Brandtner, A. and Wegmann, E. (2023) ‘The fear in desire: linking desire thinking and fear of missing out in the social media context’, BMC Psychology, 11, 176. doi:10.1186/s40359-023-01216-0.

 

Brandtner and Wegmann situate FoMO within the cognitive-affective dynamics of desire rather than treating it as inherently pathological. Drawing on the Elaborated Intrusion Theory of Desire, they test how desire thinking, FoMO and craving interact in problematic social networking-site use among 193 participants. Their most important conceptual result is negative in a productive sense: neither desire thinking nor FoMO becomes dysfunctional by definition; problematicity emerges through their interaction with craving and patterns of use. This reframes FoMO as a contingent process rather than a fixed deficit. Methodologically, the study uses serial mediation to specify the sequence through which verbally elaborated desire can contribute to FoMO and, under certain conditions, problematic use. The work bridges cognitive psychology, behavioural addiction research and media studies by locating platform use within loops of anticipation, imagined participation and recurrent checking. It thereby complicates moralising accounts of digital behaviour and provides a mechanism-sensitive model of how affective anticipation becomes technologically organised.

Servidio, R., Soraci, P., Griffiths, M.D., Boca, S. and Demetrovics, Z. (2024) ‘Fear of missing out and problematic social media use: A serial mediation model of social comparison and self-esteem’, Addictive Behaviors Reports, 19, 100536. doi:10.1016/j.abrep.2024.100536.

Servidio and colleagues model Fear of Missing Out as part of a relational mechanism connecting social comparison, self-esteem and problematic social media use. Using a cross-sectional survey of 256 Italian university students, the study tests a serial mediation model in which FoMO is associated with intensified comparison, diminished self-esteem and increased problematic use. Its value lies less in treating FoMO as a self-explanatory diagnosis than in decomposing the phenomenon into interacting psychosocial processes. Methodologically, mediation analysis renders the proposed pathway explicit and testable while also making visible the limits of causal claims from cross-sectional data. The work bridges social psychology of comparison with contemporary platform studies by showing how networked environments can become behavioural settings in which social evaluation is recurrently intensified. It also provides a useful empirical counterpoint to constructionist accounts: even when psychological variables are operationalised quantitatively, their relations remain organised by a social ecology of visibility, comparison and mediated participation rather than by isolated individual traits.

Hoemann, K., Lee, Y., Dussault, È., Devylder, S., Ungar, L.H., Geeraerts, D. and Mesquita, B. (2025) ‘The construction of emotional meaning in language’, Communications Psychology, 3, 99. doi:10.1038/s44271-025-00255-0.

Hoemann and colleagues recast emotion as situated meaning-making and ask how language can reveal the architecture of that process without reducing it to explicit emotion labels. Their conceptual innovation is to organise emotional meaning around three linguistic dimensions: attention, construal and appraisal. What becomes salient, from which conceptual vantage point events are viewed, and how circumstances are evaluated together provide a higher-dimensional account of emotion than categorical naming alone. The methodological contribution lies in joining discursive psychology with socio-, cognitive and computational linguistics, treating naturally occurring language as a rich trace of situated psychological organisation. Language is not merely a report about emotion; it participates in producing the interpretive relation between person and circumstance. This framework bridges qualitative concerns with scalable computational analysis, opening a route between close reading and large corpora without assuming that quantification must strip away context. The paper therefore advances a dynamic, relational model of emotional meaning capable of moving between discourse, culture and data-intensive research.

Mesquita, B., De Leersnyder, J. and Boiger, M. (2016) ‘The cultural psychology of emotion’, in Barrett, L.F., Lewis, M. and Haviland-Jones, J.M. (eds.) Handbook of Emotions. 4th edn. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 393–411.

Mesquita, De Leersnyder and Boiger replace the image of culture as an external modifier of universal emotions with a processual account in which emotions are made through recurrent social relations and culturally patterned situations. Their central contribution is the concept of emotional fit: affective experience can align more or less closely with culturally prevalent patterns, and that alignment changes through participation, migration and social contact. The chapter draws on cross-cultural comparisons, diary studies, survey data and acculturation research, but its methodological argument is more radical than simple comparison. Context should not be controlled away as noise because context partly constitutes the phenomenon. Emotional episodes are therefore relational accomplishments embedded in moral orders, interactional expectations and culturally valued forms of action. This position bridges cultural psychology with ecological and situated approaches to cognition. It also challenges decontextualised experimental designs by proposing that emotional processes should be studied where they are socially produced: in practices, relationships and environments rather than as isolated responses.

