Vacillating and Mixed Emotions 203 © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003 © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 33:2 0021–8308 Vacillating and Mixed Emotions: A Conceptual-Discursive Perspective on Contemporary Emotion and Cognitive Appraisal Theories Through Examples of Pride GAVIN B. SULLIVAN AND KENNETH T. STRONGMAN “Grief ” describes a pattern which recurs, with different variations, in the weave of our life. If a man’s bodily expression of sorrow and of joy alternated, say with the ticking of a clock, here we should not have the characteristic formation of the pattern of sorrow or of the pattern of joy. (Wittgenstein, 1953, p. 174e) Emotional experiences in which a person vacillates between one or more positive and negative emotions, provide a challenge to contemporary psychology. The conceptual problem, as Wittgenstein suggests, is that a sharp and regular switch between an emotion of sorrow and one of joy is an exception to the usual patterns of emotional expression. Put simply, it is not a paradigmatic example that would be used to teach a child, for example, the rules for the use of the word “grief ”. Wittgenstein’s example of a barely imaginable form of emotional oscillation (rather than vacillation) implies an almost non-human, mechanistic reaction. In everyday life, however, psychologists and psychiatrists do not con- front emotional instability as a way of explaning the limits of human expression and experience, so much as use affect shifts as a basis for ascriptions of abnorm- ality. As Hergenhahn (2001) notes, “if such rapid shifts in moods or beliefs persist, the person is often characterized as mentally ill” (p. 431). Wittgenstein created a philosophical approach which some psychologists, so- cial scientists and philosophers dismiss as anti-scientific and describe as a passing phase in the history of philosophy. However, our argument is that there is still much of relevance in Wittgenstein’s remarks, and we reject the inappropriate criticism that to engage with Wittgenstein’s work is to adopt a misguided form of ordinary language philosophy. In this paper, our approach can best be described as a combination of philosophy and discursive psychology. There are good reasons for thinking that Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks can be combined with work that focuses upon language in psychology. This does not mean,