(or, possibly, speaking of snobbery part II)

I’ll start with a little history about why I was reading Psychology Today at all (although has anyone noticed it in the check out line lately? I saw it in a grocery store in Berkeley last year). I was reading the NY Times this morning and stumbled upon this. Adequately enticed, I wanted to read the full article, so I ventured into the latest online issue of Psychology Today. I never made it to that particular article. Skimming through, something else - this article by Matthew Hutson - caught my eye:

ARE YOU NERVOUS OR ARE YOU EXCITED? IT’S UP TO YOU.

“I MET SOMEONE when I was in grad school, and I had butterflies in my stomach,” Lisa Barrett, a psychologist at Boston College, says. “I thought this meant that I was in love, but I actually had the flu.”

Okay. I realize that this is just an example that Lisa’s using to explain her research to laypeople, but Calvin and Hobbes figured this out years ago in a strip that I use when I talk about Becker in my undergrad classes.

Let’s read on:

The episode comes up frequently when Barrett describes her conceptual-act model of emotion, an entirely new paradigm that challenges decades of psychological thinking (and won her a $2.5 million NIH grant in 2007).

Read that again, $2.5 million - for research that might challenge psychological social psychological thinking, but certainly not sociological social psychological thinking on emotions.

The predominant model proposes that people have a standard set of emotions–anger, sadness, fear, disgust, interest, and happiness–and that each one corresponds to a clearly defined pattern of brain activity and behavior. But Barrett argues that the way we distinguish one emotion from another is based not only on differences in physiological reactions, but also on experience and context. You might label the same response “surprise” one time and “fear” another time based on the circumstances. An emotion is not a discrete, universal entity, Barrett says, but a flexible negotiation between general biological reflexes, social conditioning, and deliberate thought.

What? You say that emotion is not solely physiological? Peggy Thoits said the same thing when she articulated (these ideas had been floating around before that) emotion’s four interconnected components: physiological changes, situational cues, expressive gestures, and an emotion label, twenty-five years ago. We interpret biological responses with situational cues, and socialization plays a key role in how we do that.

Back to Barrett:

Her model has potential implications for therapy. If you tell your therapist you’re angry your wife left you, he might say you’re sad. “You can’t say who’s right in objective terms,” Barrett says, but you can say whose interpretation offers the more constructive way to approach the situation.

Barrett argues that you can learn to change how you interpret internal states, and even increase your emotional granularity: “If people have 20 words for anger (irritation, fury, rage, hostility), then they will perceive 20 different states and better regulate their emotional states as a result.” Preliminary support comes from a recent study Barrett and colleagues conducted demonstrating that we’re slower to recognize facial portrayals of emotion when emotional labels are less mentally accessible.

So we’re interpreting our emotional states and can alter emotional experience in a constructive (or destructive way)? Are Arlie Hochschild’s ears ringing? Schemas and labels matter? Culture matters? Wow!

Of course as a sociological social psychologist I realize that, despite differences, there’s a lot of overlap between the sociological and psychological study of social psychology. There’s an entire week of such discussion in my graduate social psych seminar on this. I am also all for throwing money at research on emotion, where I think there is lots of room for growth. However, this just blatant disregard for previous research on emotion in sociology - to the tune of 2.5 million dollars - was really disheartening.

I admit to not having read the sources cited here, or the proposal that was funded. I am working entirely off the blurb in Psychology Today. However, I really hope that psychologists interested in these “breakthroughs” read some of what sociologists have to say on this issue. Although this post makes me sound a bit bitter and angry, I’m all for cross-discipline collaboration and enhancing social psychological knowledge across the board. I also think that it’s great that psychologists are using the experimental method to study these things when we have such rich qualitative data on it.

Really, this is not about Barrett at all. I’m just slightly flabbergasted (can one be slightly flabbergasted?) that it takes this, a psychologist articulating a sociologist’s view, for a paradigm shift on the study of emotion in psychology. To paraphrase Peggy Thoits in closing, is all this the fault of those self-centered psychologists or sociologists who haven’t taken the time to convince psychologists that sociological mechanisms were overlooked?