Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Most topics studied by social psychologists involve emotion in some way. Consider how cognitive dissonance is motivated by anxiety about self-esteem, or how conformity is influenced by the embarrassment of conspicuous deviation and the contentment of belonging. The list is impressively long: social comparisons generate envy, dejection, and pride; social anxiety underlies many group processes; romantic relationships have their love and jealousy, aggression its anger, altruism its sympathy, and persuasive communications almost any emotion one can name. Emotions, then, are at the heart of many social psychological phenomena.This chapter presents an overview of perspectives on the nature of emotion. The first section discusses foundational issues in the study of emotion, including its definitions, the functions of emotion, and the general approaches that have been taken in studying it. The general thesis is that emotion spans all of the levels of analysis that psychologists apply to their subject matter: to reduce them to three, these are the social and cultural, the cognitive, and the physiological. The remainder of this chapter describes emotion at each of these three levels and presents some of the most important issues and findings that may be gleaned from each.Although there is no single, agreed-upon definition of emotion, there is considerable consensus that emotional states are ... log in or subscribe to read full text