Abstract
Emotions have been a topic long forgotten by psychologists, something, which is especially serious given the importance they have in our lives and in the proper constitution of the human being. Nevertheless, this important mistake has been corrected during the last years. Although there is still a long way left, however, we have probably advanced in the psychological study of emotions much more during the last ten or fifteen years than during the previous decades. This advance has taken place basically through two different paths: on the one hand, through the acknowledgement of the complexity of emotions and their multiple composition, given that they have biological, psychological, social and cultural elements; on the other hand, through the growing confirmation of their social and cultural nature, up to the point that this nature is now widely accepted. This happens because emotions, as in fact the rest of psychological phenomena, are mainly social constructs. In other words, the socioconstruc tionist perspective is probably the most promising when it comes to accurately understand what emotions are and which is their role in our lives and even in our own constitution as human beings.
