Emotion, imagination and the world’s furniture

I scrutinize a view of emotion that was established in the late nineteenth century and bequeathed to subsequent generations of psychological researchers. That view has strong evolutionary undertones so that continuities between humans and other animals have guided psychological research on emotion – both with children and with adults. At the center of this biological view is the idea that an emotion is a set or facial and bodily reactions triggered by a first-hand encounter with a situation of some biological significance – a potential danger, a separation from a caregiver, a sudden noise, or a snake. I argue that such a view obscures two species-specific features of human emotion: (i) the extent to which the emotional valence of a given encounter is signaled by the culture rather than by any intrinsic features; (ii) the ways in which emotion is driven not by first-hand encounters with the world’s furniture but by mental encounters that depend on the human imagination. These two features offer a helpful framework for thinking about the history of emotions as well as their development in childhood.