288 Emotion, Affect, and Mood in Social Judgments
emotions—but then these differences were acknowledged by
such ontological realists as Ekman (1972). In contrast, the
social constructionist takes the role of culture to be deeper,
extending to emotion itself.
Return to the Ilongot’s ligetand Utku’s ningaq. A nomi-
nalist would argue that instances of ligetandningaqare
merely similar enough for an observer to give them a com-
mon name (anger). The word angeradmits the head-hunting
Ilongot youth and the Utku elder who ostracized Briggs.
But this judgment is in the eye of the beholder—in this case,
an outsider’s third-person point of view. There is no entity
shared by the Ilongot youth and the Utku elder. Further,
there is no entity shared by different examples of ligetwithin
Ilongot society, or shared by different examples of ningaq
within Utku society, or shared by different examples of anger
within an English-speaking society. Nothing, that is, except
the label.
It is clear that the causes and consequences of ligetdiffer
from those of ningaq. For the social constructionist, there is a
difference as well in the conscious subjective experiences of
the Ilongot youth’s ligetand of the Utku elder’s ningaq. The
two experiences are similar in some ways, but they differ in
other ways and do not share any essence. Although the Utku
elder might share with the Ilongot youth some of the same
raw ingredients (and this remains to be demonstrated), he ex-
periencesningaqrather than ligetoranger. To experience
ningaqis to experience something that human beings should
not experience. In contrast, to experience ligetis to experi-
ence the most important force in life, something vital to life.
For an Ilongot, to feel ligetand to head-hunt as a result are the
most natural thing.
An analogy may make the nominalist position clearer. Con-
sider a baby nursing, a Jew celebrating a seder at Passover, and
a gourmand savoring a meal at Maxim’s in Paris. The word
eatingadmits all three experiences, yet their experiences are
quite different. They might have some of the same lip move-
ments, physiological processes, and raw sensations. However,
the meaning given to the behaviors, physiological changes,
and sensations would be different. Experience is a complex
web of associations that draws on expectations, history, norms
of what is proper, and so on. Suppose that we give the Utku
elder and the Ilongot youth a meal at Maxim’s. The expe-
riences would be different again. Imagine the Utku elder being
engaged in Ilongot head-hunting. He would likely experience
this state as abnormal and unnatural. In contrast, the Ilongot
youth experiences himself in line with his ancestors as doing
something completely natural, almost inevitable.
Some social constructionists view terms such asliget,
ningaq,andangerare names for interpretative schemas or
scripts (Shweder, 1994). Emotional experience is based on a
narrative constructed with the help of this cultural script,
which gives meaning to the experience. By sharing a script,
members of a society create similar narratives. Sometimes
narratives in different societies are similar enough to an out-
side observer that they can all be called by the same name.
People form widely applicable concepts and talk about them in
general. From this view, emotional experiences are cultural
products. To be sure, physiological changes, facial move-
ments, and actions are also real and might even be universal,
but these tend to be viewed as raw ingredients, devoid of in-
herent meaning.
The nominalist perspective is easy to apply to the experi-
ences of those most foreign to us, but it applies equally to our
own emotions. In his study of road rage in Los Angeles, Katz
(1999) emphasized that road rage fits a highly regular narra-
tive that shapes the driver’s experience in a characteristic
way (although to an external observer road rage can be as
mysterious and frightening as the Ilongots’liget). When cut
off by another driver, the driver becomes morally outraged,
insults the other driver (even though the other driver cannot
hear the insult), makes obscene gestures, and feels the need to
retaliate in order to teach the offender a lesson (sometimes
thereby increasing the danger).Emotion as ProcessA line of thinking about emotion that resembles a conceptu-
alist philosophical stance began with William James. James
wrote disparagingly of thinking of emotions as entities or of
giving credence to distinctions embedded in everyday lan-
guage (such as anger vs. irritation vs. annoyance, etc.). His
view opened the door to asking about the actual process that
occurs when an emotion is said to occur. He suggested that
the actual process is quite different from what is suggested by
common sense. James famously argued that bodily changes
(e.g., crying, running) produce rather than follow the experi-
ence of emotion.
Marañon (1924, 1950) tested James’s hypothesis about the
role of bodily changes in the experience of emotion. Marañon
injected epinephrine (adrenalin) into 210 hospital patients. He
observed two different results. Some (29%) of the patients re-
ported a strong “genuine” emotion, but most (71%) reported
an “as-if” emotion. That is, they felt as if they were having an
emotion but denied having any real emotion. Marañon con-
cluded that James’s hypothesis was not confirmed. Instead,
Marañon suggested that different reactions to the same epi-
nephrine-induced bodily changes were related to a patient’s
specific medical condition, such as hyperthyroidism.
Cantril and Hunt (1932) challenged Marañon’s interpreta-
tion by replicating his study with 22 students and professors