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Boston College Psychology Professor James Russell speaks yesterday on a lecture about the "Psychological Construction of Emotion." Russell challenged some of psychology's prevalent theories on emotion in his talk, which was held in Stiteler Hall. [Rac

If Alice were standing face to face with a bear in the woods, she would experience fear and want to run away.

Psychologists use this as a classic example of the emotion fear, but Psychology Professor James Russell pointed out yesterday such scenarios rarely happen.

In front of an audience of about 100, Russell, a professor at Boston College, "attack[ed] the commonsense view of emotion" in a speech entitled "The Psychological Construction of Emotion."

The widely held theory, Russell explained, is that emotion proceeds from an event, which in turn triggers one of eight "response components," including subjective feelings and nonverbal actions.

But Russell proposed that instead, psychologists should consider these components as "separable streams of events, co-occurring, which sometimes resemble a prototype of emotions."

Though people tend to group these reactions together and classify them as emotions, Russell argued that it is actually the other way around -- the components themselves evoke what we know as emotions.

"Maybe emotions as we think of them are not scientifically interesting entities," Russell said, adding that they could still be studied on a sociolinguistic level.

Russell offered other critiques of the standard view of emotion, including the difficulty of distinguishing boundaries between separate feelings and differences between the way cultures perceive the concept of emotion.

And clear-cut cases that are usually given to support this theory -- such as Alice and the bear -- "are relatively rare," Russell said. "We need a clearer view" of emotions.

"We still don't have any clear definitions of inclusion rules and exclusion rules," Russell said.

The lecture, which was the first of this year's Psychology Colloquium, "got people thinking in a very general way about emotions...," Penn Psychology Professor Benjamin Backus said.

Kevin McCarthy, a third-year graduate student in psychology, said that Russell's speech "turns emotion on its head because it dissolves certain debates" in the field of psychology.

"I really enjoyed it," third-year psychology doctoral student Robert Leeman said. "I think challenging the notion of basic emotions... is a very important thing."

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