Emotion: The Emotion Wars

Psychology Today:

Science, just like art, is subject to big shifts in the way we think about ourselves. For the past two decades, psychology has favored “inside” explanations of behavior: Who we are is largely determined by our makeup. We are hostages to our genes.

But the cutting edge is now shifting. Evidence is amassing that the environment we inhabit shapes even what we thought was most fixed about ourselves.

One orthodoxy of psychology in the past two decades has been that emotions are hardwired into us and their facial display is universal, and thus recognizable, across cultures. We just “read” the emotions that are written on a face. But Boston College psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett finds that emotion perception is driven as much or more by context, and we can’t know what emotions mean unless we know the situation.

Showcasing a photograph of Serena Williams in which the tennis ace looks feral with anger, Barrett points out that it is in fact an image of ecstasy, marking Williams’s moment of victory in the 2008 U.S. Open. “Context findings, in and of themselves, don’t negate the existence of biologically basic universal emotions,” Barrett and colleagues report in Current Directions in Psychological Science, but “such claims should be reconsidered.”

Read the whole story: Psychology Today