Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T13:29:21.604Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Constructing contempt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2017

Victoria L. Spring
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16801. vls23@psu.eduvictoria-spring.wix.com/aboutme
C. Daryl Cameron
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16801. vls23@psu.eduvictoria-spring.wix.com/aboutme The Rock Ethics Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16801. cdc49@psu.eduhttps://sites.psu.edu/emplab/
Kurt Gray
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599. kurtgray@unc.edukristen.lindquist@unc.eduwww.mpmlab.orgunc.edu/~kal29
Kristen A. Lindquist
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599. kurtgray@unc.edukristen.lindquist@unc.eduwww.mpmlab.orgunc.edu/~kal29

Abstract

Gervais & Fessler argue that contempt is a natural kind and that its experience cannot be explained by a constructionist account of emotion. We dispute these claims and offer a positive constructionist model of contempt that accounts for the existing evidence and unifies conflicting findings in the literature on contempt.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alvarado, N. & Jameson, K. A. (1996) New findings on the contempt expression. Cognition and Emotion 10:379407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrett, L. F. (2006a) Are emotions natural kinds? Perspectives on Psychological Science 1(1):2858.Google Scholar
Barrett, L. F. (2009) Variety is the spice of life: A psychological construction approach to understanding variability in emotion. Cognition and Emotion 23:1284–306.Google Scholar
Barrett, L. F. (2013) Psychological construction: The Darwinian approach to the science of emotion. Emotion Review 5:379–89.Google Scholar
Barrett, L. F. & Satpute, A. B. (2013) Large-scale brain networks in affective and social neuroscience: Towards an integrative functional architecture of the brain. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 23(3):361–72. doi: 10.1016/j.conb.2012.12.012.Google Scholar
Cameron, C. D., Lindquist, K. A. & Gray, K. (2015) A constructionist review of morality and emotions: No evidence for specific links between moral content and discrete emotions. Personality and Social Psychology Review 19:371–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clore, G. L. & Ortony, A. (2013) Psychological construction in the OCC model of emotion. Emotion Review 5:335–43.Google Scholar
Cunningham, W. A., Dunfield, K. A. & Stillman, P. E. (2013) Emotional states from affective dynamics. Emotion Review 5:344–55.Google Scholar
Cushman, F. & Young, L. (2011) Patterns of moral judgment derive from nonmoral psychological representations. Cognitive Science 35:1052–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ekman, P. & Cordaro, D. (2011) What is meant by calling emotions basic. Emotion Review 3:364–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fridhandler, B. M. & Averill, J. R. (1982) Temporal dimensions of anger: An exploration of time and emotion. In: Anger and aggression, ed. Averill, J. R., pp. 253–80. Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
Gendron, M., Lindquist, K. A., Barsalou, L. & Barrett, L. F. (2012) Emotion words shape emotion percepts. Emotion 12:314–25.Google Scholar
Haidt, J. & Graham, J. (2016) Paradise lost: How moral psychology would contract if reduced to harm. Symposium conducted at the meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, San Diego, CA, January 2016.Google Scholar
Haidt, J. & Keltner, D. (1999) Culture and facial expression: Open-ended methods find more faces and a gradient of recognition. Cognition and Emotion 13(3):225–66.Google Scholar
Heuer, K., Lange, W. G., Isaac, L., Rinck, M. & Becker, E. S. (2010) Morphed emotional faces: Emotion detection and misinterpretation in social anxiety. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry 41:418–25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Izard, C. E. (2011) Forms and functions of emotions: Matters of emotion–cognition interactions. Emotion Review 3:371–78.Google Scholar
Izard, C. E. & Haynes, O. M. (1988) On the form and universality of the contempt expression: A challenge to Ekman and Friesen's claim of discovery. Motivation and Emotion 12(1):116.Google Scholar
Kreibig, S. D. (2010) Autonomic nervous system activity in emotion: A review. Biological Psychology 84:394421. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2010.03.010.Google Scholar
