Context is Everything (in Emotion Research)

As in many areas of psychological inquiry, context matters for how emotion is experienced, expressed, perceived, and regulated. While this may sound like a truism, emotion research does not always directly theorize, manipulate, or measure emotion with context in mind. To facilitate this process, we present a framework of contextual features that shape emotion-related processes, and highlight several key factors that have been shown to matter in emotion research. We make four recommendations which we believe will help to better integrate context in emotion science. We argue that a deeper collective understanding, interrogation, and integration of context will propel the field forward theoretically and methodologically, and enhance researchers' ability to probe the mechanisms of human psychological experience. While our focus is on emotion research, we believe that the context framework and associated recommendations will also be useful to other fields of social psychological and personality science.