A General Theory of Emotions and Social Life

Warren D. TenHouten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134229079
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Founded upon the psychoevolutionary theories of Darwin, Plutchik and Izard, a general socioevolutionary theory of the emotions - affect-spectrum theory - classifies a wide spectrum of the emotions and analyzes them on the sociological, psychological and neurobiological levels.

This neurocognitive sociology of the emotions supersedes the major theoretical perspectives developed in the sociology of emotions by showing primary emotions to be adaptive reactions to fundamental problems of life which have evolved into elementary social relationships and which can predict occurrences of the entire spectrum of primary, complex secondary, and tertiary emotions.

Written by leading social theorist Warren D. TenHouten, this book presents an encyclopaedic classification of the emotions, describing forty-six emotions in detail, and presenting a general multilevel theory of emotions and social life. The scope of coverage of this key work is highly topical and comprehensive, and includes the development of emotions in childhood, symbolic elaboration of complex emotions, emotions management, violence, and cultural and gender differences. While primary emotions have clearly defined valences, this theory shows that complex emotions obey no algebraic law and that all emotions have both creative and destructive potentialities.

1 Introduction

This book presents a general theory linking emotions and rational thought to social relationships. This introduction considers scholarly efforts to define emotions and related phenomena before moving into the book’s first phase, a classification and description of the emotions. Chapter 2 considers Darwin’s evolutionary approach to the emotions and Plutchik’s psychoevolutionary classification of the emotions. Chapter 3 models four pairs of opposite primary emotions – acceptance and rejection/disgust, joy and sadness, anger and fear, and anticipation and surprise. Chapters 4–7 radically revise Plutchik’s classification of the secondary emotions, the pairings of primary emotions.

Chapter 8 considers the sociorelational approach to the emotions, pioneered by Kemper (1978). Chapter 8 presents a model of social relations which synthesizes formulations developed in classical sociology, primate and human ethology, and classical and contemporary social theory. Two models, of the emotions and of social relationships, are then used to develop concepts of self and social identity. Chapter 11 explores the relationship between social control and the important emotions of pride and pridefulness, and of embarrassment and shame. Chapter 12 considers the development of emotions and cognition in socialization. Four processes are shown to be involved in developing basic emotions and complex, secondary and tertiary emotions: verbalization, desomatization, symbollexia, and symbolic elaboration. It will be shown that massively traumatic events can retard and even reverse these processes, resulting in deverbalization, resomatization, asymbollexia, and a reduction of symbolic elaboration, which together constitute alexithymia, an inability to talk about one’s feelings and emotions.

The classification of the emotions in Chapters 4–7 is adequate for a basic consideration of the primary, secondary, and tertiary emotions, but the sociorelational model makes possible a useful reclassification of the emotions, which is carried out, in three stages, in Chapters 9–10. First, the emotions of formal, “agonic” society exist as adaptive reactions to the positive and negative experiences of power-based and market-oriented social relations. These emotions are anger and fear, anticipation and surprise, and six secondary emotions resulting from pairing these primaries. Anger and anticipation contribute to instrumentally rational action, while the other seven come into play when situations with negative aspects are encountered on the rocky road to rationally organized goal attainment. A parallel argument is then made for the emotions of the informal, “hedonic” community – acceptance, disgust, joy, and sadness – which are reactions to the valenced experiences of exchange-based and communal social relationships. It will be shown that acceptance, joy, and love (the combination of joy and acceptance) are core natural emotions, with seven other emotions seen as reactions to problematic experiences of close or intimate personal relationships. Next, a typology of character structures is attained by identifying four clusters of emotions that form bridges between the individual in the informal community and in the larger, formal society. In addition to the secondary emotions of social identity, several of the 16 possible tertiary emotions that address the problem of the individual’s self in society are considered. Emphasis will be given to two pathological character types, those of hostile intentions and of impulsivity/sensation-seeking. Other tertiary emotions – jealousy, envy, ambition, confidence, and hope – are the topic of Chapter 13. Chapter 14 discusses human violence and a final tertiary emotion, that of hatred.

Results from a partial empirical test of this theory are presented in Chapter 15. The dataset used is a corpus of 658 life-historical interviews with Australian-Aborigines and Euro-Australians. Emotions and social relations are measured through lexical-level content analysis of these interviews. It will be shown that the eight independent variables formed from the positive and negative experiences of four elementary social relations are predictive of the eight primary emotions, but in order to obtain a full fit of data to theory, one social relationship – the negative experience of economic, market-based social relations – must be defined differently in the two cultures.

