Abstract
We propose a model of emotion grounded on Ignacio Matte Blanco’s theory of the unconscious. According to this conceptualization, emotion is a generalized representation of the social context actors are involved in. We discuss how this model can help to better understand the sensemaking processes. For this purpose we present a hierarchical model of sensemaking based on the distinction between significance—the content of the sign—and sense—the psychological value of the act of producing the sign in the given contingence of the social exchange. According to this model, emotion categorization produces the frame of sense regulating the interpretation of the sense of the signs, therefore creating the psychological value of the sensemaking.
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Notes
Impressive examples of this topic come from the situation in which is possible to compare the account of an event given by people with contrasting or however different perspectives on the happening being recounted. For example, the accounts of a soccer match made by the supporters of the two teams have so little in common that one may often be led to think that one is hearing accounts of two different matches.
The lesson of the later Wittegenstein (1953/1998) returns here: language forms can be considered as tools and expressions of forms of life.
The parameters are presented by means of dichotomic scales structured in terms of opposing pairs of adjectives (e.g. good/bad; strong/weak; big/small...). This structure is aimed at eliciting an affective answer rather than an analytic representation of the stimulus (cfr. Mossi and Salvatore submitted).
The three affective dimensions identified by the literature on Semantic Differential (Evaluation; Power; Activity) are a way of depicting how affective dimension of evaluation works in terms of global categorization.
For example, if I see a big stone falling on my head, I do not represent either it or the very possible, though hypothetical, consequence as a sign, but as something immediately having a real life value for me. Interestingly, people with cerebral damages associable to the emotional elaboration of the stimuli, are able to represent, but unable to attribute a real life value to them. Such a person might think: “I can see a heavy stone falling on my head. This will surely kill me”, but without moving (Damasio 1999).
To show that property in action, we can recall the process of hallucinatory satisfaction of desire described by Freud (1900). The child acts out the omnipotent fantasy of nourishing through the significant reifying food.
The Italian psychoanalyst Fornari (1979) states that the unconscious speaks of very few things, conceivable as the basic content of affective experience of the world: parental figures, parts of the body and life/death.
A model aimed at modelling such a process of emergence has recently been proposed (Salvatore et al. 2006).
Here one could actually refer to the psychoanalytic theory of transference (inter alia: Gill 1994), which in the final analysis deals with the same process we are talking about.
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Salvatore, S., Venuleo, C. Understanding the Role of Emotion in Sense-making. A Semiotic Psychoanalytic Oriented Perspective. Integr. psych. behav. 42, 32–46 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-007-9039-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-007-9039-2