8 Discursive psychology and emotion Carrie Childs and Alexa Hepburn Target article: Edwards, D. (1999) ‘Emotion discourse’, Culture & Psychology, 5: 271–91. Discursive psychology (DP) offers a window onto the way emotion and cognition play out in everyday interaction. As one of the pioneers of DP, Edwards has been instrumental in shaping this approach, and his work on emotion and interaction has been particularly inspiring. In this chapter we consider this impact by providing an understanding of the concerns that motivated Edwards, the contributions of the paper and the lasting impact that his research has had on how emotion is conceptualized. Edwards developed a discursive psychology of emotion that examined two things: the ways in which emotion categories can be threaded through everyday talk, and how people use ascriptions and avowals of emotion to perform actions in talk. This focus on how wonderfully useful emotion categories and descriptions can be for speakers had never been done, and still sits in stark contrast to classic individualist studies that characterize the discipline of psychology. Academic context Our lay understanding of emotions is that they are things that emerge within us, sometimes bursting through cultural restrictions – the legacy of a more primitive animal past. This view is the starting point for most traditional psychological research into emotion (e.g., Röttger-Rössler and Jürgen, 2009). However, a number of researchers, inspired by the pioneering research of Edwards, have started to work up a very different image. Emotion is not treated as something underlying and separate from interaction, rather as something invoked, described and made accountable for the purposes of actions in talk. In developing the discursive psychology of emotion, Edwards had two rhetorical targets. First, the ethological, universalist idea of people sharing the same basic set of emotions, a notion developed by Paul Ekman (1992). Edwards notes that rather than being open to difference in emotions, cross-cultural studies invariably start with English language categories – anger, sadness and so on. This means that typical English emotion terms are treated as the kind of thing 6506 DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY-A_234x156 mm 31/05/2015 10:21 Page 114 1ST PROOFS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION