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Commentary: the personal experience of coherence
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- By Jeroen Jansz
- Edited by Harke A. Bosma, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands, E. Saskia Kunnen, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands
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- Book:
- Identity and Emotion
- Published online:
- 28 October 2009
- Print publication:
- 07 June 2001, pp 115-119
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Summary
Introduction
As soon as we conceptualize “the self” as a dynamic structure that is rooted in communicative relations, we bump into the question of how to account for the continuity and consistency most people experience across time and situations. Fogel addresses this perennial question at the very beginning of his chapter when he asks how people can have a sense of “stability over time if psychological experience is fundamentally relational and dynamic?” (p. 93). His answer focuses on the role of emotions: people perceive consistency in their emotional experiences and this contributes to a sense of stability of the self through time. In this commentary I will first criticize Fogel's proposal with respect to emotions, and then propose two alternative candidates for sustaining the sense of stability. The first is individual embodiment. Fogel already touches upon the importance of embodiment, but I will attribute a more fundamental role to embodied being than he does. My second candidate for sustaining stability is autobiographical memory. The recollections of people's personal past are organized in such a way that they generate consistency and continuity in normal individuals.
Emotional experiences are context bound and subject to evaluation
In this section I will take issue with Fogel's argument of the perceived consistency in emotional experiences. According to me, it is difficult to experience consistency in emotions because the emotion process is as much subject to the dynamisms of communicative interaction as selves are. Emotions unfold in a particular communicative context, and are always evaluated with respect to their appropriateness. This generally leads to adjustments in the emotional experience.
8 - Masculine identity and restrictive emotionality
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- By Jeroen Jansz
- Edited by Agneta H. Fischer, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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- Book:
- Gender and Emotion
- Published online:
- 20 January 2010
- Print publication:
- 09 March 2000, pp 166-186
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Summary
Men and psychology have a somewhat awkward relationship. From its earliest days in the last quarter of the nineteenth century until its mature age in the 1960s, psychology was largely concerned with studying one half of humankind: men. The people who provided the data by participating in psychological experiments were mostly of the male sex, and so was the majority of psychologists reporting about these experiments. As a matter of consequence, a male bias could be discerned in the theories that were advocated, and the topics that were investigated. But, despite the overrepresentation of men in psychology, men were hardly ever studied as men. They were generally seen as representatives of the human species and treated as if they had no gender (Kimmel & Messner, 1989).
Ironically, it took the feminist criticism of the male bias in psychology before a substantial psychology of men was developed. In the 1970s a number of psychologists pioneered in this new field using bits of psychological knowledge to understand masculinity. Most of them were concerned with consciousness raising in accordance with the political aims of their feminist sisters: emancipation required as many personal and structural changes in the lives of men as in women's lives. In academic research, psychologists undertook empirical analyses of the vicissitudes of the male role. In clinical settings, new therapies were developed that confronted men with their personal behavior under patriarchy.