Negative Moral Emotions and Social Cohesion: Social Functions of Shame, Guilt, Jealousy, Envy and Resentment

• In Event: 568 - Section on Altruism, Morality and Social Solidarity Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. Spirituality, Pain, and Emotions

Abstract

Today social scientists pay a great attention to moral emotions – shame, guilt, envy, jealousy, resentment, and their derivatives such as humiliation, contempt, anger, hatred and hostility. These emotions are considered to be negative both by ordinary people and experts, as an attention is primarily focused on the dysfunctions of these emotions, their psychological and medical harm. It is often overlooked the social functions of these emotions. But it is important to understand under what conditions these emotions in modern societies are functional or dysfunctional, as well as social mechanisms of balancing these emotions.
Negative emotions, like many positive emotions, promote various types of social cohesion, because these emotions regulate behaviour in accordance with social norms, increase sensitivity to assessments of other people, act as a factor of socialization. All in all they play the role in the integration and regulation in group behaviour. Up to T. Scheff in modern societies experience of shame increases, and shaming experience causes not only the disruption of social ties, but also different kinds of cohesion. Shame, especially chronic, can hold together the entire national communities and ethnic groups. Similar conclusions can be drawn regarding the jealousy and envy, and ressentiment and guilt. The studies showed that in today’s Russia under the influence of social crises negative emotions acted as neo-archaic mechanisms that brought people together in separate groups, and it was not expressed in the evident weakening of the overall social solidarity, but such negative emotions strengthened group solidarity and the general political apathy.

Author

• Olga Alexandrovna Simonova, National Research University-Higher School of Economics