The strand of social constructionism that is more germane to the Motivational Tradition is the “social role” strand, related to the thesis that emotions fulfill social functions by virtue of which they should be considered actions or roles rather than passions (see, e.g., Solomon 1976 and Averill 1990 on the “myth of passions”). Jean Paul Sartre (1939 [1948]) can be considered the first to offer a general, although idiosyncratic, theory of emotions as social roles, a view developed in the early