Wittgenstein and the discursive analysis of emotion

Author's personal copy New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 258–274 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect New Ideas in Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ newideapsych Wittgenstein and the discursive analysis of emotion Michael F Mascolo* Department of Psychology, Merrimack College, North Andover, MA 01845, United States a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: Available online June 2008 This paper explores the implications of Wittgenstein’s analysis of language, emotion and expression for contemporary theory and research on emotion According to Wittgenstein, emotional expressions operate as public manifestations of emotional experience As a result, it is meaningful to say third-person observers can ‘‘know’’ another’s emotional experience Building upon these ideas, a discursive approach to the analysis of emotional states is proposed Everyday emotion words specify the public criteria that people use to ‘‘read experience off’’ another’s emotional expressions The identification of emotion proceeds through a dialectical process involving judgment and reflection Observers (a) use everyday emotion words to make intuitive, pre-reflective classification of another’s emotional experience; (b) reflect upon and make explicit the public criteria that mediate their implicit prereflective judgments; and (c) continue the judgment–reflection cycle until the meaning of the other’s expressions is exhausted The discursive approach is illustrated through an analysis of expressed emotion within psychotherapeutic dialogue Ó 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd Keywords: Emotion Discourse Wittgenstein Experience Development Private language ‘‘It is possible to say ‘I read timidity in his face’ but at all events the timidity does not seem to be merely associated, outwardly connected, with the face; but fear is there, alive, in the features If the features change slightly, we can speak of a change in the fear If we were asked ‘‘Can you think of this face as an expression of courage too?’’ – we should, as it were, not know how to lodge courage in these features’’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, line 537) * Tel.: ỵ1 978 837 5000; fax: ỵ1 978 837 5069 E-mail address: michael.mascolo@merrimack.edu 0732-118X/$ – see front matter Ó 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd doi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2008.04.004 Author's personal copy M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 258–274 259 ‘‘Human life and the beginnings of the intelligent behavior that we can see in the infant are not only measured by their physical manifestations as bodily processes, they are those processes, and are constituted by them’’ (Gallagher, 2005, p 1) How we, as laypersons and researchers, identify emotional states in other people? Traditionally, psychology has worked to identify itself as an objective science The goal of achieving objectivity has posed significant problems for approaching the concept of emotion On the one hand, emotion is often regarded to be a type of ‘‘inner’’ or ‘‘private’’ state, accessible only by the person experiencing the emotion On the other hand, the attempt to study emotional life objectively requires a focus on descriptions of publicly observable behavior This duality creates a vast gap between emotional experiences that are regarded as hidden from view and the need for objective description of public phenomena To bridge this gap, researchers who seek objectivity attempt to identify external indicators of putatively subjective emotional states Having done so, the task becomes one of establishing the validity of their measures: Do the chosen behavioral indicators provide valid or accurate indices of the private states they are intended to measure? However, this raises its own issues If emotions are understood as quintessentially private phenomena, there can be no ‘‘objective’’ way to establish a correspondence between external measures and internal states The researcher is left with the task of assessing correlations among multiple ‘‘external’’ measures (including self-reports) that are assumed to reflect inner states These difficulties follow as the consequence of the perennial tendency to separate a private ‘‘inner’’ sphere of mental activity from a public ‘‘outer’’ domain of observable behavior In what follows, drawing upon Wittgenstein’s (1953, 1980a, 1980b) thinking, I will articulate a discursive (Harre´ & Gillett, 1994; Shotter, 2000) approach to the identification of emotions in others The discussion will begin by articulating a general framework for understanding the structure of emotional processes (Mascolo & Fischer, 2007; Mascolo, Fischer, & Li, 2003) Thereafter, I will elaborate upon Wittgenstein’s (1953) arguments against the possibility of a ‘‘private language’’ and the ‘‘epistemic privacy’’ of experience Wittgenstein (1953) argued that terms such as ‘‘pain’’ or ‘‘grief’’ not gain their meaning by introspecting on private experience According to Wittgenstein, the use of words requires reference to public criteria that can be used to establish shared meaning Thus, reference to a presumably private inner experience cannot provide the consensual basis for determining the meaning of emotion terms; persons cannot point to their feelings Wittgenstein held that the natural expression of emotion provides the public criteria needed for establishing the meaning of emotion words For Wittgenstein, emotional expressions are not simply behaviors that are contingently related to a separate world of private experience; instead, they are public manifestations of emotional experiences (Bennett & Hacker, 2004; Ter Hark, 1990) There is not a private internal event and then also a separate and distinct external behavior that may or may not be related to an ‘‘inner’’ experience.1 Thus, it becomes possible to ‘‘read’’ emotional experience directly off of a person’s public expression In this way, the problem of identifying emotions in others is not one of attempting to ‘‘infer’’ a private internal state from an external expression; the public expression is part and parcel of the emotion process itself (Overgaard, 2005; Ter Hark, 1990) After elaborating the implications of these arguments for the analysis of emotional states, I will argue that Wittgenstein’s thinking about identifying emotions in other people is consistent with current embodied approaches to social relations and the development of intersubjectivity (Gallagher, 2005; Gallagher & Hutto, in press; Meltzoff & Brooks, 2007) Traditional approaches (but see Muăller & Runions, 2003) to the problem of ‘‘other minds’’ suggest that infants start off life as separate individuals who must work to ‘‘break into’’ social relations with others Current research of infant–caregiver interaction indicates that in embodied face-to-face interaction, very young infants and their caregivers are capable of co-creating highly coordinated forms of emotional activity in relation to each other Such observations suggest that infants are inherently social beings who are capable of establishing rudimentary forms of intersubjectivity even from birth Like Wittgenstein, current approaches to the Of course, with advanced development, it is possible to hide one’s feelings The fact that we can hide our feelings is indicative of the fact that they are not inherently hidden: ‘‘One can say: ‘He hides his feelings’ But that means that they are not a priori always hidden’’ (Wittgenstein, MS 169, pp 55–56, cited in Ter Hark, 1990, p 128) Author's personal copy 260 M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 258–274 development of intersubjectivity maintain that humans are not a priori cut off from the emotional life of others Infants are capable of establishing intersubjectivity with their caregivers through the vehicle of direct face-to-face emotional dialogue Building upon these ideas, I propose a discursive method for the third-person identification of emotions in others From this view, building upon the foundation of one’s inter-subjective and semiotically mediated relations with others, the identification of emotions in others proceeds as a dialogical process The third-person identification of emotions in others begins with everyday emotion terms Everyday emotion concepts specify a priori criteria – public