The Embodiment of Emotion

In current psychological discourse, it is fashionable to talk about emotions as “embodied” phenomena. At first glance, this idea is not novel. Historically, almost all psychological theories of emotion have proposed that emotional reactions are constituted by the body in some fashion. Some suggest that changes in the body cause changes in the mind; others suggest the opposite, or that the body and mind interact to produce an emotional response. Amid theoretical differences, these theories use the common metaphor that the body and mind are separate and independent forces that can act upon one another in an emotional episode. Current embodiment theories of the mind challenge this assumption by suggesting that the body helps to constitute the mind in shaping an emotional response. This view has novel implications for understanding the structure and content of the conceptual system for emotion, as well as for defining what emotions are and how they are caused. In the present chapter, we explore a more modern embodiment view of emotion. First, we discuss how the Cartesian “machine metaphor” underlies much theorizing about emotion, as we situate an embodied view of emotion in its historical context. Our historical review is not intended to be comprehensive but rather to illustrate how emotion theories to date have conceptualized the role of the body and mind in emotion.

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