A Relational Anthropology: 4 Emotion as Constraint Negotiation: Against Inner Mentalism

We are taught that emotions are hidden states inside us: mental objects, private signals, or psychological properties. This is a comforting illusion. In reality, emotions are emergent responses to relational constraints — dynamic negotiations across biological, social, and semiotic lattices.

Emotion is not inside; it is between. It arises when humans interact with their environment and the potentials circulating through it:

1. Constraint negotiation: Emotions emerge when relational alignments are challenged, amplified, or redirected. Fear, joy, anger, and awe are patterns of systemic negotiation, not signals from an inner theatre.

2. Distributed emergence: Emotion circulates across body, social relations, and semiotic environments. It is shaped by cultural context, ecological affordances, and the relational lattice in which the human participates.

3. Coordination function: Emotions are not private experiences; they align attention, mobilise action, and coordinate interactions across systems. They are tools for relational coherence and adaptation.

This reframes familiar psychological assumptions:

• Emotional “states” are not fixed inner properties but dynamic relational patterns.

• Emotional regulation is not self-control alone; it is the management of alignments across potential lattices.

• “Feeling” is not private experience; it is the emergent resonance of human nodes with semiotic and social currents.

In practice, humans navigate complex fields of constraints. Emotion is the feedback system that signals where alignment succeeds, fails, or can be leveraged. It is not a mental object; it is relationally actualised potential, guiding action, learning, and coordination.

In short: emotion is not something we have inside; it is what emerges when potentials interact, when constraints are negotiated, and when humans circulate in relational ecologies. Understanding emotion relationally frees us from the illusions of inner mentalism, letting us see the human as a node of dynamic, distributed, and circulating potential.