Becoming closer to one another: Shared emotions and social relationships

ABSTRACT

Many authors acknowledge that people share emotions in various social contexts. However, the deeper role of social relationships for shared emotions is poorly understood. I argue that shared emotions are affected by the social relationships in which they emerge. Moreover, shared emotions help people to bond. In order to do so, emotional experiences involve an intentional component that tracks the state of our social relationships. I introduce some new terminology that helps us to clearly distinguish between different kinds of emotional phenomena. I propose to use the term social-relational emotions for emotions the subcomponents of which interact across individuals. I borrow from Helm the distinction between the target, the formal object and the focus of an emotion. By drawing insights from relationship science in general and relational models theory in particular, I elaborate on and explore the idea that shared emotions track social relationships as their foci. Sharing an emotion is experienced as rewarding even when the shared emotion itself is not a pleasant one, because it makes people feel “closer” to one another.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• shared emotions
• collective emotions
• social relationships
• social cognition

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (the Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies) under Grant TK 145.

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on the manuscript and Alan Page Fiske for reading the final version of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Szanto and Slaby (2020) for a recent account of political emotions.

2. Emotional disclosure, also called social sharing of emotions, is used in social psychology to describe “the process during which a person, having experienced an emotion, recounts this experience to his or her social environment” (Singh-Manoux & Finkenauer, 2001, p. 647). Paradigmatic cases of shared emotions are usually described as emotional episodes that people experience together. However, emotional disclosure can be considered as a special case of shared emotions where a person, via describing one’s previously experienced emotions, regenerates those emotions in oneself in order to share them with others.

3. I use the expression individual emotions as a shorthand for emotions of individuals. I will specify further terminology as the paper unfolds.

4. I will leave aside approaches that focus on the concept of affect understood as an elusive dynamic state of individuals or groups that cannot be individualized into particular emotions with intentional objects, such as fear, anger or happiness. Slaby (2019) has recently elaborated an account of relational affect which is very different from my concept of social-relational emotion and captures a rather different phenomenon. He writes (p. 1):”Relational affects are not individual feeling states but affective interactions in relational scenes, either between two or more interactants or between an agent and aspects of her material environment.” In contrast, I assume that emotions, and also shared emotions, are particular feeling states of individuals. Relational affects are likely to constitute precursors to shared emotions, but the terms relational affect and social-relational emotions refer to two different phenomena. The same holds for other similar concepts like interaffectivity (Fuchs, 2016) and affective attunement (see e.g., Collins, 2004).

5. Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments describes a common social norm that encourages bidirectional social-relational emotions. He provides interesting examples of cases where people co-regulate their emotions to achieve a certain emotional equilibrium: for instance, when I am thrilled that I won the game, but you are miserable about losing it, it is socially expected that I would try to down-regulate my emotion whereas you would try to upregulate yours.

6. León et al talk about “the feeling of togetherness“which refers to the subjective character of a shared emotion “where the other subject is experientially registered as another with whom one shares an emotion“. The feeling of togetherness can be considered as an aspect of the sense of closeness.

7. It is somewhat confusing to call it the focus of an emotion when it is defined as something in the background of the emotion, but this is merely a matter of vocabulary. Although I would prefer a less confusing term, I will leave Helm’s terminology unchanged because several other authors also employ it.

8. As Hirschfeld (2001, p. 111) writes: “(R)apid and accurate appraisal of the social environment is a demanding achievement, one in which significant cognitive resources are deployed. A critical task, accordingly, is the need to represent and to compute information about a large number of groups, varied group affiliation, and shifting coalitions among groups. In light of this, it would be adaptive to reduce cognitive demand, and one way of doing so would be to reduce the apparent complexity of the situation.”.

9. In moral philosophy, there’s a long tradition of connecting morality with emotion. Moreover, research shows that people with emotional disturbances (for instance, antisocial or borderline personality disorder) tend to have problematic social relationships.

10. Pride researchers disagree about the details of how to best conceptualize the formal object of pride, but for my current purposes, these details are not decisive. I follow Richard Lazarus (1991, p. 122) who defines the formal object of pride as “enhancement of one’s ego-identity by taking credit of a valued object or achievement, either of our own or that of someone or group with whom we identify.”.

11. Paradoxically, the job of a parent is to leave oneself without a job over time – it is to support the children’s growing independence. When a child achieves something, the parents can feel proud even when the child did all the work on her own: the parents can interpret it as a sign that they have successfully taught their offspring the value of working hard to fulfil one’s dreams. A corresponding emotion of the daughter at this moment might be gratitude to her parents for providing her with a platform good enough to enable her achievement.

12. See also: https://www.der.org/resources/guides/jero-tapakan-study-guide.pdf.

13. Here is the original quote from Scheler (2008: 12–13, translation modified by León et al., 2017): “The father and the mother stand beside the dead body of a beloved child. They feel in common the ‘same’ sorrow, the ‘same’ anguish. It is not that A feels this sorrow and B feels it also, and moreover that they both know they are feeling it. No, it is a feeling-in-common. A’s sorrow is in no way ‘objectual’ for B here, as it is, e.g., for their friend C, who joins them, and commiserates ‘with them’ or ‘upon their sorrow’. On the contrary, they feel it together, in the sense that they feel and experience in common, not only the self-same value-situation, but also the same keenness of emotion in regard to it. The sorrow, and the grief, as characterizing the functional relation thereto, are here on identical.”.

14. This example also illustrates the fact that a social relationship does not necessarily have to temporally precede the experience of a shared emotion: sometimes strangers begin to relate and feel bonded as they enter into an experience of sharing an emotion. See also Kelly et al. (2014).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund [SHVHV16145T].