A Narrative Approach to Verbalizing the Experience of Emotion

This paper discusses several factors to consider when employing a narrative approach to verbalizing the experience of emotion in educational settings. The experience of emotion consists of content-rich events and concomitant emotions, which are mutually referenced. It is recognized that emotions play an important role in decision-making. While decision-making processes are traditionally thought of in cognitive terms, such as moral reasoning, recently, however, it has been proposed that core affect has a strong influence on decision-making. Core affect comprises content-rich states of pleasure or displeasure, functioning as core knowledge about whether objects or events are helpful or harmful, rewarding or threatening, and so on. Analyzing the experience of emotion can reveal someone’s core affect and therefore core knowledge. The most direct way to analyze the experience of emotion is to describe it in the form of self-reports such as narratives. Providing students with opportunities to learn how to narrate and analyze their experience of emotion would help them understand and modify their core knowledge, which is their basis for decision-making.