MAKING SENSE OF EMOTION IN STORIES AND SOCIAL-LIFE

This paper is concerned with some limitations of the vignette methodol ogy used in contemporary appraisal research and their implications for appraisal theory. We focus on two recent studies in which emotional m anipulations were achieved using textual materials, and criticise the investigators' apparent implicit assumption that participation in ever yday social reality is somehow comparable to reading a story. We take issue with three related aspects of this cognitive analogy between lif e and its narrative representation, by arguing that emotional reaction s in real life are not necessarily mediated by symbolic processes, tha t people are involved participants of real life rather than neutral ob servers, and that in real life people's evaluations and emotions are t ypically part of an ongoing dialogue rather than the expression of a s oliloquy. Results from these studies of emotional vignettes therefore tend to overestimate the importance of constructive, abstract, and ind ividualistic processes in the everyday causation of social emotions. I n real life, people do not necessarily have to calculate, transform, o r internally represent the meaning of the dynamic situation in order t o make emotional sense of what is happening to them in the social worl d.