A phenomenological topology of positive interpersonal emotions

• Main Author: Carter, John W
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2006
• Subjects: Emotions; Personality; Personality psychology; Social psychology
• ISBN: 1109956487; 9781109956481

Although there has been much recent attention paid to positive emotional states, relatively little rigor has been applied to investigating the nature of positive interpersonal emotions such as affection and desire. Emotion researchers and theorists tend to fall into one of two traps: either reducing positive interpersonal emotions to quantitative variables or abstracting these emotions into universal types and categories. None of these strategies treat the actual experience of these emotions seriously. In order to model the experience of positive interpersonal emotions, I conducted nineteen phenomenological interviews with eight participants. The interviews focused on multiple aspects of participants' good feelings about others, and participants were given an active role in selecting which feelings to describe and in differentiating between feelings. Interviews were transcribed and subjected to iterative compare-and-contrast analyses. Nine distinct aspects of these feeling-experiences were identified: emotional feeling, symbolic meaning, cognition, perceptual awareness, bodily sensation, motivation, behavior, target, and context. Of these, the symbolic meaning (the feeling's implication for the relation between oneself and the other person), was most important in differentiating one type of feeling from another. Participants' feelings varied in seven dimensions: intensity, depth, duration, directionality, situated/generalized, power relationship, and type of connection. 'Situated/generalized' highlighted a continuum in participants' experiences between immediate emotional reactions and long-standing, background feelings. 'Directionality' proposed a three-way distinction between feelings directed towards the other, feelings coming from the other, and feelings shared with the other. Based on these distinctions, 45 different prototypes of positive interpersonal feelings were defined. This model expands the concept of positive interpersonal emotions in several ways. First, the subjective experience of these emotions provides essential information about these emotions that is not reducible to observable data. Second, the typological space for these emotions is reconfigured as a fluid landscape of overlapping regions where boundaries are frequently crossed, blurred, and blended. Third, the domain of positive interpersonal emotions is extended beyond emotional reactions towards the other to include emotions received from the other, emotions shared with the other, and emotions fading but persisting in a generalized state.