Social Emotions Are Governed by a Common Grammar of Social Valuation

Abstract

Abstract Social emotions appear to be behavior-regulating programs built by natural selection to solve adaptive problems in the domain of social valuation. For example, shame functions to prevent and mitigate the costs of being socially devalued by others, whereas anger functions to correct those people who attach insufficient weight to the welfare of the self. This chapter reviews theory and evidence suggesting that distinctively functional social emotions such as guilt, gratitude, anger, pride, shame, sadness, and envy are all governed by a shared grammar of social valuation. The authors also provide evidence that social emotions and social valuation operate with a substantial degree of universality across cultures. This emotion-valuation constellation appears to shape human sociality through interpersonal interactions. Expanding upon this, they explore how signatures of this constellation may be evident in two spheres of human sociality: personality and the criminal justice system.