This article integrates arguments and evidence from my 2019 monograph Heart to Heart: How Your Emotions Affect Other People. The central claim is that emotions operate as processes of relation alignment that produce convergence, complementarity, or conflict between two or more people’s orientations to objects. In some cases, relation alignment involves strategic presentation of emotional information for the purpose of regulating other people’s behaviour. In other cases, emotions consolidate from socially distributed reciprocal adjustments of cues, signals, and emerging actions without (...) any explicit registration or communication of emotional meaning by parties to the exchange. The relation-alignment approach provides a fresh perspective on issues relating to emotion’s interpersonal, intragroup, and organizational functions and clarifies how emotions are regulated for social purposes. (shrink)

This article discusses contemporary social psychological approaches to the social relations and appraisals associated with specific emotions; other people’s impact on appraisal processes; effects of emotion on other people; and interpersonal emotion regulation. We argue that single-minded cognitive perspectives restrict our understanding of interpersonal and group-related emotional processes, and that new methodologies addressing real-time interpersonal and group processes present promising opportunities for future progress.

This paper is concerned with some limitations of the vignette methodology used in contemporary appraisal research and their implications for appraisal theory. We focus on two recent studies in which emotional manipulations were achieved using textual materials, and criticise the investigators' apparent implicit assumption that participation in everyday social reality is somehow comparable to reading a story. We take issue with three related aspects of this cognitive analogy between life and its narrative representation, by arguing that emotional reactions in real (...) life are not necessarily mediated by symbolic processes, that people are involved participants of real life rather than neutral observers, and that in real life people's evaluations and emotions are typically part of an ongoing dialogue rather than the expression of a soliloquy. Results from these studies of emotional vignettes therefore tend to overestimate the importance of constructive, abstract, and individualistic processes in the everyday causation of social emotions. In real life, people do not necessarily have to calculate, transform, or internally represent the meaning of the dynamic situation in order to make emotional sense of what is happening to them in the social world. (shrink)

This paper presents a new approach to the demarcation of social emotions, based on their dependence on social appraisals that are designed to assess events bearing on social concerns. Previous theoretical attempts to characterize social emotions are compared, and their inconsistencies highlighted. Evidence for the present formulation is derived from theory and research into links between appraisals and emotions. Emotions identified as social using our criteria are also shown to bring more consistent consequences for social behavior than nonsocial emotions. We (...) conclude by considering ways of validating and refining our classification. (shrink)

Recent studies have used self-report methods to defend a close associative or causal connection between appraisal and emotion. The present experiments used similar procedures to investigate remembered experiences of reasonable and unreasonable anger and guilt, and of nonemotional other-blame and selfblame. Results suggest that the patterns of appraisal reported for reasonable examples of emotions and for situations where there is a near absence of emotion may be highly similar, but that both may differ significantly from the appraisal profiles reported for (...) unreasonable examples of the same emotions. Further, relevant appraisals were not always identified by participants as the most influential determinants of guilt and anger. These findings demonstrate either that the relationship between certain appraisals and emotions is less consistent than implied in some contemporary versions of appraisal theory, or that there are problems with the validity of existing questionnaire-based measures of the variables in question. (shrink)

This article catalogs social processes contributing to construction of emotions across three time-scales, covering: natural selection; ontogenesis; and moment-by-moment transactions. During human evolution, genetic and cultural influences operate interdependently, not as separate forces working against each other. Further, leaving infants’ environment-open serves adaptive purposes. During ontogenesis, cultural socialization affects emotion development in various ways, not all of which depend on internalization of cultural meanings as emphasized in some earlier social constructionist accounts. Construction also operates over the moment-by-moment time-scale of real-time (...) interpersonal interactions, as emotions adjust to the constraints and affordances of immediate cultural environments. Claims that emotions are constructed, and that social processes contribute to their construction, are no longer contestable. Now the project is to specify how these processes operate and what materials they use. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes processes potentially contributing to interpersonal anxiety transfer, including object-directed social appraisal, empathic worry, and anxiety contagion, and reviews evidence for their operation. We argue that these anxiety-transfer processes may be exploited strategically when attempting to regulate relationship partners’ emotion. More generally, anxiety may serve as either a warning signal to other people about threat (alerting function) or an appeal for emotional support or practical help (comfort-seeking function). Tensions between these two interpersonal functions may account for mutually incongruent (...) interpersonal responses to expressed anxiety, including mistargeted interpersonal regulation attempts. Because worry waxes and wanes over time as a function of other people's ongoing reactions, interpersonal interventions may help to alleviate some of its maladaptive consequences. (shrink)

