Constituting Emotional Phenomena—A Mach-Influenced Empiricist Perspective

The theory of psychological construction disputes the views of those basic emotion theorists who hold that the coordinated physiological, affective, cognitive, and behavioral features of basic emotions are initiated by the activation of affect programs. Rather than an affect program-based essentialist model, the theory of psychological construction contends that emotional episodes are constructed on the fly out of shifting sets of components. Advocating for a resemblance nominalism model like that of Locke, the theory of psychological construction holds that many different combinations of components occur, only some of which are named. Although they are portrayed as adopting eliminativism, advocates for psychological construction do not claim that emotions, including folk psychological emotions, are not real. Instead, they claim that folk psychological emotion concepts cannot support the discovery of mechanistic models of causation. Instead of a “psychological” type of construction, the theory might be better described as a theory about the construction of complex psychological states out of separable components. The concepts used to understand these states remain ‘open,’ allowing for the possibility of defining features to change. One reason such features can change is that they may have been adopted by convention – but older conventions can be swapped out for newer conventions if the newer ones can support increases in empirical or theoretical content.