patterns of expressed behavior – that people use in the language game of identifying emotion in others The activity of identifying emotions in others proceeds as a discursive process of testing and re-testing criteria specified in our everyday emotional concepts against the ‘‘data’’ of another person’s public emotional expressions Use of the discursive method not only allows identification of highly nuanced patterns of emotional experience in others, it also prompts reflective articulation of the tacit criteria that we use to identify such emotions I will illustrate the model through a discursive analysis of the role of emotion in the process of psychotherapy The anatomy of emotion Emotion is a form of felt activity However, emotional experiences differ from other forms of felt experience (e.g., ‘‘coldness’’, ‘‘nausea’’, the feel of a table) in that they exhibit intentionality (Bedford, 1962; Merleau-Ponty, 1945; Solomon, 1976) That is, they are about something or directed toward some object I am not simply afraid, angry or proud; I am afraid that it will rain; angry that James was late; or ashamed of myself As such, emotions consist of more than just feeling tone They operate like judgments, or involve judgments as part of their constitution Drawing from a large literature, it is helpful to think of emotional states with reference to three classes of components (Mascolo & Fischer, 2007; Mascolo et al., 2003; Mascolo & Griffin, 1998; Mascolo, Harkins, & Harakal, 2000) As indicated in Fig 1, emotions are composed of motive-relevant appraisals, a characteristic bodily experience or feeling tone (Kagan, 1984) and a motive-action tendency (Frijda, 1986) Appraisals refer to ongoing assessments of the relation between perceived events and a person’s motives, goals and concerns (Frijda, 1986; Scherer, 2004) Appraisal processes are generally immediate and non-deliberate Different I want my doll back; Sarah shouldn’t have taken it; I’m mad I feel as if I will “explode” I grabbed my doll I said mean things I yelled at Sarah (c) Reflective Self-Awareness (b) Overt Action Appraisal Feeling Tone (a) PRIMARY CONSCIOUS ACTIVITY (d) Sign-Mediated Cultural Meanings (a) Are you feeling mad? (b) Don’t just grab what you want! (c) Sarah shouldn’t have taken it (d) Where did you hear that word? (e) Talk about it, or else you’ll explode! (e) OTHER’S ACTION Fig The socio-emotional process The base gray arrow represents the child’s primary conscious activity-on-objects The arrow represents the intentional (directed) nature of action Emotional action is composed of an integration of appraisal, feeling tone, and overt action on the world Primary conscious activity is prelinguistic In social contexts, self-awareness emerges as the actions and words of others direct a child’s consciousness back on his or her own processes Reflective self-consciousness occurs as consciousness as consciousness takes itself as its own object This process is mediated by the use of signs that have their historical origins in public (socio-cultural) activity The child’s capacity to identify emotions is mediated by sign activity As the child appropriates the use of signs in discursive interactions with others, the sign selects subjective experience as part of the emotion concept itself In this way, both the public and private aspects of a classified experience of emotion are part of the conceptual structure of any given emotion concept Author's personal copy M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 258–274 261 emotional states reflect variations in the ways in which individuals appraise events relative to their motives and desires (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003) Positive emotions accompany motive-consistent appraisals; negative experiences arise when events clash with one’s motives Feeling tone refers to the phenomenal experience of an emotional state In emotion, it is often difficult for individuals to describe their felt states When they do, persons often resort to telling a story about the circumstances under which the feelings arose (Sarbin, 1989), describing the events that precipitate them (e.g., ‘‘It felt as if I were punched in the stomach’’), or invoke metaphor (e.g., ‘‘bubbly’’, ‘‘like walking on air’’) (Davitz, 1969) Motive-action tendencies consist of voluntary, involuntary and communicative actions that function in the service of the appraisals involved in the emotional experience For example, in anger, persons make appraisals that unwanted events are contrary to the ways in which they are supposed to be (i.e., a violation of what ought to be); persons describe their phenomenal states in terms of metaphors such as ‘‘feeling as if I’m going to explode’’, ‘‘tension’’, or ‘‘heat’’; involuntary (e.g., facial activity, vocal tone) and instrumental (i.e., speech, gesture, action) motive-action tendencies functions to restore the moral order to what it ought to be (de Rivera, 2006; Mascolo & Griffin, 1998; Mascolo, Mancuso, & Dukewich, 2006) In this way, a person’s motive-action tendency (i.e., to remove the violation to what should be) functions in the service of the goals, motives and concerns implicated in a person’s initial appraisal (i.e., violation of the way events ought to be) This tripartite structure of appraisal–affect–action is represented in Fig in terms of (b) the interlocking circles within (a) the darkened arrow The darkened arrow (a) represents primary conscious activity (Bickhard, 2005; Mascolo, 2004) The concept of primary consciousness reflects the idea that the immediate experience of emotion in action is pre-reflective (Gallagher, 2005; Thompson, 2007; Zahavi, 2005), that is, the experience itself is not the articulated object of consciousness Higher-order selfconsciousness (c) consists of awareness of one’s own emotional states as symbolic objects As such, self-consciousness requires a second-order act of reflection – an act of taking consciousness as its own object (Mascolo, 2004; Mead, 1934) Such reflective acts are typically mediated by socially embedded (e) language and other forms of symbolic activity, represented in Fig in terms of the dotted line (d) flowing through primary and secondary consciousness Are emotions private states? A common view of emotion – held by both laypersons and many scholars – states that emotions are private states that are accessible only to the person experiencing the emotion From this view, a person ‘‘knows’’ her emotional state through introspection or internal observation Terms such as ‘‘pain’’, ‘‘cold’’ or ‘‘joy’’ are labels that gain their meaning through reference to the internal states of individual actors Through introspection, individuals are able to identify their experiences and assign them labels Thus, emotion words gain their meaning from introspection of internal states Because third-person observers cannot experience the first-person states of others, observers can only make inferences about the experience of others In a series of provocative arguments, Wittgenstein (1953) rejects this common line of thinking Wittgenstein’s (1953) method is to examine the ways in which people use everyday language to refer to psychological events Wittgenstein rejected the idea that words have fixed meanings that describe the ways in which the world really is Instead, he held that words gain meaning from how they are used in public discourse for particular purposes Wittgenstein used the term grammar to refer to the rules governing the use of any given term He invoked the concept of language game to refer to the idea that words are used always within the context of everyday social practices for particular purposes The same word can be used in different ways in different language games Thus, the meaning of the utterance ‘‘Slab!’’ depends upon whether one is involved in the language game of naming an object (i.e., ‘‘that is a ‘slab’’’) or making a request (i.e., ‘‘bring me the slab’’) For Wittgenstein, the key to understanding a phenomenon is to understand the grammar of the words we use in language games that make reference to that phenomenon In his grammatical analysis, Wittgenstein argued against the idea that individual actors have privileged knowledge of their internal states Wittgenstein held that emotion terms not Author's personal copy 262 M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 258–274 make reference to internal private events that are cut off from