ABSTRACT
This chapter begins this line of research a few years ago. It investigates and compares children's accounts of emotion situations, in particular their accounts of anger and sadness situations. The idea to employ emotion situations such as 'being angry' or 'being sad' came up in the attempt to find a situation that was ecologically meaningful for both younger and older children. The original accidental stumbling across some children's confusions of angry and sad launched into a closer look at how the accounts of sadness and anger were linguistically constructed by younger American English-speaking children. The construction of anger in American English consists of two discursive purposes: blaming and eliciting empathy. In contrast to the cognitive framework of emotions and its approach to knowledge acquisition as the major developmental achievement, the discursive orientation views knowledge of the emotions rather as the result or the product of participation in cultural practices.
