Emotions as Narrative Emplotments

Abstract

Over the past few years, I have asked more than 30 adults, most of them psychologists, to define the term “emotion.” After each respondent formulated a definition, I asked him or her to give me an instance, an illustration, of emotion drawn from observation of self or others. Little uniformity characterized the off-the-cuff definitions save for one feature. Almost all the respondents included in their definitions a locus for emotion: inside the body. The psychologists in my sample phrased their definitions with the language of psychophysiology, sometimes elegantly. The agreement on bodily locus is not surprising—all of us have been exposed to the writings of several generations of textbook authors who composed chapters on emotion with the vocabulary of psychophysiology. These authors were indebted to the work of earlier exponents of this paradigm. William James and Walter B. Cannon, each in his own way, focused research and theory on emotion as internal happenings. An examination of current textbooks shows no break with this tradition.