Emotions and related phenomena

Emotions

At the outset, it is helpful to consider what is meant by emotion and the closely related notions of feeling, mood, sentiment, and affect. As we might expect, emotions have been defined in many ways (see Plutchik 2003: 18–23) using many epistemological orientations. Frijda (1987), using a functionalist approach, defines emotions as “tendencies to establish, maintain, or disrupt a relationship with the environment … [so that] [e]motions might be defined as action readiness in response to emergencies or interruptions” (p. 71). This helpful definition suggests emotions are ways in which individuals deal with the people and events they encounter in the social world, as they react to complex social situations. That the most elementary of emotions are valenced, positive or negative, has been emphasized by psychologists with a cognitive orientation (e.g., Ortony et al. 1988). Thus, emotions are ways of coping and adapting to the social situations that life presents. Despite the arguments of some social-constructionists that emotions are purely social (e.g., by Averill 1980 and Harré 1986), emotions also have a biological substrate. The word emotion comes from a Latin word, movere, meaning “to move” or to “stir up.” Aristotle (383–323 BC), in De Anima, spoke of emotions as a principle of movement in human experience. Change occurs in what we feel, Aristotle argued, because jealousy, anger, and the other emotions are the results of sensations reflected upon and thought about, a process that enables us to act in the social world. Aristotle, as we shall see, was on the mark, but his contemporaries saw emotions as visited upon humans by their gods, a view that reappeared in the Middle Ages, when human passions came to be seen as the voice of the Devil (Sennett 1980: 4–5). The psychological meaning of emotion is defined as “a mental ‘feeling’ or ‘affection’ (e.g., of surprise, hope, or fear, and so forth) as distinguished from cognitive or volitional states of consciousness” (Oxford English Dictionary 1971: 853; hereafter, Oxford) and came into use in the English language in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Strasser (1970: 302) points out that emotional behavior can easily be recognized, and has three defining characteristics: (i) emotions often occur in situations in which one’s vital needs are apt to be at stake; (ii) emotional behavior, by nature, is eruptive and expressive, which is why it stands out, is often easy to recognize, and is often not based on rational grounds after a careful weighing of motives and a search for suitable means to reach a clearly defined goal; and (iii) an emotion is a primitive form of a response to a situation, which is not evaluated in an objective manner but immediately, in light of existential needs, and by means of partial information. Thus, emotions are often described as “hot” and as demonstrating one’s lack of a “cool head.” While emotions are adaptive reactions, they are often maladaptive, as they can be acted upon without due consideration of consequences; a sequence of acts, driven by an emotion, is apt to be performed in an inappropriate, unhelpful, or destructive temporal order. It should not be inferred from this, however, that emotions necessarily undermine reason. Quite the contrary, it will be shown that even the most basic emotions can be understood as efforts to attain rationality.

Aristotle understood that emotions have a social dimension. Consistent with the idea that emotions are adaptive reactions to situations of life, he saw that the totality of a person’s emotional experience provides a framework through which the world is viewed. In his Rhetoric, he claimed that the emotions consist of those feelings that so change persons as to affect their judgments, and they are attended by pain or pleasure. An emotion, he also asserted, comes into consciousness together with its own justification. An emotion, for Aristotle, is a mental structure that makes a claim for its own reasonableness, its own rationality (see also Lear 1990: 49–50). An emotion, then, is potentially rational but it can be irrational to the extent that the framework it provides is invalid, if it is directed inappropriately to an object or person in the world, or if the emotion is in conflict with beliefs, morals, values, and states of affairs that would undermine its justification.

Many emotions are triggered by events significant for the welfare of the organism. As examples: the presence of a prey or a predator; the presence of a friend, enemy, mate, or competitor; a novel occurrence. Emotions are adaptive reactions to such stimuli in the life of an organism. This means that antecedents are related to consequences: for example, the emotion of fear has the associated behavior of flight. As a second example, anger and its associated attack behavior acts to move aside or even destroy a barrier to the satisfaction of a need or the attainment of a goal. Plutchik (1962) argues that a stimulus event results in a cognitive evaluation, a good/bad, plus/minus values judgment, which in turn determines the way we think, feel, and act, which can involve approach of the good and avoidance of the bad.