Lindquist, K. A. (2013) Emotions emerge from more basic psychological ingredients: A modern psychological constructionist model. Emotion Review 5(4):356–68.Google Scholar
Lindquist, K. A. & Barrett, L. F. (2008) Emotional complexity. In: Handbook of emotions, ed. Lewis, M., Haviland-Jones, J. M. & Barrett, L. F., pp. 513–30. Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Lindquist, K. A. & Barrett, L. F. (2012) A functional architecture of the human brain: Emerging insights from the science of emotion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16:533–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lindquist, K. A., Barrett, L. F., Bliss-Moreau, E. & Russell, J. A. (2006) Language and the perception of emotion. Emotion 6:125–38.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lindquist, K. A. & Gendron, M. (2013) What's in a word? Language constructs emotion perception. Emotion Review 5:6671.Google Scholar
Lindquist, K. A., Gendron, M., Barrett, L. F. & Dickerson, B. C. (2014) Emotion perception, but not affect perception, is impaired with semantic memory loss. Emotion 14:375–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindquist, K. A., MacCormack, J. K. & Shablack, H. (2015a) The role of language in emotion: Predictions from psychological constructionism. Frontiers in Psychology 6: article 444. (Online journal).Google Scholar
Lindquist, K. A., Satpute, A. B. & Gendron, M. (2015b) Does language do more than communicate emotion? Current Directions in Psychological Science 24:99108.Google Scholar
Lindquist, K. A., Wager, T. D., Kober, H., Bliss-Moreau, E. & Barrett, L. F. (2012) The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35:121–43.Google Scholar
Lupyan, G. (2012) Linguistically modulated perception and cognition: The label-feedback hypothesis. Frontiers in Psychology 3: article 54. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00054. (Online journal).Google Scholar
Matsumoto, D. & Ekman, P. (2004) The relationship among expressions, labels, and descriptions of contempt. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87(4):529–40. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.87.4.529.Google Scholar
Mauss, I. B. & Robinson, M. D. (2009) Measures of emotion: A review. Cognition and Emotion 23:209–37.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mill, J. S. (1884) A system of logic, ratiocinative and inductive: Being a connected view of the principles of evidence and the methods of scientific investigation. Longmans, Green.Google Scholar
Panksepp, J. (2011) The basic emotional circuits of mammalian brains: Do animals have affective lives? Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 35:1791–804.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, E. L. & Ekman, P. (1995) Conceptual and methodological issues in the judgment of facial expressions of emotion. Motivation and Emotion 19(2):111–38.Google Scholar
Rozin, P., Lowery, L., Imada, S. & Haidt, J. (1999) The CAD triad hypothesis: A mapping between three moral emotions (contempt, anger, disgust) and three moral codes (community, autonomy, divinity). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76(4):574–86.Google Scholar
Russell, J. A. (1991d) The contempt expression and the relativity thesis. Motivation and Emotion 15:149–68.Google Scholar
Russell, J. A. (2003) Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion. Psychological Review 110(1):145–72. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.110.1.145.Google Scholar
Russell, J. A., Suzuki, N. & Ishida, N. (1993) Canadian, Greek, and Japanese freely produced emotion labels for facial expressions. Motivation and Emotion 17:337–51.Google Scholar
Shenhav, A. & Greene, J. D. (2010) Moral judgments recruit domain-general valuation mechanisms to integrate representations of probability and magnitude. Neuron 67:667–77.Google Scholar
Vigliocco, G., Meteyard, L., Andrews, M. & Kousta, S. (2009) Toward a theory of semantic representation. Language and Cognition 1:219–47.Google Scholar
Vytal, K. & Hamann, S. (2010) Neuroimaging support for discrete neural correlates of basic emotions: A voxel-based meta-analysis. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22:2864–85.Google Scholar
Wager, T. D., Kang, J., Johnson, T. D., Nichols, T. E., Satpute, A. B. & Barrett, L. F. (2015) A Bayesian model of category-specific emotional brain responses. PLoS Computational Biology 11(4):e1004066. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004066.Google Scholar
Wagner, H. L. (2000) The accessibility of the term ‘contempt’ and the meaning of the unilateral lip curl. Cognition and Emotion 14(5):689710.Google Scholar