Emotion Review

Cultures, institutions, and social roles powerfully shape affective experience. Four types of social affect—cultural sentiments, characteristic emotions, structural emotions, and consequent emotions—characterize relations between culture, social structure, and individual affective experience within social interactions. This article briefly reviews findings from contemporary research traditions about these forms of affect and finishes with simulations comparing predictions about social emotions across cultures. The results of that simulation study illustrate how we might use data and tools from affect control theory to investigate differences in basic cultural sentiments, as well as predictions about the core types of social emotions—those associated with identities, those associated with structural relationships, and those evoked by a social event.

This article provides a brief overview of scholarship on gender differences in emotion and emotional well-being among adults in the United States, highlighting major substantive findings, methodological innovations, and theoretical developments that have emerged in the sociologies of emotion and mental health. Sociological research consistently finds that men report more frequent positive and less frequent negative feelings than women as well as gender differences in both the experience and expression of emotional distress. Sociologists attribute these gendered patterns of emotion to the larger social, economic, and cultural context surrounding women and men. Overall, by identifying macro- and meso-level social causes of microlevel emotional processes, sociologists have made significant contributions to knowledge about gender differences in emotion and emotional well-being in the US.

In recounting some of the key sociological insights offered by over 30 years of research on emotion management, or emotion regulation, we orient our discussion around sociological answers to the following questions: What is emotion management? How does emotion management occur? Why does it occur? And what are its consequences or benefits? In this review, we argue that emotion and its management are profoundly social. Through daily interactions with others, individuals learn to differentiate which emotions are appropriate when, as well as the most effective ways to bring their feelings in line with culturally agreed-upon emotion norms. Emotion management is also functional, not only for the individuals who perform it, but also for the dyads, groups, institutions, and societies in which they are embedded. The social processes through which individuals learn to display culturally appropriate emotions have important implications on many levels, from interpersonal interactions to the development of social movements.

In recent years sociological research on social movements has identified emotional dynamics in all the basic processes and phases of protest, and we are only beginning to understand their causal impacts. These include the solidarities of groups, motivations for action, the role of morality in political action, and the gendered division of labor in social movements. Anger turns out to be at the core of many of these causal mechanisms.

Recently, McGinn (2011) has proposed a new theory of disgust. This theory makes empirical claims as to the history and function of disgust, yet does not take into account contemporary scientific research on the subject. This essay evaluates his theory for its merits as an account of disgust, and as a piece of scholarship more generally, and finds it lacking.

Strohminger (2014) criticizes McGinn for his lack of attention to recent scientific findings, and for ignoring common sense. This commentary deepens both of these criticisms via an exploration of McGinn’s account of the evolution of disgust.

Strohminger gives a lively and accurate critique of McGinn’s book (2011) but is somewhat inaccurate herself in describing the current theoretical state of the science on disgust. My comment primarily focuses on the issues I have with McGinn’s and Strohminger’s discussions and briefly offers a possible unifying account of the function and meaning of disgust.

In The Meaning of Disgust (2011), Colin McGinn employs elements of the phenomenological theory of disgust advanced by Aurel Kolnai in 1929. Kolnai’s treatment of what he calls “material” disgust and of its primary elicitors—putrefying organic matter, bodily wastes and secretions, sticky contaminants, vermin—anticipates more recent scientific treatments of this emotion as a mode of protective recoil. While Nina Strohminger (2014) charges McGinn with neglecting such scientific studies, we here attempt to show how Kolnai goes beyond experimental findings in his careful description of the phenomenological differences between disgust and other emotions of forceful disapproval.

The Meaning of Disgust (McGinn, 2011) is a vivid example of how interdisciplinary research can go horribly wrong. Strohminger’s (2014) criticisms serve as a good starting point to discuss some of the issues that need to be addressed by the growing number of researchers who choose to conduct interdisciplinary research in philosophy and psychology. I argue that McGinn’s approach to science in The Meaning of Disgust serves as a useful contrast to the ideal, and that it illustrates the most important virtue necessary for being a good interdisciplinarian: intellectual humility.

Strohminger (2014) is revolted by McGinn’s (2011) book, The Meaning of Disgust. We argue that her reaction of repugnance highlights one of the greatest mysteries in the psychology of disgust: this emotion is at times elicited by abstract ideological concerns rather than physical threats of infection or contamination. Here we describe the theoretical challenge of accounting for nonpathogenic disgust elicitors, which include spiritual defilement, violations of the “natural order,” and, apparently, McGinn’s latest publication.

I use a number of McGinn’s (2011) ideas to identify likely confounds in the induction of incidental disgust as the basis of the moral amplification effect.

Grand unified theories of messy topics like emotion tend to fail at capturing all the important dimensions of their subject. Why is this? I take on this question while responding to commentaries.

In evolutionary psychology predictions, women’s mate preferences shift between fertile and nonfertile times of the month to reflect ancestral fitness benefits. Our meta-analytic test involving 58 independent reports (13 unpublished, 45 published) was largely nonsupportive. Specifically, fertile women did not especially desire sex in short-term relationships with men purported to be of high genetic quality (i.e., high testosterone, masculinity, dominance, symmetry). The few significant preference shifts appeared to be research artifacts. The effects declined over time in published work, were limited to studies that used broader, less precise definitions of the fertile phase, and were found only in published research.

