Why Should We Give a Damn? On Sharing Emotions (original) (raw)
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Collective Emotions - Phenomenology, Ontology, and Ideology
One conception of collective emotion is that of one token emotional disposition, episode, or attitude with many participants. Such emotions are a collective’s. This conception has been criticized on phenomenological and ontological grounds, and it has recently been depicted as a piece of political ideology. This paper focuses on Max Scheler’s conception of collective emotion which some of those who are sympathetic to the idea in the recent debate have endorsed. It is argued that while it withstands the phenomenological and ontological objections, the issue of political ideology has to be taken seriously.
Collective feelings and the politics of affect and emotion
International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion, 2009
This paper distinguishes between affect and emotion as two different aspects of human feeling. Ways of conceptualising such feelings as socially organised as well as individually experienced are then suggested. These concepts include 'structures of feeling', 'abiding affects', 'emotional habitus' and fleeting emotional reactions. Illustrations of each of these are provided. Finally, research methods drawing on observation, free association and imagery are particularly appropriate for the investigation of collective feelings.
How We Feel: Collective Emotions Without Joint Commitments
ProtoSociology, vol. 35, 2019
This article engages critically with Margaret Gilbert's proposal that joint commitments are necessary for collective emotions. After introducing Gilbert's concept of joint commitment (Section 2), and the joint commitment account of collective emotions (Section 3), we argue in Section 4 that research from developmental psychology challenges the necessity of joint commitments for collective emotions. In that section, we also raise a more principled objection to Gilbert's account, independently of developmental considerations. Section 5 develops a complementary line of argument, focused on the notion of mutual recognition. While we agree with Gilbert that mutual recognition has an important role to play in an account of collective emotions, we take issue with her attempt to analyse face-to-face based mutual recognition in terms of the concept of joint commitment. We conclude by sketching an alternative analysis of collective emotions that highlights the role of interpersonal identification and socially mediated self-consciousness.
The basic function of emotion in life is to know what matters in a situation in a way that tightly connects cognition to evaluation and action. Emotions focus our attention on what’s significant in the light of our aims and values, and they dispose us to act. Emotions are thus practical knowledge par excellence. As such, they are indispensable, at least for our kind of agency. To put all of this in a simple slogan: emotions are our way of getting our act together. This chapter opens with a discussion of how this works in the individual case (1.), and then proceeds to examining how this carries over to joint action (2.). It is argued that in spite of some important differences between these cases, in order for us to get our joint act together, we need to know what matters to us. For such knowledge to be suitably related to action, it has to involve a single unified evaluative perspective (3.). The way in which this perspective is unified is plural self-knowledge: a non-observational and non-inferential sense of our concerns as ours. Such emotion is a collection’s, or a group’s; its subject is plural rather than singular.
Emotions in collectivist and individualist contexts
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001
A theory of cultural differences in emotions was tested in a questionnaire study. Hypotheses about the differences between emotion in individualist and collectivist contexts covered different components of emotion: concerns and appraisals, action readiness, social sharing, and belief changes. The questionnaire focused on 6 types of events that were rated as similar in meaning across cultures. Participants were 86 Dutch individualist respondents and 171 Surinamese and Turkish collectivist respondents living in the Netherlands. As compared with emotions in individualist cultures, emotions in collectivist cultures (a) were more grounded in assessments of social worth and of shifts in relative social worth, (b) were to a large extent taken to reflect reality rather than the inner world of the individual, and (c) belonged to the self-other relationship rather than being confined to the subjectivity of the self.
Towards a theory of collective emotions
Emotion Review, 5(3), ePub ahead of print, DOI: 10.1177/1754073913484170
Collective emotions are at the heart of any society and become evident in gatherings, crowds, or responses to widely salient events. However, they remain poorly understood and conceptualized in scientific terms. Here, we provide first steps towards a theory of collective emotions. We first review accounts of the social and cultural embeddedness of emotion that contribute to understanding collective emotions from three broad perspectives: face-to-face encounters, culture and shared knowledge, and identification with a social collective. In discussing their strengths and shortcomings and highlighting areas of conceptual overlap, we translate these views into a number of bottom–up mechanisms that explain collective emotion elicitation on the levels of social cognition, expressive behavior, and social practices.