion, given the protagonist's desire and the protagonist's belief. The results show that, to a certain extent, preschool children take others' beliefs into account when predicting others' emotions. When the outcome is clear, children probably feel tied to reality, and in the case of false beliefs, their knowledge about reality biases their emotion predictions, as was also evident in ‘false belief’ research (Wimmer H, Perner I. 1983. Beliefs about beliefs: representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognition 13: 103–128). However, when it is uncertain what the actual outcome will be, then it is not the likelihood of others' beliefs but the desirability of the outcome that biases children's predictions of others' emotions. In other words, when the actual outcome is yet unclear, 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds show a tendency for wishful thinking in their predictions of others' emotions. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

GETTING UNDER MY SKIN: WILLIAM JAMES ON THE EMOTIONS, SOCIALITY, AND TRANSCENDENCE

“You are really getting under my skin!” This exclamation suggests a series of psychological, philosophical, and metaphysical questions: What is the nature and development of human emotion? How does emotion arise in social interaction? To what extent can interactive situations shape our embodied selves and intensify particular affective states? With these questions in mind, William James begins to investigate the character of emotions and to develop a model of what he terms the social self. James's studies of mimicry and his interest in phenomena now often investigated using biofeedback begin to explain how affective states develop and how it might be possible for something to “get under one's skin.” I situate these studies in the history of psychology between the psychological schools of structuralism and behaviorism. More important, I suggest continuity between James's Psychology and recent research on mirror neurons, reentrant mapping, and emotional mimicry in the fields of clinical psychology and cognitive neuroscience. This research supports and extends James's initial claims in regard to the creation of emotions and the life of the social self. I propose that James's work in the empirical sciences should be read as a prelude to his metaphysical works that speak of a coordination between embodied selves and wider environmental situations, and his psychological studies should be read as a prelude to his reflections on spiritual transcendence.     

The A Priori and the Empirical in Theories of Emotion: Smedslund's “Conceptual Analysis” of Emotion

Abstract

This paper examines the suggestion made by Smedslund that the empirical laws of emotion proposed by Frijda are a priori necessities, derivable from a definition of emotion Smedslund proposes. First, a distinction is drawn between a causal and non-causal reading of Smedslund's own definition of emotion. The suggestion is made that although on the causal reading the definition might provide sufficient conditions for being in an emotional state, causal regularities are empirical, so this reading would not meet his own criteria for an a priori definition. Moreover, showing that Frijda's laws are derivable from the definition thus understood would not undermine their empirical status. The non-causal reading is then examined and questions are raised about whether it can provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a state to be a state of emotion. Finally, the suggestion is made that the central issue in the question of whether or not a theory of emotion is wholly empirical turns not on whether it can be derived from a definition of emotion, but, rather, on the extent to which the explanations proposed of the regularities governing emotions must appeal to a priori rationality constraints.     

Parents' Emotion‐Related Beliefs,Behaviours, and Skills Predict Children's Recognition of Emotion

Children who are able to recognize others' emotions are successful in a variety of socioemotional domains, yet we know little about how school‐aged children's abilities develop, particularly in the family context. We hypothesized that children develop emotion recognition skill as a function of parents' own emotion‐related beliefs, behaviours, and skills. We examined parents' beliefs about the value of emotion and guidance of children's emotion, parents' emotion labelling and teaching behaviours, and parents' skill in recognizing children's emotions in relation to their school‐aged children's emotion recognition skills. Sixty‐nine parent–child dyads completed questionnaires, participated in dyadic laboratory tasks, and identified their own emotions and emotions felt by the other participant from videotaped segments. Regression analyses indicate that parents' beliefs, behaviours, and skills together account for 37% of the variance in child emotion recognition ability, even after controlling for parent and child expressive clarity. The findings suggest the importance of the family milieu in the development of children's emotion recognition skill in middle childhood and add to accumulating evidence suggesting important age‐related shifts in the relation between parental emotion socialization and child emotional development. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Comments on the Sacred,the Search for Significance,and Means/End Relationships

This is a comment on Pargament's article Of Means and Ends: Religion and the Search for Significance. It is based on a long collaboration with Pargament. Agreement is expressed with the central thesis, namely that psychology has long struggled with whether it shall be concerned with facts or values. The psychology of religion clearly reflects this debate. The difference between science and religion needs to be understood for the psychology of religion to fully develop. Pargament's interest in studying ways in which people appropriate religion is affirmed. The search for significance as an overarching value is seen to be the central focus of life to which religion addresses itself. It is clear that both the use of religion by persons and the study of that use are grounded in value judgments. Means and ends do not exist apart from one another.     

