Vol. 44 No. 2 (2024)
Articles

Misunderstandings in the Agency: When Emotion Takes over Action

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  • Mercedes Rivero-Obra
Mercedes Rivero-Obra
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Getafe, Madrid, España.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36446/af.e1050

Published 2024-11-08

Keywords

  • Entendimiento,
  • Emoción,
  • Acción,
  • Inteligibilidad,
  • Malentendidos
  • Understanding,
  • Emotion,
  • Action,
  • Intelligibility,
  • Misunderstanding
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Intelligibility relates to a person’s agency in guiding their behavior to be logical and reasonable, and it makes sense during action. However, it does not always happen. Sometimes, intelligibility fails, and the subject’s actions become distanced from what had previously made sense to them or others. At that moment, what I have called misunderstandings within the agency appear. When the emotional process interferes with the action process, it is one of the causes of misunderstandings within the agency. Then, emotions interfere with the action and produce a cognitive dissociation that makes it difficult for the agents to interpret what is happening in the scene. It breaks between intelligibility and meaning. This also creates problems of understanding and communication. This is why the analysis of the misunderstandings within the agency is of such great importance.

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