Wood, Kressel, Joshi, and Louie (2014) thoroughly evaluate the evidence for menstrual cycle shifts in ratings of several male characteristics and conclude that their analyses fail to provide supportive evidence for consistent cycle effects. The topic of menstrual cycle shifts in mate preferences has been strongly debated, with disagreements over both scientific content and practice. Here, we attempt to take a step back from these acrimonious exchanges and focus instead on how to interpret menstrual cycle shifts in mate preference tasks, independently from the question of when, or if, task performance varies with cycle stage. A greater consideration of domain-general mechanisms could provide an opportunity for investigating how evolved predispositions interact with socially transmitted information in biasing women’s responses on mate preference tasks.

In their meta-analysis Wood, Kressel, Joshi, and Louie (2014) argue little evidence supports shifts in mating preferences across the menstrual cycle. They imply this may represent a critical weakness of evolutionary psychology theories of mating preferences more generally. This report represents a fairly common use of meta-analysis: to assemble data to support or reject a particular proposition over which there is debate. Yet, rarely do meta-analyses succeed at resolving ideological debates. Multiple decision points related to the selection, coding, effect size extraction, and interpretation of studies leaves considerable room for meta-analytic authors to interject their own beliefs. Meta-analyses are typically hailed by those who agreed a priori with their conclusion, and rejected as fatally flawed by those in disagreement. As such, meta-analyses have failed in replacing narrative reviews as more objective.

We applaud Wood, Kressel, Joshi, and Louie’s (2014) careful, nuanced meta-analysis. The evolutionary hypotheses designed to explain menstrual cycle fluctuations in mate preferences are convoluted and, based on this new meta-analysis, unnecessary because the existence of the fluctuations is not supported by the data. Evolutionary explanations are still possible if they predict women’s mate preferences rather than cyclic fluctuations in those preferences. The biosocial model provides a plausible alternative account. We emphasize the importance of improved methods in future research, focusing especially on ascertainment of cycle phase.

Wood, Kressel, Joshi, and Louie (2014) report that published, but not unpublished, studies of masculinity, dominance, symmetry, and health preferences show significant overall effects of cycle phase. They interpret this as evidence that reports of cyclic shifts in mate preferences are artifacts of publication bias. I will first discuss why these conclusions do not necessarily follow straightforwardly from their results. I will then discuss their findings for health preferences specifically, concluding that their dismissal of a significant overall effect of cycle phase is unreasonable.

The target meta-analysis (Wood, Kressel, Joshi, & Louie, 2014) raises a number of red flags for research on menstrual shifts in women’s psychology. In this commentary, I particularly address one: the near-absent attention to sociocultural forces in this body of work. I use social neuroendocrinology as one example of a research paradigm that integrates both evolution and socialization into studies of human behavior. I argue that incorporating attention to social constructions actually provides clearer answers to evolutionary questions and also fills the biobehavioral comparative mandate by seriously attending to human specificities alongside cross-species generalities. I close by noting that human bodies simultaneously reflect evolved and sociocultural forces, an understanding that undergirds contemporary biobehavioral research.

This reply addresses the issues raised by the thoughtful commentaries on Wood, Kressel, Joshi, and Louie’s (2014) meta-analysis. We maintain that menstrual cycle influences on women’s mate preferences are obtained inconsistently in the literature and are linked to research artifacts. This pattern provides little support for the simple evolutionary psychology biology-to-behavior models that inspired this research. As illustrated by the commentaries, more promising theories of human reproduction situate biological and psychological processes within societal structures.

Anger is often primarily portrayed as a negative emotion that motivates antagonistic, aggressive, punitive, or hostile behavior. We propose that this portrayal is too one-sided. A review of the literature on behavioral consequences of anger reveals evidence for the positive and even prosocial behavioral consequences of this emotion. We outline a more inclusive view of anger and its role in upholding cooperative and moral behavior, and suggest a possible role of equity concerns. We also suggest new predictions and lines of research derived from our perspective.

Questions about the relation between shame and embarrassment are often posed in discussion of emotion but have rarely been examined at length. In this study I assemble and examine distinctions that have been proposed in the literature with the aim of identifying the criteria that have been used to differentiate shame and embarrassment. Relevant empirical studies are also reviewed. Despite the attention paid to the question of the difference between shame and embarrassment consensus on differentiating criteria has not been reached nor has there been consideration of what kind of question is being posed. Three positions that have been adopted are identified and critically evaluated.

In the past two to three decades health behavior scientists have increasingly emphasized affect-related concepts (including, but not limited to emotion) in their attempts to understand and facilitate change in important health behaviors, such as smoking, eating, physical activity, substance abuse, and sex. This article provides a narrative review of this burgeoning literature, including relevant theory and research on affective response (e.g., hedonic response to eating and drug use), incidental affect (e.g., work-related stress as a determinant of alcohol use), affect processing (e.g., anticipated regret for illicit sex or skipping an exercise session), and affectively charged motivation (e.g., cigarette craving). An integrative dual-processing framework is presented that suggests pathways through which affect-related concepts may interrelate to influence health behavior.