the view of others People not learn to identify their emotions by introspecting and then assigning labels to their experience Wittgenstein argued that if psychological states were accessible only to persons experiencing them, there would be no public basis for teaching the correct use of inner state terms To be sure, people have experiences However, without public criteria to which people can refer to teach and verify the correct use of any given term, there would be no way to judge whether or not the term was being used appropriately Each person might look within herself and say, ‘‘This is pain/ coldness/joy’’; however, there would be no way of judging whether or not interlocutors were making reference to the same events This point is eloquently illustrated by Wittgenstein’s (1953) ‘‘beetle in a box’’ example: ‘‘Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a ‘beetle’ No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle – Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing – But suppose the word ‘beetle’ had a use in these people’s language? – If so it would not be used as the name of a thing The thing in the box has no place in the language game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty’’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, p 537) From this view, it follows that words like ‘‘pain’’, ‘‘joy’’ and ‘‘fear’’ not get their meaning from looking within the self and identifying inner states Wittgenstein maintained that there can be no such ‘‘private language’’; without public criteria for verifying whether or not words are used appropriately, there can be no language at all Wittgenstein held that natural emotional expressions provide public criteria for creating rules governing the use of emotion terms in everyday speech When a child bangs his knee, he naturally cries out and rubs the affected area This public expression provides the criteria for the construction of a grammar for the concept of ‘‘pain’’ Thereupon, when a child exhibits pain behavior, adults engage the child in language games that demonstrate the meaning of the term ‘‘pain’’ The child then appropriates such terms and expressions to express her pain Upon banging a knee, instead of crying, a child might say ‘‘Ouch!’’, ‘‘That hurts!’’ or ‘‘I’m in pain.’’ In this way, emotion words gain their meaning through public discourse, not through private introspection According to Wittgenstein, once acquired, utterances such as ‘‘that hurts’’ or ‘‘I’m in pain’’ come to function as replacements for natural emotional reactions For Wittgenstein, to say, ‘‘That hurts’’ after having scraped a knee does not follow from an act of introspection Instead, the utterance functions as a higher-order expression of emotion that replaces more basic natural reactions Thus, statements such as ‘‘I’m angry with you’’ are not descriptions of inner experiences, but are akin to expressions such as ‘‘ouch!’’ or ‘‘help!’’ In making this point, Wittgenstein (1980a) states, ‘‘If I call out ‘Help!’, is that a description of my state of mind? And is it not an expression of a wish? It is not as much that as any other cry is?’’ (p 90; line 464) This is not to say that individuals not experience emotion or cannot describe emotion For Wittgenstein, emotional experience is immediate Descriptions of emotional experience are possible, but only as a form of reflective activity – not as a process of private introspection (Bennett & Hacker, 2004) Thus, although experience is immediate, descriptions of experience are reflective actions that require skill in the use of psychological terms whose origins arise within discursive activity A crucial assumption underlying these ideas is that public expressions of emotion are not simply ‘‘external behaviors’’ contingently related to ‘‘internal’’ experience Instead, expressions of emotion (e.g., facial, vocal, motor action) are manifestations of the emotion itself There is not an internal state and also a set of contingent expressions; instead, what we call an emotional expression is part and parcel of the emotion process itself This applies to both natural and linguistic expressions of emotion For Wittgenstein (1980a), ‘‘the words ‘I am happy’ are a bit of the behavior of joy’’ (p 88, line 450) Ter Hark (1990) clearly articulates the relation between expression and experience in Wittgenstein’s philosophy: ‘‘The basis for the meaning of the [emotion] concept is formed by the rule-governed manifestations of facial expressions, primitive reactions and actions The inner is not presented via this basis – as if the inner is a domain behind or parallel to the outer and something which one Author's personal copy M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 258–274 263 should also be able to know in that capacity – the inner is expressed in it The outer is expressive for the inner and this expressive relation is internal’’ (p 141, emphasis in original).2 Thus, emotional experience is not something that is encased within individuals; emotional expressions reveal emotion directly to third party observers Third-person observers use existing emotion concepts to ‘‘read emotion’’ off of a person’s expression This is not to say that third party observers have certainty of their interlocutor’s emotional states Wittgenstein’s point is that the thoughts and experiences of one’s interlocutor are not in principle hidden Instead, they are merely manifest to self and other in different ways The idea that experience is normally expressed in bodily actions is eloquently articulated by Ter Hark (1990), who writes, ‘‘If the inner seems concealed, this is not because it is hidden by the outer, but because the outer is hidden’’ (p 144) This issue is further illuminated in Wittgenstein’s analysis of the asymmetrical grammar of the term ‘‘know’’ Wittgenstein noted that we not ordinarily say, ‘‘I know that I am in pain’’ Instead, a person is said to simply be in pain or to have pain The person’s experience of pain is immediate and her statement ‘‘I’m in pain’’ is an expression of that pain However, having observed another person’s pain behavior, on the basis of public displays, a third-person observer can ‘‘read the emotion’’ off the persons’ bodily expression In this way, a thirdperson observer can be said to know of another person’s pain Wittgenstein’s analysis can be illuminated through reference to Fig As indicated in Point (a), a person experiences her inner life directly, but pre-reflectively When inner life is publicly expressed through voluntary, involuntary and communicative action, as indicated in Point (e) in Fig 1, it becomes knowable to a third party At this point, throughout childhood, parents and other interlocutors use language (d) to bestow meaning onto the child’s publicly displayed emotional experience Appropriation of this language by the child first comes to replace or transform the primary expression of emotion (e.g., ‘‘I’m mad at you!’’) With the development of a child’s capacity for symbolically mediated self-reflection (c), a child uses emotion language and the concepts to ‘‘know’’ her experience Experience, intersubjectivity and the problem of ‘‘other minds’’ As indicated above, in rejecting the idea that sensations and emotions are ‘‘private objects’’, Wittgenstein held that public expressions are bodily manifestations of emotional experiences Words like ‘‘pain’’ and ‘‘joy’’ cannot gain their meaning from reference to private events; they require access to public criteria These statements raise several important questions that require attention The first concerns the question of whether or not experience plays any role in our language games about emotion The assertion that sensation and emotion words not gain their meaning through private introspection can be seen as meaning that experience is irrelevant to the meaning of emotion words It is easy to interpret Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of private language as follows: ‘‘If the meaning of emotion words cannot be established through introspection upon private experiences, then experience is irrelevant or does not exist; only behavior matters’’ The problem with this interpretation is that it continues to rely on the assumption of a duality between the ‘‘private’’ and the ‘‘public’’ If we retain the dichotomy between a necessarily private inner world and a separate and distinct world of public behavior, it is easy to attribute to Wittgenstein the