Feelings

Feelings and emotions are often conflated in everyday discourse. Feelings are described as emotions, as in saying, “I feel angry/jealous/happy.” Emotions, in turn, are often defined in terms of feelings. Feelings refer to a person’s own state of mind, especially with reference to an evaluation of what is agreeable and disagreeable, pleasant or unpleasant. The English word feeling has a vast connotation, as it includes the experience of physical drive states, such as hunger, pain, and fatigue, as well as emotional states, so that it refers to all experiences of inner states (Arieti 1970: 136). Antonio Damasio (1999, 2003) describes recent advances in affective neuroscience which elaborate Arieti’s helpful definition and clarify the distinction between emotions and feelings: people react emotionally to objects and events, usually in social interactions, and these emotional reactions are followed up by a pattern of feelings whose necessary components include some levels of pain and pleasure. Thus, emotionally-competent social stimuli trigger emotional reactions, which in turn can contribute to our overall feeling state. Inspired by philosophical insights of Spinoza (2002; lived 1632–1677), Damasio (2003) conceptualizes the human mind as above all else the idea of the human body, such that mental processes are guided by the brain’s various mappings of the body’s parts and systems. Emotions involve actions and movements, often in public view, revealed in facial expression, posture, gesture, specific behaviors, and conversation. Feelings, which follow emotions, are in comparison private, playing out not in the body but in the mind and at a higher level. Of course, we can choose to share our private feelings and talk about them to others, to the extent that they are known to consciousness.

Damasio (2003) argues that pain and pleasure are essential ingredients of feelings. Feelings arise from a set of reactions aimed at maintenance of steady internal states (homeostasis), which include emotions, but also come from other sources of bodily condition, which together find representation in the brain’s maps of parts of the body and their states. Feelings reflect emotions and their perturbing effects on the body, but they are also influenced by the brain’s mappings of the state of muscles, the posture and orientation of the body, the state of the circulatory, respiratory, digestive and other systems, and brain neurochemistry, all of which are mapped in body-sensing regions of the brain. A feeling, in its essence, is a mind-state expressing an idea of the body. Thus, while the object of an emotion is apt to be external, typically another person with whom one is interacting, the object of a feeling is internal, for it is the body. Emotions, as we will see, are built up from simple adaptive reactions to prototypical life situations, which evolved in animals before the emergence of the brain power and creative intelligence necessary for feelings about our emotions emerged as a vital capability of the human mind.

Consider an example. Upon learning of the death of someone we are close to, we immediately experience the emotion sadness, which is followed up by feelings of sadness and grief. While the emotion sadness can occur well within a second following realization of such a social loss, the corresponding feelings of sadness and grief are experienced later and over a longer period of time. Feelings commonly last for a period of two to twenty seconds (Lutz et al. 2002; Damasio 2003: 122) and can recur systematically as the loss is thought about. Such feeling of sadness include thoughts consonant with the emotion of sadness, such as concern for one’s saddened or even depressed condition, a sense of fatigue, feelings of disappointment with life, and, on the pathological level, despairing ruminations of death and putrification, which might recur over many years and lead to a protracted, or even permanent, state of painful sadness and depression. People are strongly motivated to seek emotional happiness and feelings of well-being, and are equally motivated to avoid negative emotions and feelings of sadness, but it should be kept in mind that life presents problematic situations as well as hopeful opportunities, and that the emotions and feelings appropriate to specific situations, both negative and positive, are adaptive responses to our body, our sense of self, and our social reality.

Sentiments

Sentiments are defined by Steve Gordon (1981) as “socially constructed pattern[s] of sensations, expressive gestures and cultural meanings organized around a relationship to a social object, usually another person … or group such as a family” (pp. 566–7). Sentiments include romantic love, parental love, loyalty, patriotism, trust, friendship, happiness, and other relatively enduring social orientations that serve as affect elicitors. Sentiments typically focus on a particular person or object. Thus, a person can have a longstanding love for a mate or parent, a longstanding sorrow for someone who has died, a longstanding hostility to a rival or competitor. Such sentiments are generated, and continue to exist, as they relate to specific objects, situations, and processes.

Emotions, in contrast to sentiments, are acute, tightly tied to an eliciting situation, and episodic in nature. They are triggered by perceived changes in the environment, usually with respect to another person or a social situation, and have an intense feeling dimension. Emotional episodes last longer than emotions. Extended emotional episodes become sentiments. On the temporal level, “sentiments are enduring emotions which last longer than typical emotions, but are shorter than affective traits” (ibid.). Thus, sentiments are emotions with long duration. Emotions that have stable features thus become sentiments. Emotions with this potentiality would include love and hatred, envy and guilt, joy and sadness. Love, for example, can become a long-term favorable attitude toward another person, which is a sentiment, but this sort of stable love can be punctuated by short-term outbursts of passion and strong feelings. Here, the sentiment of love is no mere aggregation of short-term episodes of intense love, for it is rather stable, long lasting, and of a moderate level of intensity, in which the feeling component of the emotion is not continuously present.

