ABSTRACT
While previous chapters have looked at emotional conduct as it might be influenced by representations of emotion, the present chapter turns the focus onto emotion representations themselves. In the first sections, I summarize research that has directly investigated people's interpretations of emotion terms either by examining relations and oppositions between different emotional meanings, or by exploring the internal structure of emotional categories. In later sections, I re-evaluate the status of these data concerning representations with respect to their relevance for general theories of emotion. My review considers various possible relations between ideas and realities of emotion (descriptive, interpretational, and constitutive) and examines the relative validity of these postulated connections. I conclude by drawing attention to three limiting assumptions characterizing most previous explorations of the logical geography of emotion terms: that such studies give access to a ‘deep structure' of emotion; that emotional language is purely descriptive; and that the descriptions it offers can be seen as more or less ‘accurate' in some absolute sense. In contrast, I shall suggest that there are a variety of grammars of emotion which are differentially implemented in different contexts; that emotional talk should be studied from a pragmatic as well as semantic perspective (i.e. that it serves linguistic functions in addition to simple description); and that the interrelations between emotional talk and emotional conduct are far more complex and intricate than implied by a simple one-way accuracy mapping. Studies of emotional meaning may help to clarify how emotions are dealt with by individuals, couples, groups, institutions, and societies, but the information that they provide allows no quick shortcut to a psychological theory of emotion. Research attention should be redirected towards the ways that emotional talk is deployed in its everyday conversational contexts, and to the effects that this deployment may have on the construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction of emotional episodes.
