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Article Excerpt
This paper is concerned with illuminating how emotion (anger) and emotion-related phenomena such as feelings, thoughts and expressions appear to the individual person. In particular, it focuses on the role of feelings in emotion experience, that 'what it is like' aspect. We suggest that understanding emotion experience necessitates comprehending feelings--they tell us about an emotion from the perspective of the person who is having that emotion. It is our belief that emotions become intelligible when we consider them from the personal perspective.
LeDoux (1998) suggested that feelings were nothing more than 'red herrings, detours in the scientific study of emotions' (p. 18). Recently, Frijda (2005) and Lambie and Marcel (2002) have challenged this view drawing attention to (a) their crucial part in motivational states, learning and the maintenance of a coherent sense of self and world and (b) how emotion experience is a legitimate interest in its own right, not least because it has significance for people. Lambie and Marcel point to how current thinking has shifted towards a component view of emotion with emotion experience being one such component (e.g. Lazarus, 1991; Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988). However, emotion theorists tend to focus on one or other components, for example cognitive theories which give the concept of appraisal centre place (e.g. Ellsworth, 1991; Frijda, 1993; Lazarus, 1991; Smith & Lazarus, 1993).
According to Frijda (2005), the nature and content of emotion experience has been variously described as bodily feelings (e.g. Damasio, 1994, 2003; James, 1884), indescribable qualia (e.g. Oatley & Johnson-Laird, 1987; Plutchik, 1980) or as pleasure or pain states joined with felt activation (e.g. Russell, 2003). Frijda goes on to say that these understandings, although not incorrect, fail to do justice to how people describe what it is like when they have an emotion experience; what it is like to feel joyful or to feel anger. These experiences:
present feelings as experiences of the world or of oneself, both carrying meanings, of one's relationship to them, and of one's striving in relation to them ... Such emotion experience is best characterized as a perception of a meaningful world that is filled with calls for action. (Frijda, 2005, p. 474)
It is clear then that emotion experience can take different forms because of the different contexts in which such experiences occur. Moreover, emotion experiences are often world-focused rather than self-focused--they are directed outwards towards the world, and the people, events and objects that make up that world. These comments indicate that a more holistic approach to understanding emotion experience is required, one which focuses on the embodied person who is 'world-involved' (Moran, 2000, p. 233). Lambie and Marcel draw attention to the paucity of psychological research which addresses what they call first-order phenomenology (exceptions include Davitz, 1969; Parkes, 1996). Characterization of first-order emotion phenomenology is more typically the domain of phenomenology and our aim in this paper is to contribute to existing psychological research from this theoretical perspective.
Our phenomenological standpoint draws heavily on the work of the philosopher Peter Goldie (2002), and it is to a brief summary of his argument that we now turn. That emotions are intentional is an uncontroversial viewpoint (Averill, 1997; Sartre, 1994; Solomon, 1993). When you are angry, you are angry at someone, when you experience pity, it is pity for someone and so on. However, in what ways are emotions intentional? Goldie criticizes emotion theories which conceptualize intentionality solely in terms of beliefs, or beliefs and desires, arguing that this leaves feelings out of the emotion experience. Feelingless belief-desire accounts overintellectualize emotion and typically incorporate feelings as an add-on, perhaps as the awareness of physiological change and which lack intentionality. Alternatively, Goldie proposes an intentionality of feelings, what he calls feeling towards, a thinking of with feeling that is directed toward the object of one's thought. To illustrate this point, he considers the example, 'I am afraid of the snake because its bite is poisonous and poison would harm me'. (Taylor, 1985, p. 2) and says:
I believe that many of our emotional experiences are not like this: there seems to be too much talk of belief, and not enough talk of feeling, perception, and imagination. The point is not easy to express, but what often happens, I think, is that we first have an emotional response towards an object, a feeling which is often quite primitive ... Then, in self-interpretation, when we become reflectively aware of this feeling towards the object of the emotion (as we reflective beings are sometimes able to do), we also normally seek to make it intelligible by looking for [the] identificatory and explanatory beliefs ... What really comes first is the emotional response itself--the feeling of fear towards the snake--and not the thought that its bite is poisonous and the thought that poison would harm me. (Goldie, 2002, p. 45)
For Goldie, feeling towards is not always 'fully cognitively penetrable' (p. 78) and it is this quality which distinguishes it from belief. In addition to feeling towards are feelings of bodily changes, that sense of 'what it is like' bodily to experience an emotion. One way of understanding emotion experience is to attempt to capture it from the personal point of view because emotions and emotion experience are always embedded in a person's narrative.
Following Goldie, we define emotions as complex, episodic, dynamic and structured. They are complex because of the varied elements which make them up such as thoughts, perceptions, feelings and episodes of emotion experience. It is a feature of these various elements that they can come and go over time in a dynamic and episodic manner. Finally, emotions are structured because they form an integral part of the evolving order of thoughts and feelings, actions and events which go to make up the lifeworld of the individual.
Thus, this study attempts to grasp what anger feels like for the individual in the context of their life and all that that entails. It does this through the analysis of interview material from a single person case study. The method is idiographic because it emphasizes the importance of the individual as a unit of analysis (Smith, 2004; Smith, Harre, & Van Langenhove, 1995). An idiographic approach is committed to the detailed examination of a phenomenon as it is experienced and given meaning in the lifeworld of a person. Our aim is to show the value of a phenomenological approach for understanding emotion.
The data are analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA; Smith, 2004). IPA is one of several closely related approaches described as phenomenological psychology, and its central concern is the subjective experiences of the individuals--what we have been calling, from an existential phenomenological perspective, the lifeworld of the individual. IPA acknowledges that it is not possible to access an individual's lifeworld directly because there is no clear and unmediated window into that life. Investigating how events and objects are experienced and given meaning requires interpretative activity on the part of the researcher, which Smith and Osborn (2003) describe as a dual process in which 'the participants are trying to make sense of their world; the researcher is trying to make sense of the participants trying to make sense of their world' (p. 51). IPA has now been used to examine a wide range of psychological topics e.g.: European social identity (Chryssochoou, 2000); affective aspects of travel choice (Mann & Abraham, 2006); awareness in Alzheimer's disease (Clare, 2003); identity change and life transitions (Smith, 1994). For a review of work in IPA, see Reid, Flowers, and Larkin (2005).
IPA is a distinctly psychological qualitative approach and can be described as experiential research in contrast to discursive research (Reicher, 2000). For IPA, the focus is more on understanding, representing and making sense of peoples' ways of thinking, their motivations, actions and so on whereas for discourse analysis, the emphasis is on the ways in which language constructs people's worlds, the performative aspects of talk. Although IPA recognizes the importance of language in influencing how individuals make sense of lived experiences and then in turn how researchers make sense of participants' sense making, it can be described as taking a light constructionist stance in contrast to the strong constructionism of discourse analysis. Our talk may be action oriented and functions to achieve our interpersonal objectives but IPA suggests that...
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