Forms and functions of the social emotions: Shame functions to minimize the spread of discrediting information about yourself and the threat of being devalued by others

Forms and Functions of the Social Emotions. Daniel Sznycer, Aaron Sell, Debra Lieberman. Current Directions in Psychological Science, June 15, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214211007451

Abstract: In engineering, form follows function. It is therefore difficult to understand an engineered object if one does not examine it in light of its function. Just as understanding the structure of a lock requires understanding the desire to secure valuables, understanding structures engineered by natural selection, including emotion systems, requires hypotheses about adaptive function. Social emotions reliably solved adaptive problems of human sociality. A central function of these emotions appears to be the recalibration of social evaluations in the minds of self and others. For example, the anger system functions to incentivize another individual to value your welfare more highly when you deem the current valuation insufficient; gratitude functions to consolidate a cooperative relationship with another individual when there are indications that the other values your welfare; shame functions to minimize the spread of discrediting information about yourself and the threat of being devalued by others; and pride functions to capitalize on opportunities to become more highly valued by others. Using the lens of social valuation, researchers are now mapping these and other social emotions at a rapid pace, finding striking regularities across industrial and small-scale societies and throughout history.

Keywords: emotion, anger, gratitude, shame, pride, social valuation

Check also Forms and Functions of the Self-Conscious Emotions. Daniel Sznycer. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 23, Issue 2, February 2019, Pages 143-157. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.11.007

Highlights

.  Self-conscious emotions such as pride, shame, and guilt are often studied through the lens of attributional theories. Under attributional theories, the activation and operation of self-conscious emotions depend on how the individual construes and evaluates her own successes and failures.

.  Although attributional theories highlight the intrapersonal nature of self-conscious emotions, recent theories and data suggest that the self-conscious emotions serve interpersonal adaptive functions.

.  From an adaptationist perspective, the characteristic self-reflexive and self-evaluative processes of self-conscious emotions are proximate means to solve adaptive problems related to social valuation.

.  Many known facts about the self-conscious emotions can be interpreted as outputs delivered by well-engineered emotion adaptations.

.  Attributional theories view shame as an immoral, pathological version of guilt. However, shame and guilt simply appear to be distinct adaptations serving different adaptive functions.

.  This interpersonal adaptationist framework can generate novel, testable hypotheses.

Abstract: Pride, shame, and guilt color our highest and lowest personal moments. Recent evidence suggests that these self-conscious emotions are neurocognitive adaptations crafted by natural selection. Specifically, self-conscious emotions solve adaptive problems of social valuation by promoting the achievement of valued actions and characteristics to increase others’ valuations of the individual (pride); limiting information-triggered devaluation (shame); and remedying events where one put insufficient weight on the welfare of a valuable other (guilt). This adaptationist perspective predicts a form–function fit: a correspondence between the adaptive function of a self-conscious emotion and its information-processing structure. This framework can parsimoniously explain known facts about self-conscious emotions, make sense of puzzling findings, generate novel hypotheses, and explain why self-conscious emotions have their characteristic self-reflexive phenomenology.

Keywords: shameprideguiltcooperationreputationstatus