Sustainability and Social Justice

Emotions as Social Relationships

Document Type

Article

Abstract

While emotions are usually treated as internal states, it is possible to view them as social relationships. From this perspective, the different emotions are not primarily understood in terms of facial expression, physiological pattern, hedonic tone, or level of arousal, but as different transformations of the relationship between person and other. To demonstrate the value of this approach, judgments of the similarity between different emotions were submitted to multidimensional scaling. It is shown that the resulting dimensions describe different aspects of the relation between self and other. These dimensions provide us with a "taxonomy" of emotions that makes some important distinctions between closely related emotions and leads to some interesting predictions about personality differences. © 1986 Plenum Publishing Corporation.

Publication Title

Motivation and Emotion

Publication Date

12-1-1986

Volume

10

Issue

4

First Page

351

Last Page

369

ISSN

0146-7239

DOI

10.1007/BF00992109

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