What is Love? Discourse about Emotions in Social Sciences

• Authors: Simone Belli , Rom Harré , Lupicinio íñiguez
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The study of emotions has been one of the most important areas of research in the Social Sciences. Social Psychology has also contributed to the development of this area. In this article we analyse the contribution of social Psychology to the study of emotion, understood as a social construct, and its strong relationship with language. Specifically, we open a discussion on the basis of the general characteristics of the Social Psychology of emotions and the contributions from different disciplines in this area of research, to give meaning to the relationship they have with the language of emotions. In this regard, we have reviewed basic references for the study of the construction of an emotion, and thematically classified them into three broad categories: 1) Contributions from different backgrounds and perspectives; 2) Construction and de-construction studies of emotion, and 3) Postconstructionist studies of emotion. In the first category, we consider the main contributions from the Social Sciences, which can be summarized in two areas: philosophical-construction of an emotion; mainstream-psychology of emotion. In the second category we have began with the relationship between emotion and language and the social construction of emotion, i.e., its discursive status. We end with postconstructionist theories, i.e., Butler's concept of performance and technoscience. To give more meaning to this line of research, the use of a concrete example of emotion seemed appropriate. Thus, we chose "love".

Keywords

EN

social construction of emotion; language; performance; technoscience; love

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Human Affairs
• Year: 2010
• Volume: 20
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 249-270

Dates

published

2010-09-01

online

2010-09-22

Contributors

author

Simone Belli

• Departamento de Lingüística General, Lenguas Modernas, Lógica y Filosofía de la Ciencia, Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Ciudad Universitaria de Cantoblanco, 28049 Madrid

author

Rom Harré

• Psychology Dept., Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057 USA

author

Lupicinio íñiguez

• Dept. de Psicologia Social, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, 08192 Bellaterra (Cerdanyola), Spain

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10023-010-0026-8