The Internalization Theory of Emotions: A Cultural Historical Approach to the Development of Emotions

Abstract

Starting with an overview of theoretical approaches to emotion from an activity-oriented stance, this article applies Vygotsky's three general principles of development, sign mediation, and internalization to the development of emotional expressions as a culturally evolved sign system. The possible twofold function of expression signs as a means of interpersonal regulation and intrapersonal regulation predestines them to be a mediator between sociocultural and psychological processes in the domain of emotions. The proposed internalization theory of emotional development transfers Vygotsky's theory of the development of speech and thinking to the development of expression and feeling. Three stages of emotional development are described and underpinned by empirical studies: (a) the emergence of enculturated expression signs and related emotions from precursor emotions of newborns in the interpersonal regulation between caregivers and children during early childhood, (b) the emergence of intrapersonal regulation of emotions out of their interpersonal regulation by using expression signs as internal mediators that starts from preschool age onward, and (c) the internalization of emotional expression signs and the emergence of a mental plane of emotional processing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Falk Seeger, Dorothee Seeger and the reviewers of the manuscript for their fruitful and supportive comments and recommendations. I also thank Jonathan Harrow very much for translating the manuscript into English.

Notes

¹This contribution is meant to go beyond a strategy sometimes adopted in cultural-historical approaches that seek thought-provoking quotations about the topic in question in the writings of the leading authorities of activity theory and then try to assemble them in order to formulate a theory. Vygotsky (1927/1997a) himself criticized such an approach when discussing his contemporaries’ attempts to find an answer for a Marxist psychology by collecting quotations from Marxist classics: “It must be remarked that the heterogeneity of the material, its fragmentary nature, the change of meaning of phrases taken out of context and the polemical character of the majority of the pronouncements—correct in their contradiction of a false idea, but empty and general as a positive definition of the task—do not allow us to expect of this work anything more than a pile of more or less accidental citations and their Talmudic interpretations. But citations, even when they have been well ordered, never yield systems” (pp. 312–313).

²Vygotsky wrote this monograph between 1931 and 1933, and he died in 1934. It is not clear whether he was satisfied with the present version or had wanted to revise it (see Métraux, 1996; van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991). Whatever the case, these methodological approaches are Vygotsky's only theoretical analyses on the topic of emotions.