Nature and culture in the study of emotions

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to highlight the complexity of the study of emotions and stress the need of a more sociological perspective that could complement the psychological approaches and the emphasis on their adaptive function. Although emotions are important in social life, its study needs a better and clearer understanding than the one we have up to now. It is also very important to acknowledge the difficulties of establishing the relationship between emotions and other mental processes, especially cognitive processes; historically emotion and cognition have been studied as opposite. While presenting some of the main analytical approaches to emotions we will concentrate on the studies that come to the conclusion that emotions and socio-cognitive processes are part of socio-cultural processes. Regardless of the various difficulties to solve the apparent incompatibility among different epistemological and theoretical approaches, the complexity of emotions forces to establish a bridge between them, since no single perspective is capable of explaining the different dimensions of emotions. The challenge is to build up a comprehensive theory that includes the contributions of different research areas on emotions, including a sociological perspective.