Understanding the Role of Emotion in Sensemaking. A Semiotic Psychoanalytic Oriented Perspective

We propose a model of emotion grounded on Matte Blanco’s theory of the unconscious. According to this conceptualization, emotion is a generalized representation of the social context actors are involved in. We discuss how this model can help to understand the sensemaking processes better. For this purpose we present a hierarchical model of sensemaking based on the distinction between significance - the content of the sign - and sense - the psychological value of the act of producing the sign in the given contingence of the social exchange. According to this model, emotion categorization produces the frame of sense regulating the interpretation of the sense of the signs, therefore the psychological value of the sensemaking.