argument that experience is irrelevant to our language games However, as Overgaard (2005) has argued, Wittgenstein’s point was not to declare the inaccessibility of a really existing world of ‘‘private experience’’, it was to demonstrate the absurdity of the argument that there can be private experience that is a priori separate and distinct from public expression Thus, the statement that sensation and emotion language gain their consensual meanings through the capacity to make reference to public criteria does not imply that experience is irrelevant to everyday emotion concepts It simply implies that experience is not independent of expression, and that we gain the capacity to talk about experience through reference to public expression A second related question concerns the issue of how it is possible that emotion can be ‘‘read directly’’ from a person’s bodily experience In making this argument, Wittgenstein (1980b) states: An internal relation is one that is defined logically rather than contingently To the extent that the public expression provides the basis of the emotion concept, the concept is logically structured by the expression Author's personal copy 264 M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 258–274 In general I not surmise fear in him – I see it I not feel that I am deducing the probable existence of something inside from something outside; rather it is as if the human face were in a way translucent and that I were seeing it not in reflected light but rather in its own light (p 33, line 170) Such assertions raise important questions: How is it that we are able to ‘‘see’’ a person’s expression as an emotional one? That is, why we experience another’s furrowing brows as an expression of anger, rather than as simply a furrowed brow? As indicated above, Wittgenstein (1980a, 1980b) rejected the traditional notion of the inaccessibility of ‘‘other minds’’ The traditional Cartesian approach casts persons as isolated individuals who have transparent access to their own inner states From this view, there is an asymmetry between first- and third-person access to experiential states; although individual actors are said to have first-person access to their own subjective states, they can only know the subjective life of others indirectly Third-person observers must infer another person’s subjectivity from observation of her behavior From this view, it becomes possible to doubt the existence of other minds, or at least to doubt that one can ever know the ‘‘contents’’ of another person’s mind Wittgenstein, however, rejected this asymmetry In its place, he offered a more nuanced conception First, in asserting that emotion in others can be read directly from embodied expressions, Wittgenstein maintained that persons can be in direct contact with the experience of others Second, although he asserted that persons experience sensation and emotion directly, he rejected the idea that individuals have transparent access to inner experience as a system of ‘‘private objects’’ Thus, according to Wittgenstein (1992), ‘‘my thoughts are not hidden from the other, but are just open to him in a different way than they are to me’’ (pp 34–35) Thus, although there is room for uncertainty in third-person access to the experiential states of others, the other is not a priori closed off from the self Persons not enter social interactions as isolated individuals The embodiment of emotion in expression functions to bridge the experiential gap between interlocutors This line of thinking bears great similarity to classic and contemporary embodied (Gallagher, 2005), phenomenological (Gallagher & Hutto, in press; Overgaard, 2005, 2006; Thompson, 2007) and developmental (Gallagher & Hutto, in press; Trevarthen, 1998) approaches to intersubjectivity and the problem of ‘‘other minds’’ On the one hand, psychologists have often assumed that infants enter the world as pre-social individuals who must work to break into social interactions (see Piaget, 1966; but see Muăller & Runions, 2003) Others have maintained that infants begin life unable to differentiate self from others (Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, 1975) In contrast to both of these perspectives, current developmental theory and research paint a picture of infants as social beings from birth onwards Much of this work is directed toward identifying the origins and developmental course of different forms of intersubjectivity in infancy (Stern, 1985; Trevarthen, 1993a) Intersubjectivity can be defined in terms of the capacity for shared or coordinated experience within episodes of joint action (Matusov, 1996; Rommetveit, 1979; Trevarthen, 1993a) Research suggests that infants are capable of establishing intersubjectivity with their caregivers from very early ages From this view, the capacity for inter-subjective interaction provides the foundation for later social and intellectual development; it is not merely a developmental outcome This contention is supported by a variety of different research programs In their foundational work on the development of intersubjectivity, Trevarthen and his colleagues differentiated between primary and secondary forms of intersubjectivity that occur between infants and their caregivers According to Trevarthen (1979), the capacity for primary intersubjectivity emerges in the first months of life in the form of coordinated affective interaction between infant and mother dyads Early in infancy, infants and their caregivers engage in mutually regulated face-to-face interaction (Fogel, 1993) Early in infancy, in face-to-face interactions with emotionally sensitive adults, infants demonstrate a capacity for emotional interchange (Trevarthen, 1979), regularity in the timing of facial actions (Trevarthen, 1993b), rudimentary forms of turn taking (Trevarthen, 1993c) Gallagher and Hutto (in press) have suggested that these emotional exchanges suggest a capacity for immediate and pre-reflective forms of interaction and coordinated experience By virtue of being immersed in direct sensori-motor-affective exchanges with a caregiver, the infant is able to experience the bodily actions of the other in terms of a rudimentary sense of goal-directedness Beginning around months of age, infants become capable of establishing secondary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen & Hubley, 1978) At this important juncture, within social interaction, infants become aware of their co-affectivity Author's personal copy M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 258–274 265 or co-agency with another person (Fogel & DeKoeyer-Laros, 2007) This is evidenced by the capacity to establish joint attention with others, to use gestures such as pointing, or to follow the gaze of another person Each of these capacities indicates a capacity for joint action, coordinated goals, and/or shared reference Meltzoff and Moore (1977, 1983) have demonstrated that neonates are capable of imitating facial actions.3 A series of studies has shown that infants are capable of making discriminations in their imitations (e.g., responding with tongue-protrusion rather than lip-protrusion to an extended tongue) Neonatal imitation – even if it is considered to be a rudimentary or reflexive act – is an extraordinary capacity In the case of facial imitation, the infant is unable to see his own facial movements The capacity for neonatal imitation thus suggests the presence of a foundational capacity for the cross-modal mapping of behavioral observation and execution More importantly, the finding suggests the capacity for a rudimentary form of intersubjectivity even at birth The recent discovery of ‘‘mirror neurons’’ (Rizzolatti, 2005) has animated discussion of the significance of neonatal imitation and other forms of intersubjectivity ‘‘Mirror neurons’’ consist of neurons, discovered in the prefrontal cortex of monkeys, that fire both when observing behavior in others and in the first-person execution of the same action The finding that a common neurological system mediates both the observation and production of similar classes of motor behavior can provide a framework for understanding the origins of neonatal imitation, but also for the capacity for inter-subjective experience and action in general Theorists and researchers have proposed that the ‘‘mirror neuron system’’ may provide a framework for understanding imitation (Meltzoff & Brooks, 2007), the development