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Emotions are social
Abstract
In this paper, I question the assumption that emotions are first and foremost individual reactions, and suggest instead that they are often best viewed as social phenomena. I show that many of the causes of emotions are interpersonally, institutionally or culturally defined; that emotions usually have consequences for other people; and that they serve interpersonal as well as cultural functions in everyday life. Furthermore, many cases of emotion are essentially communicative rather than internal and reactive phenomena. Previous research has often underestimated the importance of social factors in the causation and constitution of emotion. In conclusion, I recommend that existing cognitive and physiological approaches to emotional phenomena be supplemented or supplanted by social psychological analysis.
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Citations
Cited by
The ripple effect: emotional contagion and its influence on group behavior
Barsade, S. G. (2002) · Administrative Science Quarterly · doi:10.2307/3094912 · Cited by 3,361
How Emotions Regulate Social Life: The Emotions as Social Information (EASI) Model
Van Kleef, G. A. (2009) · Current Directions in Psychological Science · doi:10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01633.x · Cited by 1,457
Mood and emotions in small groups and work teams
Kelly, J. R., & Barsade, S. G. (2001) · Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · doi:10.1006/obhd.2001.2974 · Cited by 1,011
Stellar, J. E., Gordon, A. M., Piff, P. K., Cordaro, D., Anderson, C. L., Bai, Y., Maruskin, L. A., & Keltner, D. (2017) · Emotion Review · doi:10.1177/1754073916684557 · Cited by 696
Compassion in Organizational Life
Kanov, J. M., Maitlis, S., Worline, M. C., Dutton, J. E., Frost, P. J., & Lilius, J. M. (2004) · American Behavioral Scientist · doi:10.1177/0002764203260211 · Cited by 671
Metadata
- Authors
- Parkinson, B.
- Venue
- British Journal of Psychology
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1996-11
- Volume
- 87
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 663-683
- ISSN
- 0007-1269 (ISSN-L)
- 2044-8295
- OpenAlex
- W2123465917
- Cited by
- 514
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 5.08
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Parkinson, B. (1996). Emotions are social. British Journal of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1996.tb02615.x
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
