Psychological Construction of Episodes Called Emotions

People witness or experience episodes they explain as due to an emotion. Like ordinary folk, many academic theorists try to understand these obviously important episodes in the same way using the terms emotion, fear, anger, joy, grief, and so on. Yet, each term refers to a heterogeneous cluster of events with unclear boundaries and no single cause-rather than to a prepackaged pancultural bundle of common components (subjective experience, behavior, expression, thought, physiological change). Psychological construction is an alternative approach that treats the concepts of emotion, fear, and so on as the folk concepts they are. It invites emotion researchers in the sciences and humanities to work together to characterize different folk theories of emotion and their influence, but also, in a separate project, to hone more precise scientific concepts embedded in separate accounts of each component of emotional episodes, cognizant of both human diversity and what humans have in common.