of empathy (Bråten, 2007), language (Arbib, 2006) as well as social deficits in autism (Gallese, Eagle, & Migone, 2007; Hobson & Lee, 1999; Williams, Waiter, & Gilchrist, 2006) Thus, in Wittgenstein, there is both experience and behavior However, Wittgenstein did not speak of experience and then behavior, but instead of embodied experience; expression is part of the embodiment of experience Because experience is not an a priori hidden phenomenon, it is possible to speak of knowing another person’s experience In development, infant and caregiver come to know each other’s expressed experience through the embodied medium of face-to-face interaction By the time that they begin to acquire language, children have already gained a richly inter-subjective (although pre-reflective) appreciation of the emotional life of self and other Children acquire the capacity to play the language game of identifying emotions in others by learning to use emotion words that have their consensual basis in public expressions of emotion In this way, everyday emotion concepts specify public criteria for the identification of emotions in others Building upon this assumption, the discussion now turns to the elaboration of a discursive approach to identifying emotions in others Using the discursive approach, the identification of emotion in others proceeds through a dialectical interplay between (a) intuitive and pre-reflective sign-mediated judgments and (b) reflections upon the basis of those judgments That is, the empirical observation of emotions in others (a) begins with using everyday emotion words to make intuitive, pre-reflective classification of another’s emotional experience; (b) this is followed by the process of reflecting upon and making explicit the public criteria that mediate such implicit pre-reflective judgments; (c) this reflective process continues until the meaning to be identified in the other person’s emotional expression has been exhausted This dialectical process has a kind of dual effect It not only provides rich and nuanced descriptions of another person’s emotional experience, but it also functions to make explicit the largely implicit criteria that govern our use of emotion words to identify emotions in others Conceptualizing the process in this manner builds on Wittgenstein’s thinking in two ways First, the discursive method provides an empirical tool for identifying emotional experience from a person’s public expressions Second, because the discursive process prompts reflection on the ways in which public criteria are indicated by everyday emotion words, it helps to make explicit the largely implicit grammars that structure everyday emotion concepts Claims of infant imitation remain controversial Some evidence suggests that facial imitation disappears by two months of age (see Gouin-Decarie & Ricard, 1996; Muăller & Runions, 2003) Author's personal copy 266 M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 258–274 Third-person analyses of emotion: a discursive approach How can researchers, from a third-person perspective, go about the task of identifying emotion in others? There are a variety of methods for identifying emotions in others The most frequent approach, of course, is self-report Besides their ease of use, it is likely that the use of self-reports in psychological research is motivated by the assumption that they provide a direct index of a person’s private emotional experience.4 As indicated throughout, Wittgenstein held that emotional experiences are not necessarily transparent to first-person actors To Wittgenstein, during the course of an emotional episode, the utterance ‘‘I am happy’’ functions as an expression of a person’s emotional state, not a description of the experience Individuals are capable of introspecting upon and describing their experiences However, introspections involve secondary (and higher-order) acts of reflection that are mediated by the available emotion lexicon In either case, the emotion word gains its consensual meaning through criteria represented in the public realm of discourse; they are not the result of a transparent access to a private emotional state A second tradition involves the identification of patterns of bodily expression – primarily facial actions – as expressions of emotional states For example, Ekman, Friesen, and Hagar (2002) have developed a highly precise system for identifying facial expressions of what they call ‘‘basic’’ emotions (anger, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, etc.) The affinity between Ekman’s and Wittgenstein’s approach to emotion is revealed in Ekman’s (1993) statement that ‘‘expression is a central feature of emotion, not simply an outer manifestation of an internal phenomena [sic]’’ (footnote 1, p 384) Ekman’s classification system has much to be recommended Despite the similarity between Ekman’s and Wittgenstein’s focus on bodily expression, there are also differences Ekman’s research program has worked to establish the universality of basic categories of emotional facial activity In so doing, he and his colleagues have shown that there is wide agreement among members of different cultures in assigning emotion names to patterns of facial activity for each basic emotion This is an important and useful finding However, from the perspective of Wittgenstein’s approach, the attempt to use self-reports to establish links between facial action and emotional states amounts to a tautology If natural expressions provide the public criteria that define everyday emotion categories, then the same conceptual systems would be used to classify facial patterns and presumably private emotional states From this view, what Ekman has produced would be evidence of the universality of the natural expressions that provide the public basis for the development of consensual emotion categories A discursive approach provides an alternative methodology for the third-person identification of emotion The discursive model proceeds as a refinement of the everyday dialogical processes involved in coming to know other’s minds The discursive approach begins with the application of everyday emotion concepts to the task of identifying emotional experience When we play the language game of identifying emotions in others, we use everyday emotions to classify public expressions as they arise within the process of discursive activity within particular socio-cultural contexts Although public expressions provide the point of entry, the identification of emotion in others requires analysis of the meaning of their continuously changing embodied expressions within the discursive context in which they occur As such, the language game of identifying emotional states in others rests upon the foundation of the entire history of an observer’s verbal and non-verbal inter-subjective exchanges with others In this way, when identifying emotional states in others, the observers themselves function as the research instrument (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995) The discursive approach begins with videotaped recording of ongoing emotional activity of one or more persons An observer or team of observers views the videotape One can think of the process of This assumption is represented in a passage by Ortony, Clore, and Collins (1988), who write: ‘‘There is as yet no known objective measure that can conclusively establish that a person is experiencing some particular emotion In practice, however, this does not normally constitute a problem because we are willing to treat people’s reports of their emotions as valid Because emotions are subjective experiences, like the sensation of color or pain, people have direct access to them So that if a person is experiencing fear, for example, that person cannot be mistaken that he or she is experiencing fear’’ (p 9) Wittgenstein would argue that the statement, ‘‘the person cannot be mistaken that he or she is experiencing fear’’ constitutes a conceptual confusion For Wittgenstein, statements like ‘‘I feel afraid!’’ function as expressions of fear, not descriptions of fear An expression of fear can neither be ‘‘correct’’ nor ‘‘mistaken’’; ‘‘doubt’’ has no application to the expression of emotion Author's personal copy M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 258–274 267 analyzing emotion expressed by videotaped individuals in terms of the discursive metaphor of ‘‘interrogating the data’’ Fig provides a representation of the experience–reflection cycle, which describes the dialectical flow of the process of interrogating the data of another person’s expressed behavior In this process, it is helpful to differentiate between the level of researcher’s experience (observation) and his or her reflection The interrogation process involves a dialogical interplay between experiencing and reflecting on an observer’s experience of the other’s expressed emotion Although there is no single set of steps in the experience–reflection process, a typical interrogation might proceed as follows: (a) observers view a videotaped emotional display; (b) drawing upon everyday emotion language, observers classify the expressed emotion into one or another emotion category; (c) observers reflect upon the basis of the categorization: ‘‘What expressed behaviors am I using to make this judgment?’’; ‘‘Is the term I have chosen consistent with these expressed features?’’; (d) observers re-evaluate the meaning of the emotion term against the videotaped data: ‘‘What other indicators of emotion appear?’’; ‘‘Is the target’s display consistent with my assessment?’’; ‘‘What aspects of the display are inconsistent with my classification?’’; and (e) observers continue the experience–reflection cycle until they reach some consensual degree of corroboration between the data of their experience and their reflections about the appropriate use of emotion language It is noteworthy that the discursive approach does not require the elaboration of a formal classification system for identifying specific behaviors viewed as indicative of specific emotions There are many reasons why this is the case First, emotional experiences are very subtle processes; the meaning of a given emotional display often relies upon the significance of non-obvious expressive elements Such elements are difficult to capture in formal coding schemes Second, there are a wide range of expressive behaviors that can serve as criteria for any given emotion category Formal classification schemes often focus on subsets of expressive behavior (e.g., facial, vocal, postural) and thus miss expressive acts that arise in social interaction in non-obvious ways Third, observers are often unaware of the basis of their classifications The discursive process provides a method for identifying criteria that are implicit rather than explicit in our emotional classification systems Finally, although existing emotion concepts are defined in terms of a priori systems of implicit or explicit criteria, emotion taxonomies can evolve It is possible that fine-grained analysis of emotional expression can reveal forms of emotional life that are difficult to capture using our existing emotion lexicon The discursive approach thus provides a means for the development and evolution of our existing emotion lexicon 4.1 Illustrating the discursive approach To illustrate the discursive approach, consider a study of the role of emotion in psychotherapy processes The goal of the study was to identify the role of the client’s emotional experience in organizing psychological change in the client over the course of the session The case involves a 44-year-old woman, hospitalized for severe depression and suicidal ideation, who was receiving short term dynamic psychotherapy (McCollough, 1998) Videotaped interactions between the client and the Reflection Experience Fig Experience–reflection cycle Third-person analysis of emotions in others begins with direct experience of the other’s expressed emotion Observer(s) draw upon everyday emotion concepts to classify the other’s expressed emotion In acts of reflection, observers identify the implicit or explicit criteria they have used in their initial categorization of the other’s expression Using these criteria, observers successively evaluate the fit between their nominated emotion categories and elements of the other’s embodied expression The experience–reflection cycle continues until the observer(s) are able to corroborate the various criteria used to define nominated emotion categories with their articulation of the various elements expressed in the other’s emotional display Author's personal copy 268 M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 258–274 therapist provided the data of interest As part of the study, researchers attempted to identify specific emotional states exhibited by the client in selected interactive episodes Toward this end, the team adopted an explicitly discursive approach When viewing the client’s behavior for any given conversational turn, the team worked together to interrogate the videotaped data as well as each other’s sense of the meaning of the client’s expressed emotion In so doing, members of the team asked themselves and each other a series of questions: (a) what is the client feeling in this context? (b) What elements of the client’s expression support my sense of the client’s state? (c) What cues are inconsistent with my characterization? (d) What other expressive qualities are present? (e) What does the pattern of expressive acts suggest? Using this method, the team relied upon their everyday emotion concepts to classify public behavior When offering an interpretation, an observer was instructed to seek supporting evidence – no matter what form or how subtle – from the videotape This procedure had a dual effect: not only did it produce richly textured descriptions of the client’s emotional states, it also forced observers to make explicit (and refine) the public criteria they used to define any given emotion concept To illustrate this process, consider the analysis of a brief segment of videotaped behavior The psychotherapy session in question is organized with reference to the client’s sense that ‘‘when I’m on stage [at work, doing good for other people], I matter, but when I’m off stage [at home, all alone], I don’t matter’’ Over the course of the therapy session, the therapist worked to induce a sense in the client that others cared about her and thus that she mattered ‘‘off stage’’ At one point in the session, the client was able to identify a specific incident in which she indeed ‘‘mattered off stage’’ – an occasion when her current and past therapist talked about the client when the client was home alone This set up the following exchange: T: When you were home alone, did you feel like you mattered to Carol? That you’d be in her thoughts and in her heart? C: Even just that question Thoughts, yeah Heart, oooh well, I don’t know about heart In this example, the analysis centers on the client’s emotion during her conversational turn, which lasted 3.75 s Fig provides a detailed analysis of the emotional behaviors exhibited by the client over the course of the client’s turn As indicated in Fig 3, the client’s turn is divided into six phases Prior to the point at which she began to speak, the client sat motionless as she reflected, with eyes lowered and down-turned lips, on the therapist’s question In Phase I, raising her brows while looking away with her eyes closed, the client let out a brief laugh In Phase II, focusing her gaze on the therapist, the client smiled as she said, in a monotone voice, ‘‘Even just that question’’ In Phase III, the intonation of her voiced rose Gesturing with her hand and accentuating with her head, she said ‘‘Thoughts, yeah’’ In Phase IV, the client tilted her head to the left, with rising intonation, the client said, ‘‘Heart?’’ Thereafter, in a gradually lowered voice, the client quickly said, ‘‘Oooooooh’’ In Phase V, the client lifted her hands in front of her upper torso and lower face, and, with her palms up, produced a ‘‘pushing away’’ gesture Appearing to hide slightly behind her hands, with gradually lowered intonation and an increasingly guttural voice, the client quickly said, ‘‘well, I don’t know about heart’’ In Phase VI, with her hands still raised in a ‘‘pushing away’’ motion, the client closed her eyes and looked away as she again emitted a brief laugh (hih hih) Four members of the research team (M, the author; T and P, two male research assistants; and G, a female research assistant) participated in a discursive analysis of this segment After the first viewing of the segment, the following discourse occurred: M: Okay so what have we got? She’s laughing What did we say about laughing before? T: That we didn’t generally associate that kind of laughter it’s like embarrassed or an ashamed laugh It’s not like ha it’s a haaa! M: Others? T: I put it as an anxious laugh P: I think that she’s trying to push away, put her guard up or something like that M: Cuz she’s making a gesture of pushing it away ‘‘Even just that question, thoughts yeah, heart, oh well, I don’t know about heart’’ G: Because if we’re gonna say that embarrassment is unwanted exposure she’s trying to block it by pushing it away Author's personal copy 269 M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 258–274 Time (seconds) (I) (II) (III) (IV) (V) (VI) Relative Loudness 1.0 75 50 25 E ven just that ques tion Thoughts yeah Heart? Ooooooo wellIdon’tknowboutheart Laugh Smile Clear Voice Gutteral Voice Raised Brow Eyes Closed Gaze at Therapist Gaze Averted Head Upright Head Tilted Head Behind Hands Head Accentuates Gesture Accentuates “Pushing Away” Heavy in Chair Fig Pattern of client’s emotional activity over time during a conversational turn The client’s utterance is divided into six phases The top panel traces the contour of the relative loudness (intonation) of the client’s utterance The bottom panel lists a series of target emotional behaviors and the duration of their evocation T: I never associate embarrassment with unwanted exposure M: What you associate embarrassment with? T: Embarrassment is like something you’ve done that you don’t want to talk about I just contradicted myself This discussion illustrates several functions of the discursive approach First, by focusing on the meaning of the client’s ‘‘inconsistent’’ laughter, the team began to entertain the idea that the client experienced embarrassment or anxiety Second, the introduction of the concept of ‘‘embarrassment’’ prompted reflection on the meaning of that term T initially rejected G’s suggestion that the client’s embarrassment signaled ‘‘unwanted exposure’’ However, as T attempted to articulate his own (implicit) conception of embarrassment, he realized its similarity to G’s statement The process thus prompted articulation of a previously implicit emotion concept After viewing the segment for the third time, the following dialogue occurred: M: She’s thinking and the laugh is abrupt! G: It’s like she’s trying to allow it in and she can’t T: It’s like oh the laugh she’s like looking up immediately She looks up and away; the whole time she is staring at the therapist and then when she laughs she looks up and away from her Author's personal copy 270 M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 258–274 G: But she’s trying to accept it and she can’t M: What’s the ‘‘it’’ that she can’t accept? G: The feeling in her heart M: I think you’re right, but I think that that comes in a few seconds I’m going with the hypothesis right now that that comes in a few seconds because what she’s talking about right now is the question; I think she’s laughing about the question; I can’t put my finger on it, it’s like P: Just the idea of M: The idea of the question Just prior to this segment, G suggested that the client feels shame because she doesn’t feel that she deserves to be cared about This prompted a search for public indicators of the client’s shame T suggested the client’s shame can be justified in terms of the laugh and gaze aversion that followed her self-negating statement Building on her previous utterance, G suggested that the client was afraid of ‘‘letting in’’ the therapist’s care Drawing the team’s attention back to the transcript, M noted that the client’s attention was focused on the question posed by her (present) therapist, not the care provided by her previous therapist In so doing, he suggested that it is the question being posed to her that the client does not want to ‘‘let in’’ This suggests that the question posed some sort of threat to the client; the client’s gesture functions to ‘‘push away’’ the emotional implications of the question The following dialogue illustrates a core principle of the discursive analysis – namely the need to return to the videotape to make explicit interpretations the basis of which is not yet clear: G: I think that to talk about her laughing because a statement is threatening another statement, I think that it’s too interpretive M: Why you think that? Why you think that that’s what we are doing, we’re interpreting Go ahead G: I know, I just do, I just don’t think it’s right M: Tell me why! G: I can’t; I don’t know why M: Well we, let’s play with it; let’s play with it; let’s look at the tape, let’s look at the materials, this is the core of it! What – there must be something there that’s making you feel that way What is it? Can we make it explicit? Can we see it again? Here is the idea – the idea is that if you feel that way, either you’re not seeing something that I’m seeing; or you are seeing something that you haven’t made articulate yet; see the difference? I want to find out what or both of those things are In this segment, M notes that if G holds a particular interpretation that M does not, there must be something in the tape that supports that position (or vice-versa) M invites G to re-examine the tape to find evidence that supports G’s position After another viewing, the following dialogue occurs M: Now I look at this and I say, ‘‘Even just that question’’ I’m gonna say it different, ‘‘Even just that question raises my insecurity’’ I’m changing what I said before now – ‘‘Even just that question re-raises my insecurity’’ Here I was saying that I was mattering, but now I’m listening to your question and I see well maybe, you know I could have been mattering but I probably wasn’t I don’t even want to entertain the question – I’m pushing the question away – because it’s too threatening I still can’t put my finger on the laugh the laugh is it’s almost a defensive laugh G: I think that the laugh is that she is trying to block that type of care from Carol She’s trying to make the relationships not as serious? M: I see it as almost just the opposite Here – if that’s true, if what you’re saying is true, what you with ‘‘Even just that question’’ – the question is what’s threatening G: It’s not believable as P was saying before, it’s [the therapist’s care] not believable M: Okay, can I try this on you? Is it the idea that they could have cared for me is not believable? Or it’s too good to be true G: [Immediately] Too good to be true P: Too good to be true Author's personal copy M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 258–274 271 M: You say that with conviction P: That’s what I meant In this segment, the team attempts to articulate what the client experiences as threatening The process of corroborating multiple sources of interpretive data is illustrated by M’s question to G: ‘‘If what you’re saying is true [the client is question by the therapist’s actual care], what you with ‘Even just that question’?’’ This question invites discussion on how to corroborate a piece of evidence against alternative interpretations G’s response, ‘‘it’s not believable’’ prompts further differentiation of the concept of believability, which leads to a consensus within the group that the client may see the therapist’s care as ‘‘too good to be true’’ This interpretation provides a bridge that holds out the possibility of integrating both G’s and M’s seemingly conflicting interpretations: M: That question is scary because if I let in the idea that she really cared for me, I would open up myself to evidence that maybe she didn’t care for me – or won’t in the future I would be sitting with this notion that she cared for me and I’d be really comfortable, and then something would happen and I would find that she didn’t care for me and then I’d be back in this crazy state again P: Just the fact that she might not believe that she matters, she might not believe it because she might think at some point she won’t she doesn’t matter G: I agree P: With one comes the other Maybe she’s got some thought in her head that if she matters to somebody there can also be that chance that at some point she will not matter and she doesn’t want that loss At this point, the team arrived at a consensus about the meaning of the client’s verbalizations and emotional behavior Through discursive activity, the team was able to articulate the extremely subtle nature of the emotional threat that the client experienced as a result of considering that her therapist could have genuine feelings of care for her The team was able to characterize the client’s emotional state as a kind of fear