The emotions of powerlessness

Abstract

After briefly considering cognitive aspects of powerlessness, we propose that the affective basis of powerlessness is comprised of four primary emotions–acceptance–acquiescence, anticipation–expectation, sadness, and fear. Plutchik’s psychoevolutionary model of primary emotions, together with a partial classification of pairwise combinations of these four emotions, enables a theoretical model hypothesizing that powerlessness also involves six secondary-level emotions – fatalism, pessimism, resignation, anxiety, submissiveness, and shame. A quantitative content analysis of 564 life-historical interviews of Australian Aborigines and Euro-Australians was used for structural equations models relating objective and subjective powerlessness. The results of these analyses fit the data. Cultural and sex difference in the manifest variables were analyzed. This work aspires to contribute to alienation theory, to establish a linkage between alienation theory and the sociology of emotions, and to develop hierarchical, lexical categorization analysis.

Keywords:

• powerlessness
• emotion
• alienation
• Australian Aborigines
• life-historical interviews
• shame
• anxiety
• resignation

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the many helpful suggestions, criticisms, and discussions provided by Maria Gritsch, Melvin Seeman, and Charles Kaplan. The data analyzed in the study were acquired with the aid of the New South Wales Aboriginal Family Education Centres Federation, with special thanks to, and Alex Grey, Maisie Cavanagh, and Kevin Cavanagh.

Notes

1. There was no significant Sex difference detected for the variable Anxiety, which merits a brief comment. That women are more anxious than me is a long-held stereotype. One component of anxiety, fear, is often defines as a prototypical ‘female’ emotion, and would appear central to the emotion-based stereotypes of men and women (Fabes and Martin 1991). On the other hand, the other hypothesized component of anxiety, anticipation/exploration, is strongly linked to the brains and behaviors of men. Men tend to be disproportionately involved in anticipation and exploration, which has been widely attributed to evolutionary adaptation. From mice to humans, in the sexual division of reproduction-related behavior, females have been disproportionately responsible for infant care, and are adept at detecting and using protection-oriented cues for coping with emotional events (Kret and De Gelder 2012), and do so automatically when they occur. In contrast, males, from an evolutionary standpoint, have borne responsibility for exploration of their environments, seeking resources, hunting for prey, and facing predatory enemies, all of which requires planning and a deliberate, controlled allocation of attentional resources. In a sense, females are specialized for close attention to tasks for which the body is a frame, whereas males are more oriented to the processing and planning of activities with respect to distant information: Motor control is exerted better for the arm by men, but by the hand for women; visual processing is performed better by women for stimuli within hand reach (near space) as opposed to beyond hand reach (far space) (Sanders 2013). This evolved sexual division of labor has not disappeared from the human brain, and has been reflected in event-related-potential studies, where expectancy with respect to emotion-laden stimuli for men involves controlled information processing, whereas women respond to the same stimuli with automatic processing, being adept at incongruity detection and the anticipatory processing of potentially negative or dangerous events (Meng and Yuan 2009, see also Meyers-Levy and Loken 2015).