ABSTRACT
Discursive psychology (DP) offers a window onto the way emotion and cognition play out in everyday interaction. A distinctive feature of a discursive psychology of emotion is its continuing critical engagement with assumptions in cognitive psychology. Edwards notes that rather than being open to difference in emotions, cross cultural studies invariably start with English language categories, anger, sadness and so on. This means that typical English emotion terms are treated as the kind of thing that emotion is, and the problem is to look for it, emotion, cross culturally. Studies of emotion in social interaction have diverse roots and come from disciplines such as interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and conversation analysis. Emotions contrast to cognition. Honest emotions are those uncontrollable spontaneous reactions, versus either cognitive calculation or faked, insincere emotions. Emotion descriptions refer to individual feelings that people all share and recognize, rather they are resources to be deployed to perform a range of actions.
