EMOTION REVIEW –  July, 2010, vol 2, nº 3

SPECIAL SECTION: THE FUTURE OF EMOTION RESEARCH

Lisa Feldman Barrett

Department of Psychology, Boston College, USA

 

The last several decades have produced a virtual explosion of research and theoretical writing on emotion. Surveying the field amidst these riches, a natural question is: where do we go from here? In this special section, we asked a variety of scholars to share their vision for the future of emotion research. Working from a variety of perspectives and focusing on a variety of topics, these authors discuss current domains of inquiry and suggest new areas that hold the promise of future innovation. These essays were not designed to be broad treatments of the field. Instead, each author was given 3,000 words to express those ideas that hold the most promise or that are, perhaps, the most troubling for the field and therefore require our immediate attention. Although the essays themselves vary in focus and scope, when taken together they chart a path for future scholarship in emotion.

The future, as it is mapped in these pages, includes more of a focus on understanding the nature of emotion from multiple levels of analysis in the social and natural worlds (with workable and meaningful bridges between the two). To understand what emotions are and how they work, investigations must situate emotions more clearly and unambiguously in the immediate social context, the broader cultural context, as well as the his­torical context. Time itself is also an important context. There is a call for the importance of descriptive, inductive research anchored in real-life settings (to augment what can be learned within the confines of the laboratory). A push in both these directions will help us to understand the variety in emotional life that must be explained.

And of course, old debates continue to rage on. What is the role of the body in emotion? Is it necessary, sufficient, or is the body more important for some people than for others, and so is the question entirely wrong to begin with? Is the experience of emotion epiphenomenal to emotion, or is it a central aspect that requires explanation? Is it possible to separate content from proc­ess? To have an epistemologically objective scientific enterprise about something that is so ontologically subjective? And what is the role of language in the generation/emergence/construction of emotional phenomena? Is it problematic? Productive? Necessary? Are words at the root of the definitional problems that currently plague the field—is the problem that we don’t have a common scientific language so that it is hard for one scholar to see what another sees when the same words are used—or are there deeper issues that require our attention? These are only some of the topics that the authors touch upon in this special section. Thoughtful discussion and provocative ideas await you in these pages. So grab a cup of coffee, or tea, and relax. I hope you find these essays engaging and thought provoking. Bon appétit.

 

http://emr.sagepub.com/content/current

Comentários

Nenhum comentário realizado até o momento

Para comentar, é necessário ser cadastrado no CEV fazer parte dessa comunidade.