Constructionist Theories of Emotions in Psychology and Neuroscience
Lisa Feldman Barrett, Tsiona Lida
Abstract
According to the historian of science Naomi Oreskes (2019), the validity of science rests on the consensus of scientists from diverse backgrounds who participate in a collective give-and-take of critical examination (Longino, 1990). Do they agree on which hypotheses are most important to test, which methods provide the best tests for those hypotheses, which interpretations of the observations are most defensible, and which hypotheses are most supported vs. most in doubt? From this vantage point, the science of emotion has a serious validity problem. The linguist George Lakoff called emotion an essentially contested concept (Lakoff, 2016): scientists agree that emotions should be studied, but after about 150 years of scholarly activity, that is about all we agree on. This situation is not easily remedied, in part because scientists take different theoretical approaches with incompatible philosophical assumptions and practices (Barrett, 2015), leading them to consistently misunderstand one another, even to the point of mischaracterizing each other’s hypotheses in the most fundamental ways. At times scientists can’t agree on the specific experiments that might resolve their debates, in part because they disagree on what they are actually debating about. Attempts to summarize relevant research often do so selectively, sometimes failing to grapple with evidence that precisely calls their preferred hypotheses into question. There are notable exceptions, of course, but overall, the science of emotion remains mired in a scientific stalemate. Research progresses in silos, stalling any accumulation of knowledge, and an emerging consensus is nowhere in sight. One necessary step for resolving this impasse, at a minimum, is to ensure that scientists develop an accurate understanding of the various assumptions, hypotheses, and methods that constitute these debates, particularly as they evolve in response to new research findings and conceptual advances.