Piecing Together Emotion: Sites and Time-Scales for Social Construction

Abstract

This article catalogs social processes contributing to construction of emotions across three time-scales, covering: natural selection; ontogenesis; and moment-by-moment transactions. During human evolution, genetic and cultural influences operate interdependently, not as separate forces working against each other. Further, leaving infants’ environment-open serves adaptive purposes. During ontogenesis, cultural socialization affects emotion development in various ways, not all of which depend on internalization of cultural meanings as emphasized in some earlier social constructionist accounts. Construction also operates over the moment-by-moment time-scale of real-time interpersonal interactions, as emotions adjust to the constraints and affordances of immediate cultural environments. Claims that emotions are constructed, and that social processes contribute to their construction, are no longer contestable. Now the project is to specify how these processes operate and what materials they use.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 71 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.