Barrier or Benefit? Emotion in Life-Career Design

Emotion permeates human life, yet receives little attention in career theory and intervention. Long seen as a barrier to avoid, recent conceptual and empirical work indicate that emotion benefits human behavior and development. Advances in the interdisciplinary science of emotion support examining the construct across differential, developmental, and social cognitive career traditions. The subjective, phenomenological, and socially constructed nature of emotion particularly suits career theory and intervention’s increasing emphases on postmodernism, constructivism, and social constructionism; implicating emotion as of principal benefit to self-construction in work and other life domains. In this regard, emotion figures prominently in motivational processes related to early memory narratives within career construction counseling and the intentionality process of life— career design. Considering emotion in life—career design may help complement vocational psychology’s long-standing foci on answering questions of what occupations people choose and how ready they are to choose them with addressing the question of why people move along particular life— career pathways.