Gen Eickers & Jesse Prinz: Social Construction 3.0: A Performative Theory of Emotion

The Network for Critical Emotion Theory (CET) is happy to present a recording of an online talk in December 2020 by Gen Eickers (University of Education Ludwigsburg) and Jesse Prinz (City University of New York).

According to the most influential view in contemporary psychology, emotions are evolved universal responses grounded in the body. When this view came into prominence, it was presented as a challenge to the then popular view that emotions are social constructions: culturally learned patterns of behavior that have no consistent relationship to biology. While the innateness view has been challenged countless times by theorists defending social context and the construction view has been criticized countless times by theorists defending views more focused on innateness, there has been comparably little debate in recent years around the details of constructionism. Many of the theories of emotion pushed forward in recent years embrace an approach to understanding emotion that incorporates innateness and sociality and proposes a hybrid understanding of emotion. We think, however, that thinking of emotions as social constructions needs to be taken more seriously. Here, we compare prominent (social) constructionist approaches to emotion and propose that each of these theories carry elements that contribute to understanding emotions better but that are not sufficient to explaining emotions. Some constructionists underestimate the role of the body and others underestimate social scripts and the long-term effects social norms have on our behavior. Prevailing theories also neglect relevant work in theoretical traditions outside philosophy and psychology (sociology, feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, post-structuralism), which may shed light on the operative social norms and relationships between socialization and embodiment. We propose a performative account that combines the constructionist emphasis on context-sensitive scripts with the bodily nature of emotions.