of being rejected in close relationships Against the backdrop of sadness exhibited throughout the session, the primary behaviors that corroborate this proposition include (a) the client’s laugher when saying ‘‘even just that question’’; (b) her sense of not mattering in the therapist’s ‘‘heart’’; (c) her laughter about ‘‘not mattering’’; and (d) the ‘‘pushing away’’ gesture that accompanied her statement, ‘‘I don’t know about heart Although the client’s fear is intense, it is not indicated by any traditional indicators of fear or anxiety (e.g., a fearful face) The primary cue to the client’s fear is the ‘‘pushing away’’ gesture that occurs with other emotional indicators at a particular point and in time in the context of the flow of the therapeutic exchange The client’s gesture is an unlikely expression of emotion It gains its meaning as an indicator of threat through metaphor (McNeill, 1992); the client ‘‘pushes away’’ the ‘‘question’’ as someone might physically push away an object moving toward them In addition, through these discussions, the team identified a rich complex of emotions in this short segment of videotape These include (a) a backdrop of sadness not being able to matter to other people Her sadness is reflected in this segment through her lethargic posture and her down-turned lips; (b) shame about unworthiness as indicated by the client’s negative self-evaluative language, the alteration in her gaze to and away from the therapist, and by her ‘‘pushing away’’ the (self-evaluative) question posed to her; (c) embarrassment in having these feelings exposed, as indicated by smiling and laughing in the context of negative self-evaluations as well as her alterations in gaze Conclusion: emotion as an embodied process According to Wittgenstein, emotional expressions operate as public manifestations of emotional experiences From this view, emotion is not a process that is inherently or even ordinarily hidden from view from third party observers Persons use public expressions to ‘‘read’’ emotion directly off of a person’s embodied activity For Wittgenstein, public expressions of emotion are not simply adjuncts to the concept or experience of emotion; they are part of the structure of the concept of emotion itself (see Bennett & Hacker, 2004) Everyday emotion words specify the public criteria that people use to ‘‘read experience off’’ another’s emotional expressions These propositions suggest that any act of identifying emotion in another person must begin with our everyday emotion concepts The discursive Author's personal copy 272 M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 258–274 approach to identifying emotion employed in the present paper is built on this foundational assumption From the standpoint of the discursive approach, the process of identifying emotions in others involves a dialectical interplay between implicit sign-mediated judgment and explicit reflection To identify emotions in others, observers (a) use everyday emotion words to make intuitive, pre-reflective classifications of another’s emotional experience Although such judgments are mediated by the use of everyday emotion words, we are not necessarily or ordinarily aware of the implicit criteria that we use to make such judgments To become aware of those criteria, it becomes necessary to (b) reflect upon and make explicit the patterns of public expressions that mediate an observer’s implicit pre-reflective judgments Making such criteria explicit serves several important functions First, it clarifies the criteria and rules that govern the (often tacit) meaning and use of everyday emotion words The mere explication of such criteria serves an important function for psychological theory Many of the deepest insights we have about psychological phenomena come from the process of making explicit in reflection what is only implicit in our everyday experience (Shotter, 1975) Many of our judgments of emotions in others rely upon subtle distinctions that are difficult to articulate As a result, even though some of the more obvious criteria for identifying emotion are well known (e.g., Ekman, 1993), the processes by which we make discriminations across the full range of emotional experience are highly contextualized and unclear Thus, the act of making our implicit emotion classification criteria explicit serves an important theoretical and empirical purpose Second, within the discursive approach, when an observer is able to make explicit the criteria she uses to identify emotion in any given context, she gains further control over the empirical process The discursive process continues as the observer tests multiple aspects of the other’s expressed emotion against increasingly explicated criteria for identifying emotion The judgment–reflection cycle continues until the meaning of the other’s emotional expression is exhausted, and/or until one reaches clarity on the pre-empirical criteria that mediate the classification of emotion The result is an extremely rich theoretical and descriptive accounting of the emotional experience of the other Wittgenstein’s approach to experience and expression rejects what Shotter (2000) calls the doctrine of ‘‘radical hiddenness’’ in psychology The ‘‘inner’’ and the ‘‘outer’’ not function as separate and distinct spheres of activity; what we take to be ‘‘inner’’ experience is normally expressed as public action Embodied expression of experience can take a variety of different forms, including facial or vocal expressions, language use, posture, gesture, or even biological concomitants of embodied action The criteria that we use to identify various classes of embodied experiences in terms of one or another category of emotion are already prefigured to some degree in our public use of language; they cannot be induced by empirical observation alone As a result, from this view, the empirical study of emotion can proceed more directly, without appeal to a separate and distinct internal sphere of private experience This brings Wittgenstein’s thinking in line with embodied (Clark, 1997; Gallagher, 2005), dynamic systems (Fogel, 1993), phenomenological (Thompson, 2007) and inter-subjective (Overgaard, 2005) approaches to the development of thinking, feeling and acting These various approaches share the goal of transcending dualisms such as inner/outer, private/public; mind/body; biological/psychological; physical/mental; individual/social and subjective/objective To the extent that emotional experience is directly reflected in public expression, it becomes possible to study emotion directly from a third-person inter-subjective perspective Conversely, to the extent that language provides a vehicle for constructing consensual representations of public manifestations of experience, individuals are able to provide intelligible first-person reflections upon their experience In this way, eliminating the barrier between the internal and the external opens up new avenues for both first-person and third-person analyses of emotional experience Acknowledgements I wish to thank Paul Ebbighausen, Julie Norman, Michael Tartaglia, Greta Thompson for their important contributions to this paper I would like extend my gratitude to Ulrich Mueller who provided insightful and thorough commentary on this paper Finally, I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers whose input was instrumental in preparing the final version of this manuscript Author's personal copy M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 258–274 273 References Arbib, M A (2006) Action to language via the mirror neuron system Cambridge University Press Bedford, E (1962) Emotions In V C Chappell (Ed.), The philosophy of mind (pp 110–126) Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Bennett, M., & Hacker, P M S (2004) Philosophical foundations of neuroscience Basil Blackwell Bickhard, M H (2005) Consciousness and reflective consciousness Philosophical Psychology, 18(2), 205–218 Bråten, S (Ed.) 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Illustrating the discursive approach To illustrate the discursive approach, consider a study of the role of emotion in psychotherapy processes The goal of the study was to identify the role of the client’s... mediate the classification of emotion The result is an extremely rich theoretical and descriptive accounting of the emotional experience of the other Wittgenstein? ??s approach to experience and expression