Computer-Mediated Communication Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Emotion has long been a contested concept and subject to different, often conflicting, definitions and approaches. Emotions have long been viewed in a reductionist way as solely biological components, as private components of the... more

Emotion has long been a contested concept and subject to different, often conflicting, definitions and approaches. Emotions have long been viewed in a reductionist way as solely biological components, as private components of the personality structure of an individual, or as entirely socially and culturally constructed. These views, that separate analytically different facets of emotion, reflect persisting dichotomies of human phenomena as nature vs. nurture, universality vs. culture-specificity, and private vs. public, which have served as the key organizing principles inWestern science and humanities.
Emotions, however, occupy a liminal space between divisions (Leavitt, 1996); they involve phenomena that are interactive and integrated with cognition (Izard, 2009), playing a key role in human development, in everyday social interaction, and in the organization of social and cultural life. Emotions are, then, to be understood as a not exclusively private object of inquiry (Zembylas, 2007). The study on emotion has
received an enormous increase since the 1980s with a marked rise in psychological studies, and gradually engendering more insight from sociology, political science, anthropology, communication, and cultural studies, among others (Döveling, Scheve, & Konijn, 2011). Scholars seemto have reached consensus on the usefulness of the term
“emotion” to refer to certain socially embedded psychobiological processes, even if they do not necessarily agree on how such processes cohere, or to what extent components such as arousal, feeling, appraisal, or facial expression can be given causal or definitional prominence (Beatty, 2013, p. 416).It is, however, agreed that emotions constitute a lens not only into the development of human evolution and cognition, but also into the complexities of meaning-making, the organization of roles and relationships in social life, and the way thesemay change over time. Emotions can then be conceptualized as a broad range of affective phenomena, including moods, feelings, affects, and related concepts (Döveling et al., 2011), which are not contained in a single domain, but rather belong to several domains, including the affective, the social, and the evolutionary/ motivational (Wilce, 2009). Emotions are particularly pertinent to the investigation of communication practices in online contexts.The article provids an interdisciplinary and intercultural lens to emotional communication in mediatized contexts of grieving, mourning, and memorialization and contribute to the understanding of the reflexive and social dynamics of sharing emotions online.