Lutz, C. (1986) ‘Emotion, Thought, and Estrangement: Emotion as a Cultural Category’, Cultural Anthropology, 1(3), pp. 287–309.

Lutz’s essay dismantles the apparently self-evident Western category of emotion by treating it as an ethnographic object. Rather than assuming emotions to be universal biological substances subsequently coloured by culture, she asks how the Euro-American opposition between emotion and thought, nature and culture, body and reason has itself been historically constructed. The iconic idea is that “emotion” is a master cultural category whose conceptual architecture organises both ordinary life and scientific explanation. Her methodological operation is reflexive anthropology: the analyst turns the ethnographic gaze back onto the categories through which Western psychology and social science claim to describe affective life. This move exposes how notions of naturalness, interiority and irrationality are culturally specific rather than neutral. The essay bridges anthropology of emotion with feminist epistemology, history of concepts and science studies because it demonstrates that analytical vocabularies carry moral and political assumptions. Emotion becomes not an object beneath culture but one of culture’s techniques for organising persons, bodies and social difference.

Gil-Juárez, A. and Vitores González, A. (2009) Comunicación y discurso. Barcelona: Editorial UOC.

Gil-Juárez and Vitores reject the conduit metaphor of communication: language is not a neutral channel through which already formed meanings travel from one mind to another. Communication is instead constitutive, a social process through which objects, identities and versions of reality are produced, negotiated and made durable. Their central theoretical contribution is the insistence on the productive and performative character of linguistic practice. Discourse is approached as a historically situated ensemble of meanings, metaphors, categories and narratives capable of making some versions of the world appear obvious while marginalising others. The methodological operation is therefore to examine variation, rhetorical function and interpretative repertoires rather than to treat speech as transparent evidence of underlying mental states. This connects social psychology to ethnomethodology, post-structuralism and the linguistic turn, while preserving attention to everyday interaction. The work is particularly strong in showing that meaning is neither purely individual nor merely textual: it is socially available, pragmatically mobilised and consequential in action.

Pallí Monguilod, C., Martínez Martínez, L.M., Calsamiglia Madurga, A. and Cubells Serra, J. (2019) Actitudes y discurso. Barcelona: Fundació Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Actitudes y discurso reconstructs the attitude concept from an apparently internal psychological property into a historically variable and socially consequential practice of evaluation. The text’s key move is to shift attention from what people supposedly “have in their heads” to what evaluations accomplish in situated language. Discursive approaches treat attitudes as positions enacted through talk, rather than as stable predispositions awaiting measurement. This theoretical reorientation also foregrounds ideology, power and institutional effects: discourse is analysed not only for what it represents but for what it authorises, normalises or excludes. Methodologically, the text links conceptual history to discourse analysis, showing how competing definitions of attitude imply different models of the person, knowledge and social reality. Its wider significance lies in connecting social psychology with critical discourse studies and governmentality: evaluative language becomes a mechanism through which subjects and social objects are stabilised. The work therefore makes discursivity operational without reducing discourse to rhetoric alone.

Feliu i Samuel-Lajeunesse, J. (2022) Breve introducción a la psicología social y sus corrientes. Barcelona: Fundació Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Feliu’s compact introduction is built around a decisive epistemic proposition: social psychology is not one unified gaze but a field organised by incompatible ways of constituting its object. By distinguishing psychological social psychology, sociological social psychology and constructionist social psychology, the text turns “perspective” into an analytical instrument rather than a taxonomic label. Its theoretical contribution lies in showing that questions, evidence and explanations are inseparable from the conceptual frame that makes them possible. Methodologically, the text performs controlled perspectival switching: the same phenomenon can be reformulated through individual cognition, interactional structures or historically situated practices. This operation dislodges the assumption that social phenomena pre-exist their explanatory apparatus intact. The work therefore bridges introductory social psychology with epistemology and sociology of knowledge, because it makes visible how disciplines produce different realities by asking different questions. Its most useful proposition is that comparison between perspectives is itself a form of critical inquiry.