Perceiving Emotion: Scripts versus Emotion Concepts

This paper proposes that the role of emotion scripts, and their entanglement with emotion concepts, has not been adequately treated in recent concept-focused and situated approaches to emotion perception. These approaches aim to emphasize the context-sensitive and interactive nature of emotion perception, and I argue that scripts have distinctive explanatory power when it comes to both of these features of emotion perception, and accordingly deserve to be taken more seriously by concept-focused and situated approaches. Situated perspectives on emotion perception have long pointed out that, while the move toward understanding emotion perception as context-sensitive is needed, an individualistic and overly cognitive focus remains in context-sensitive accounts to emotion perception, particularly in accounts that emphasize emotion concepts (see Glazer 2022, Krueger 2014a, b). And while recent and influential context-sensitive approaches to emotion perception have emphasized emotion concepts (see Gendron and Barrett 2018), earlier work on emotion concepts that ties them to emotion scripts has been ignored in these recent views (e.g., Russell, 1991, 2003; Wierzbicka 1992; Fehr & Russell, 1984). Situated approaches that criticize recent context-sensitive views for their individualistic focus have also overlooked scripts, despite their potential to contribute to situated views. Overlooking scripts is a problem when arguing for a context-sensitive and situated understanding of emotion perception. Scripts describe contextually variable, normatively constrained moves between social agents; that is, they account for how social norms influence social interaction (including emotion perception) in context-sensitive ways. Thus, scripts are exceptionally well positioned to account for context-sensitive, interactive emotion perception. This paper aims to (1) explain what it means to understand emotion perception as both interactive and context-sensitive, making reference to situated approaches to emotion perception, and (2) bring scripts back into the debate on emotion perception.