Problem

I am feeling more and more perplexed by some of the arguments between social (cognitive) psychologists and critical social psychologists about the existance (or not) of emotions, and feelings as actual things inside our heads. The more I read, the more it feels as though I must side with one camp or the other, and whichever I choose, I will be eternally damned by the other side.
The natural sciences - here I have no (or very little) problem with the idea of fixed structures in the world that we can measure and record (in a lab or otherwise controlled environment), make predictions about, get knowledge and facts about. This stretches to some parts of psychology too - neurology, the biological side of psychology, and I can see the use of experimental social psychology's studies into some aspects of emotional type things (face recognition, responses to fear, response to authority....). However, I cannot see how lab-type studies can give us the whole picture about how meaning is attributed to different aspects of our lives, our experiences, interactions. How can a self-esteem inventory, for example, really tell us anything about something actual and fixed in someone's head? How do we know there are emotions and feelings in our heads? Surely they are created, at least in part, by the words we use to describe them - the meaning of the emotion is something we construct with language in a particular given context. What does self-esteem actually mean? It is something someone made-up - something we continue to make-up until it becomes a 'fact'. Can we not use other methods to investigate feelings, emotions, meanings - especially as created through language and context - as well as traditional cognitive science? I think there is some desperate-to-be-seen-as-a-Science snootery going on.

NADP conference 2009

I will be running a workshop at the NADP conference this year on dyslexia in HE - particularly on the experience of academics with their dyslexic students and how they approach support.