Emotions: Problems and Promise for Human Flourishing

Abstract

Before diving into Emotions: Problems and Promise for Human Flourishing, I assumed that emotions are hardwired in the neural networks of our brains, ‘ready to be “triggered” by a particular (and specific) stimulus’ (150). For example, I visualized fear as a hardwired alarm system in my brain that could be activated by a news report on more contagious variants of COVID-19. I assumed that emotions such as fear, shame, guilt, anger and disgust were universal and structural. I wasn’t aware that my commonsense notion of emotions didn’t jive with my social constructionist ways of understanding other complex psychological and cultural phenomena. It was enlightening, then, for me to read McClure’s crystal-clear summary of neurophysiological studies proposing that emotions and feelings are constructed out of three psychological processes: (1) basic sensory information from the world that is (2) registered by our brains as ‘core affects’ which we then (3) make meaning of, using stored representations of prior experience and socialized categories, values, and expectations (144). McClure sums up this neurophysiological understanding of emotions: