Mary Helen Immordino-Yang (2010)
Towards a microdevelopmental, interdisciplinary approach to social emotion.
Emotion Review 1, 1-4
Emotions about others quality of mind eg admiration, compassion,
p1 ‘their neurobiology remains elusive’ important for knowing how to act in the social world.
P2 ‘ emotions as intersubjective psychological processes’
What is it that makes these sorts of emotions difficult to study
· Complex
· Subjective
· Play out over time cf basic and social emotions that ‘pertain to others’ more immediate actions or circumstances’ the evaluation accumulates over time and involves reflection and also inference about what is meaningful and in so doing constructing an appropriate emotional response. They represent knowledge structures.
cf
Basic and appraisal models of emotion that assume a linear, context independent process p2 ‘ ‘emotions as organisms’ coherent, packaged responses to invariant classes of environmental stimuli ‘( Gendron & Barrett, 2009)
Approach to adopt
Emotions about others require a micro developmental approach ‘ a person is viewed as actively constructing increasingly complex mental behaviour and meaning, in essence organizing his mind state, by hierarchically coordinating pieces of mentally represented information , including social, cognitive, affective and episodic information into context –specific functional skills’
p3 ‘consistent with a constructionist approach in that emotion is built out of smaller pieces that are not themselves emotional per se ( Barrett, 2009a) but seeks to specify how the process of constructing the emotion is context-dependent, fundamentally subjective and involves dynamic cycling between simpler and more complex knowledge and feeling states in accordance with the context and other sources of emotional variability’ ‘The total sum of these states dynamically self-organising over the time course of the emotion can be described as both a person’s understanding and experience of emotion’
Using the example of Amy with the admiration script ‘ mentally coordinates the components of her reactions by relating her life to that of the protagonist, she builds an understanding that transcends her reaction to this particular story and offers a more general, abstract assessment of her own life’
Advantages of the approach ( microdevelopmental)
P3
· ‘Allows study of effective and cognitive under the same framework’
· doesn’t attempt to standardize the emotional experience
· uncovers any stable elements within the variability of emotion
Suggestions for methodological approach
Use a story - P3 ‘ control the context while leaving the participant free to build their own meaning’ This allows for variability between individual interpretations at the same time the context is stable for all participants