Moods

The term “mood” is used in many ways. In ordinary discourse, people use the term broadly to refer to all kinds of feeling states, so that we might be in a happy, cheerful, or blue mood. A narrower usage refers to an intense and pervasive form of feelings, so that we might be in a depressed, anxious, or melancholic mood, where a more general technical term would be an “affective disorder” (Ben-Ze’ev 2000: 86). Moods basically express the subject’s own situation, and in this sense are similar to feelings. But subject–object relationships, which are crucial to emotions, are of lesser importance to moods. Moods differ from emotions in that they are generally of less intensity and longer-lasting than are emotions. Moods and emotions also differ in their causes. Emotions are typically triggered by events and changes in the social environment that are sudden and urgent, but moods are less specifically tied to an eliciting situation and are ordinarily lacking in urgency.

Affects

Brennan (2004) considers an affect to be a sensation of pleasure, or unpleasure, or both, together with the ideas associated with this valenced sensation. Ben-Ze’ev (2000: 79–116) defines the “affect realm” very broadly, to include emotions and related phenomena such as sentiments, moods, and feelings, and affect disorders such as depression, agoraphobia, and social anxiety, which are ultimately topics for the sociology of emotions but are beyond the scope of this book. Consistent with Brenner, Ben-Ze’ev sees affective phenomena as having an inherent positive (pleasurable) or negative (unpleasurable) evaluation, which shows the ideational intention of the affect, and a non-cognitive sensation, or feeling.

Ben-Ze’ev (2000: 83) clarifies the distinction between emotions, sentiments, and affective traits using the example of anger. A tendency to become angry, irrespective of the situation at hand, is an affective trait. Affective traits work their way into the personality, so that we might describe a person as easily irritated and short-tempered. When this person actually becomes angry, “hot under the collar,” the experience is one of the emotion anger. There are important temporal differences between emotions and these related concepts. Emotions usually last between a minute and a few hours, whereas sentiments and affective traits, which are basically dispositions, last for a longer period. Moods can last for hours, days, even months. Sentiments can last for weeks, months, years, even decades. Affective traits, and affective disorders, can last a lifetime.

In the everyday world, language provides a rich vocabulary of affect that for each emotion provides for all kinds of distinctions. Consider variants of sadness: grief clearly can be an emotion, if it is an acute mental pain resulting from loss, misfortune, or deep disappointment. Grief is both more acute and less enduring than sorrow, which can be considered a sentiment. Mourning, also a sentiment, refers to a sorrow that is publicly expressed. Anguish is a painful, excruciating kind of grief, and woe is a deep and inconsolable sorrow. Sadness and unhappiness are generic subjective terms that apply to this whole range of emotion, and can result from a vague sense of want following the loss of a close personal relationship, from poor health, and from numerous other causes. A person with disheartened spirits can be described as dejected and downcast, and such a person can also be characterized as desolate, forlorn, gloomy, blue, and forsaken, and as having a dreary outlook on life (see Fernald 1914/1947: 233, 377–8). Of course, it should be added that not all adult persons are equipped with a technical vocabulary of affect and are apt to use even the most common terms incorrectly, and to conflate everyday notions such as jealousy and envy, shame and guilt, fear and anxiety, disgust and contempt. In this book, the term emotion will be given broad meaning, so that, for example, the discussion of the emotion joy is extended to include the sentiment of happiness and the affective trait of being a happy person.

The language of emotions is thus complex and apt to be ambiguous. A person who is “blue” might describe herself as “depress...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 From Darwin to psychoevolutionary theories of primary and secondary emotions
• 3 The four pairs of opposite primary emotions: acceptance and disgust, joy and sadness, anger and fear, anticipation and surprise
• 4 Secondary emotions: the four pairs of opposite primary dyads – love and misery, pride and embarrassment, aggressiveness and alarm, curiosity and cynicism
• 5 Secondary emotions, continued: the four pairs of half-opposite secondary dyads – dominance and submissiveness, optimism and pessimism, delight and disappointment, repugnance and contempt
• 6 Secondary emotions, continued: the eight tertiary dyads – resourcefulness and shock, morbidness and resignation, sullenness and guilt, anxiety and outrage
• 7 Secondary emotions, continued: the four antithetical, quaternary dyads – ambivalence, catharsis, frozenness, confusion
• 8 The sociorelational approach to the emotions: four elementary forms of sociality
• 9 Affect-spectrum theory: the emotions of rationality and of intimacy
• 10 Affect-spectrum theory, continued: the emotions linking informal community and formal society; a typology of four character structures
• 11 Social identity and social control: pride and embarrassment, pridefulness and shame
• 12 Socialization and the emotions: from alexithymia to symbolic elaboration and creativity
• 13 The development of tertiary emotions: jealousy, envy, ambition, confidence, and hope
• 14 Emotions, violence, and the self: vengefulness and hatred
• 15 A partial empirical test of affect-spectrum theory
• 16 Discussion
• Notes
• References