Relevance in the affective and cognitive sciences

Pr. David Sander, University of Geneva
Dr. Daniel Dukes, University of Geneva

Human beings are fundamentally relational: Our identities, our motivations and well-being are shaped through our ongoing relationships with the people, events, and objects around us. Emotions serve as the primary signal to us of how we value those objects, those relationships, and our emotional expressions can be used as signals to others of what we feel, and how strongly we feel about those people, events, and objects. Indeed, we experience emotions about those things, those things that we appraise as important to us, that concern our identities, motivations and well-being: the things that are relevant to us. Emotions are about something, about how we relate to the object given who we are and what we would like to do next. Jan’s loss of trust in politics is relevant to her as she had hopes and plans for her community that now seem to be lost, making her sad. Jon had the goal of getting a promotion this year and he feels anger towards his boss’s obstructive actions (and pehaps even his boss) because he feels they are relevant (in a negative way) to his goal, while Jane is delighted with her history exam results because they are relevant to her getting a good average score at the end of the year which she needs to het to college.

While there are ongoing debates about how best to characterise an emotion, a large consensus exists across those debates that for a person to experience emotion, the object must, in some way, be relevant to us. Interestingly, comparatively little has been said about what it takes for something to be relevant in the field of emotion. However, Sperber and Wilson have developed a cognitive theory of relevance (RT) that has had great success in other fields, particularly in pragmatics, in explaining how we process what is relevant to us.

This interdisciplinary project (linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology) looks at comparing RT with the comparatively under-developed concept of relevance in affective science. In a first publication (Wharton et al., 2021), we compared the two ideas, concluding that there are meaningful similarities between them which might be used to inform research in both disciplines. We are currently working on developing those ideas to evaluate what the consequences might be for our understanding of relevance in both fields, and in the cognitive and affective sciences more generally.

First paper: Wharton, T., Bonard, C., Dukes, D., Sander, D., & Oswald, S. (2021). Relevance and emotion. Journal of Pragmatics, 181, 259-269. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.06.001

Second paper (in prep: co-authors in last-name alphabetical order): Constant Bonard, Daniel Dukes, Steve Oswald, David Sander, Yoann Stussi, and Tim Wharton.