Parent–child talk and children's understanding of beliefs and emotions

We examined the development of children's understanding of beliefs and emotions in relation to parental talk about the psychological world. We considered the relations between parent–child talk about the emotions of characters depicted in a picture book, false belief understanding and emotion understanding. Seventy-eight primarily Caucasian and middle-class parents and their 3- to 5-year-old children participated (half boys and half girls). The emotions talked about were relatively simple, but the complexity of the situation varied in terms of whether or not an understanding of beliefs was required to understand the emotion. Talk about the belief-dependent aspects of the emotions of picture book characters predicted children's false belief understanding, whereas talk about non-belief-dependent aspects of these emotions predicted children's emotion understanding. We argue that these data suggest that the development of children's understanding of beliefs and emotions is intertwined with learning to talk about the psychological world.     

The Role of Bodily Perception in Emotion: In Defense of an Impure Somatic Theory

In this paper, we develop an impure somatic theory of emotion, according to which emotions are constituted by the integration of bodily perceptions with representations of external objects, events, or states of affairs. We put forward our theory by contrasting it with Prinz's (2004) pure somatic theory, according to which emotions are entirely constituted by bodily perceptions. After illustrating Prinz's theory and discussing the evidence in its favor, we show that it is beset by serious problems—i.e., it gets the neural correlates of emotion wrong, it isn't able to distinguish emotions from bodily perceptions that aren't emotions, it cannot account for emotions being directed towards particular objects, and it mischaracterizes emotion phenomenology. We argue that our theory accounts for the empirical evidence considered by Prinz and solves the problems faced by his theory. In particular, we maintain that our theory gives a unified and principled account of the relation between emotions and bodily perceptions, the intentionality of emotions, and emotion phenomenology.     

Shared emotions

Existing scientific concepts of group or shared or collective emotion fail to appreciate several elements of collectivity in such emotions. Moreover, the idea of shared emotions is threatened by the individualism of emotions that comes in three forms: ontological, epistemological, and physical. The problem is whether or not we can provide a plausible account of “straightforwardly shared” emotions without compromising our intuitions about the individualism of emotions. I discuss two philosophical accounts of shared emotions that explain the collectivity of emotions in terms of their intentional structure: Margaret Gilbert's plural subject account, and Hans Bernhard Schmid's phenomenological account. I argue that Gilbert's view fails because it relegates affective experience into a contingent role in emotions and because a joint commitment to feel amounts to the creation of a feeling rule rather than to an emotion. The problems with Schmid's view are twofold: first, a phenomenological fusion of feelings is not necessary for shared emotions and second, Schmid is not sensitive enough to different forms of shared concerns. I then outline my own typology that distinguishes between weakly, moderately, and strongly shared emotions on the basis of the participants’ shared concerns of different degree of collectivity, on the one hand, and the synchronization of their emotional responses, on the other hand. All kind of shared emotions in my typology are consistent with the individualism of emotions, while the question about “straightforward sharing” is argued to be of secondary importance.     

Intentionality and Compound Accounts of the Emotions

Most philosophers of emotion endorse a compound account of the emotions: emotions are wholes made of parts; or, as I prefer to put it, emotions are mental states that supervene on other (mental) states. The goal of this paper is to ascertain how the intentionality of these subvening members relates to the intentionality of the emotions. Towards this end, I proceed as follows. First, I discuss the problems with the account Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson offer of the intentionality of the emotions; I argue their account is fundamentally misguided by virtue of being motivated by a misunderstanding of the nature of propositional attitudes. Second, I argue against Peter Goldie's claim that an affective component of an emotion contributes to its intentionality. Third, I offer my own compound account of emotions. I argue (1) emotions are mental states that supervene on other mental states, (2) the mental states that constitute the subvenience base of emotion can have nonconceptual and/or conceptual representational content, and (3) an emotion's intentionality supervenes on (but is often not identical to) the intentionality of only one of its subvening members, specifically, the evaluative representation.     

Studying the specificity of spirituality: lessons from the psychology of religion

Psychological research on spirituality need not start from scratch: the psychology of religion provides substantial knowledge and experience that can be drawn on when psychologists want to do research on spirituality. Spirituality, while certainly not identical with religion or religiosity, is a human phenomenon to which many methodological insights from the study of religion may be applied, although it is also a domain where many mistakes from the history of the psychology of religion are likely to be repeated. After presenting some thoughts on the conceptualization of spirituality, and reflecting on the type of psychology required to do research on spirituality, the paper points out some hidden agenda's in the psychologies of religion and spirituality. Focusing on and keeping in mind the specificity of spiritual conduct, the paper discusses a number of practical aspects of empirical research on spirituality.     

The Body in the Psychology of Religion

Hutch's position that psychology of religion has neglected the mortal body is affirmed but reinterpreted. Although it may be true that psychology has adopted as postmodern bias toward defining the human being as primarily cognitive, it is less true that the psychology of religion has been unaware of how religion emerges from the experience of living. Noting that Hutch could be understood as a modern Romantic, I reinterpret, in an alternate frame- work, his contention that reexperiencing the sexuality and mortality of the body will reinstate eros into the psychology of religion. The I story model of Donald McKay and the existential paradigm of Reinhold Niebuhr are of- fered as reconceptions of what Hutch is proposing. These theorists state Hutch's position in ways that allow for a more substantive picture of what religion is and how it emerges from the life process.     

Longitudinal associations between children's understanding of emotions and theory of mind

Theory of mind competence and knowledge of emotions were studied longitudinally in a sample of preschoolers aged 3 (n=263) and 4 (n=244) years. Children were assessed using standard measures of theory of mind and emotion knowledge. Three competing hypotheses were tested regarding the developmental associations between children's theory of mind abilities and their knowledge of emotions. First, that an understanding of emotion develops early and informs children's understanding of others’ thinking. Alternatively, having a basic theory of mind may help children learn about emotions. Third, that the two domains are separate aspects of children's social cognitive skills such that each area develops independently. Results of hierarchical regressions supported the first hypothesis that early emotion understanding predicts later theory-of-mind performance, and not the reverse.     

Parents' emotion‐related beliefs and behaviours in relation to children's coping with the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks

To assess relationships between parental socialization of emotion and children's coping following an intensely emotional event, parents' beliefs and behaviours regarding emotion and children's coping strategies were investigated after a set of terrorist attacks. Parents (n=51) filled out the Parents' Beliefs about Negative Emotions questionnaire and were interviewed within two weeks of the attacks. Their elementary and middle school‐aged children were interviewed eight weeks later. First, parents' beliefs were related to two kinds of parental behaviours. Parents' beliefs about both the value of and the danger of children's emotions were positively related to their discussion with their children. Parents' belief about children's emotions as dangerous was also negatively related to parents' expressiveness with their children. Second, parents' beliefs were related to five kinds of coping strategies reported by their children. Parents' belief about children's emotions as valuable predicted children's problem‐solving, emotion‐oriented, and support‐seeking coping following the terrorist attacks. Parents' belief about children's emotions as dangerous predicted children's avoidance and distraction coping following the attacks. Parents' beliefs about the importance of children's emotions may foster a family atmosphere that facilitates children's coping with intensely emotional events. Results support differentiated, multi‐faceted analysis of the broader construct of parental beliefs. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

EMOTIONAL SELF-AWARENESS AND ETHICAL DELIBERATION

How are we to distinguish between appropriate emotional responses that reveal morally salient reasons and inappropriate emotional responses that reflect our prejudices? It is often assumed that reason – considered as distinct from emotion – will make the distinction. I argue that this view is false, and that the process by which emotional responses are vetted involves ‘emotional self‐awareness’. By this, I mean feeling an emotion, being aware of so doing, and feeling some usually subtle emotional response, often of calm or anxiety, to it, together with a general readiness to feel and acknowledge what emotions one has. Registering and exploring feelings of anxiety that arise in emotional self‐awareness helps enable us to detect when emotions and thoughts are inappropriate. Deliberation that is not emotionally open in this way is therefore at an epistemic disadvantage. Furthermore, the attempt to remain unemotional when evaluating one's emotions can be produced or co‐opted by anxiety about one's feelings of precisely the kind that indicates one's emotional responses and thoughts are being distorted.