ABSTRACT
The psychological approach ignored the socially constructed, processual nature of thoughts, feelings, and introspection. Interactive introspection provides self-introspection from subject and researcher, since a researcher must introspect about her own responses in reaction to experiences and feelings of respondents. Resurrecting introspection as a systematic sociological technique will allow sociologists to examine emotion as a product of the individual processing of meaning as well as socially shared cognitions. Systematic sociological introspection permits a look into the processing of everyday emotional life. Introspection permits us to prompt and collect our own and other people’s stories about the lived details of socially constructed experience. Emotions result from applying personal interpretations of collectively created rules to the situations in which we find ourselves.