Drawing on research reviewed in this special section, the present article discusses how various contextual factors impact on production and decoding of emotion-related facial activity. Although emotion-related variables often contribute to activation of prototypical “emotion expressions” and perceivers can often infer emotional meanings from these facial configurations, neither process is invariant or direct. Many facial movements are directed towards or away from events in the shared environment, and their effects depend on these relational orientations. Facial activity is not only a (...) medium for descriptive representation of internal affective states, but also a means of adjusting to, and operating on, external objects, and of influencing other people’s appraisals of those objects. (shrink)

Does appraisal co-ordinate emotional responses? Are emotions usually reached via mental representations of relational meaning? This comment considers alternative causal routes in order to assess the centrality of appraisal in the explanation of emotion. Implicit and explicit meaning extraction can certainly help steer the course of emotion-related processes. However, presupposing that appraisals represent the driving force behind all aspects of emotion generation leads to inclusive formulations of appraisal or restrictive formulations of emotion.

How do facial movements and verbal statements relate to emotional processes? A familiar answer is that the primary phenomenon is an internally located emotion that may then get expressed on the fac...

A social partner’s emotions communicate important information about their motives and intentions. However, people may discount emotional information that they believe their partner has regulated with the strategic intention of exerting social influence. Across two studies, we investigated interpersonal effects of communicated guilt and perceived strategic regulation in trust games. Results showed that communicated guilt mitigated negative effects of trust violations on interpersonal judgements and behaviour. Further, perceived strategic regulation reduced guilt’s positive effects. These findings suggest that people take emotion-regulation (...) motives into account when responding to emotion communication. (shrink)

To what extent does the level of overlap between social appraisal and social referencing depend upon the particular definitions adopted when following different research agendas? I argue that processes of both kinds fall under the more inclusive heading of relation alignment. Relation alignment also covers emotional influence that is not mediated by the communication of appraisal. Similarities, interdependences, and distinctions between these various relation-alignment processes warrant further investigation.

Emotion-related words differ across societies and eras. Does this mean that emotions themselves differ in similar ways? Three perspectives on language-emotion relations suggest alternative answers to this question. A referential approach implies that any language's emotion concepts provide a potentially perfectible mapping of the emotional world. Constructionist approaches suggest that linguistic concepts shape culturally different emotion perceptions. By contrast, a pragmatic approach emphasizes the performative functions served by conversational uses of emotion words. From this perspective, emotional language is attuned to (...) culture-specific requirements for aligning relations between people and objects. Thus, emotional utterances may be constituents of socially functional emotions rather than separate commentaries on them. Full understanding of cultural variation requires investigation of naturalistic emotional conversations in different societies. (shrink)

This reply considers how my article’s approach might be extended by attention to individual, contextual, and ecological processes. I agree that individual learning and agency play important roles in ontogeny; that sociologists have conducted informative work about the interpersonal and institutional contexts shaping on-line emotion construction; and that consideration of the relational niches in which discrete emotions consolidate can help to clarify their abstract structure. Emotion construction works with nonsocial as well as social materials.

Moors and colleagues’ clever studies demonstrate that goal-relevant stimuli can produce rapid, unintentional affective priming, but not necessarily that primes are compared with goal representations following onset. Instead, prior attunements based on changing concerns may prespecify reward value. Even if both these processes count as emotion-relevant appraisal, none of the evidence rules out appraisal-independent emotion under other, unsampled, circumstances, including those where emotions develop as cumulative responses to unfolding and responsive environments rather than as momentary reactions to briefly-presented simple stimuli. (...) Although the functional relations between inputs and outputs may imply “constructive” processes at one level, these processes may be implemented by sequential lower-level mechanisms. (shrink)