Essay guidelines
The assessment for PY6014 Psychology of Emotions is a 3000-word essay and it represents 100% of your final grade. It is due on Thursday May 12st and you will submit it through a Turnitin link that will be set up early on April. The task is to write an essay analysing one emotions from three different theoretical perspectives.
This is a theoretical essay. The propose of this essay is that you learn to identify the main principals of a theory and use them to imagine and speculate how different theories would approach the same phenomena, in this case, an specific emotion. The three theories that you will combine in your essay will be covered on the lectures and are: The Social Construction of Emotions (Harré, 1986), Theories of Affect (Massumi, 2002; Clough, 2007; Lara 2020), and the Theories of Feelings (Cromby & Willis, 2016). You will use these theories to analyse your chosen emotion from these three different perspectives. Your emotion options will also be covered during the lectures and are: Happiness, Love and Hate.
You are free to organize your essay in any way you want, just make sure the following three elements are explicitly present somewhere in your essay:
1. Introduce your emotion. Offer a minimum literature review informing from what kind of perspectives your emotions has been studied and what have other researchers found about it. You can also discuss what are the limitations on the study of such an emotion? What would psychology gain from a deeper, better, or different understanding of this emotion? Etc. 2. Introduce your theories. Explain what are the main theoretical principals of each of the three theories you will use in your essay. Offer notes on the philosophical bases of the theories, their empirical approach and political commitments. In this point is very important that you cite, quote, paraphrase the authors we had covered on the Lectures. 3. Analyse your emotion using the 3 theories. Imagine how the principles of each theory could be used to study your chosen emotion and reflect on what are their resources and limitations on exploring such an emotion. Offer examples, even if speculative, on how each theory would address your emotions. What kind of questions they would ask?, what procedures will they implement? Etc. To be clear, for example, if your emotion is Love, you will have to explain how Social Construction of Emotions would study Love, and then how Affect theory would study Love, and then how Feelings theory would study Love, you will compare, contrast, analyse, discuss the differences, advantages, disadvantages, etc.
The following is a suggested structure you can use to organize your essay. You don’t have to follow this structure, but if you are unsure of how to organize your essay, this structure represents a safe option.
Whatever you do, make sure your writing is clear, explicit, smart and embedded in criticality.
Suggested structure of the Essay
1. Tittle. Start your essay with a tittle, think of a nice one that makes clear 1) what emotion are you addressing on your essay?,
2) from what theoretical perspective(s) you analyse that theory? ,
3) the literature from the module that you will be using 2. Introduction. Approx. 500 words. The first thing you have to do in the intro is to explain the outline of the whole essay. This means mentioning the sections of your essay and briefly describing the content of these sections. Also, use this section to provide the context of your essay, explain the relevance of an exercise of theoretical analysis on understanding emotions, or offer a summary of the theoretical tensions in the emotions literature, or introduce briefly the main gesture of your theories before you explain them in detail in the next section.
3. Main body. Approx. 1500 words. This is the section where you want to include the three points mentioned before:
1. Introduce your emotion,
2. Introduce your theories,
3. Analyse your emotion using the 3 theories. Keep in mind that the whole propose of this essay is that you learn to identify the theoretical principles of the theories and use them to attempt to explain real life specific situations, or in this case, one particular emotions. Therefore you are welcome to use examples (real or speculative) to illustrate your points. Think questions like, how this theory would approach the study of this emotion? What kind of arguments would they suggest about this emotion? How is this approach useful to better understand the emotion? Etc.
4. Critique. Approx. 500 words. Use this section to elaborate your own critique of the theory(ies) that you have used to analyse your chosen emotion. Think about, what are the limits of the theory? What kind of emotions/affects/feelings the theory can’t account for? Etc. This section is a marking criteria.
5. Conclusion. Approx. 500 words. Use this section to close the essay, but do it by focussing on these questions: why is it important to understand better your emotion (hate/happiness/love)? How the three theories contribute (or not) to the understanding of the emotion? Offer as well a reflective statement about what you have learnt in this module.
6. Reference list. Make sure your reference list is in proper APA format. Or any other format that you feel you want to use, just be consistent along the essay using the same format.
We will have a workshop to work on your essays, this will be on week 12, Thursday May the 5th at lecture time. Make sure you show up with at least an outline for your essay so we can improve it together.