"Emotion, Sociality, and Behavioral Decision Making: The Long and The Short of It"
It is widely accepted that discrete emotions serve as functional mechanisms designed to aid individuals in meeting adaptive challenges. That is, they efficiently shunt cognition and behavior toward certain classes of outcomes. Whether it be fear to avoid danger, anger to prepare for conflict, or disgust to avoid contaminants, the impact of emotion on shaping behavior to such threats is clear. For humans, however, adaptive function-ing involves not only successful navigation of the physical world, but successful navi-gation of the social one as well. Deciding who to trust, when to reciprocate, and what is morally acceptable, for example, constitute challenges of equal importance for build-ing the social and economic capital needed to flourish. If it is the case, therefore, that emotions represent mechanisms designed to increase adaptive responding, then it should be the case that discrete “social” emotions exist that function to “grease the wheels” of social interaction. In this colloquium, I will argue for this view by demon-strating the impact of several social emotions (e.g., gratitude, pride, empathy) that serve as mechanisms to foster the development of social and economic capital, primarily through aiding immediate impulse control in order to reap longer-term rewards.
© 2006, The Ohio State University | Department of Psychology, 1885 Neil Avenue Mall | Columbus, Ohio 43210