A distinction that many authors adhere to is that between fundamental, basic or primary emotions, and complex, or social emotions. The first seem to be related to goals such as physical survival, the establishment and maintenance of a personal relationship, the possibility of carrying out the actions undertaken; They are common to man and higher animals. The latter depend largely on the purposes and cognitive capacities offered by cognitive and social development.
Emotions allow us to feel part of a community, have shared moral values, feel empathy and identify with others. They not only belong to the private dimension of life, but also to the collective dimension, and many of our emotions are, in fact, social emotions. In this Psychology-Online article we will see the Social emotions: what they are, what they are and examples.
What are social emotions
All emotions have their function and reason for being and many have a direct effect on our relationships with others. Some emotions are already present at birth, the so-called , while others arise when, during development, they must perform an adaptive task. The latter are secondary or complex emotions, including shame, guilt, remorse, envy, which are conditioned and shaped by experience.
Social emotions appear later and, unlike primary emotions, are only present in human beings. These are those expressions that are influenced by the growth of the individual and by social interaction during development. They are complex because they need more external elements, emotional images or heterogeneous thoughts to be activated.
Socialization and the acquisition of the first rules that the environment imposes as ideal ways of displaying emotions cause them to lose their initial connection with physiological expressions and become increasingly socially determined.
In this article we talk about.
Development of social emotions
Between the two months and one year of life, children begin to use emotional expressions at a communicative and social level, a direct antecedent of the ability to relate and cope with stimuli in a way that is consistent with their own objectives. It is in this period that he makes his appearance of the social smileactivated by the high tones of the eloquy and by the closeness of human faces.
Next, facial expressions of other emotions appear such as surprise (6/10 weeks), the binomial joy-sadness and anger (3/4 months), anger resulting from a frustrating experience (7 months), fear and circumspection in the face of stimuli perceived as ambiguous, new or dangerous, and fear of strangers predictably appear along with locomotion (5/9 months).
The last phase of the child’s emotional development, after the first year of liferefers to the appearance of social emotions such as guilt, shame, shyness, contempt. These emotions are called social emotions precisely because they are learned from the cultural context of reference and refer to the assessment that the child, as a consequence of the experiences derived from socialization, learns to give of himself and others.
Types of social emotions
Now that we have seen what social emotions are, let’s specify what they are and what types there are. Complex emotions for some authors are the product of the combination of primary emotions, while for other scholars complex emotions are self-conscious and are based on self-awareness. Social emotions, in the strict sense, are related to the type of relationship we want to have with another person, and they make it important to have a purpose to interact with them in an adoptive or aggressive way.
We can distinguish between two types of social emotions:
The social emotions of attachment
These types of social emotions are intended to receive adoption. And they are for example:
- Love
- Tenderness
- Sense of belonging
- Loneliness
- Sense of exclusion
The social emotions of aggression
These other types of social emotions are those that we experience when we want harm from others and they are:
- Rejoicing and evil joy, that is, enjoying the misfortune of others
- Rage
- Hate
- Antipathy
- Envy
- Jealousy
What are social emotions
In addition to those already mentioned, social emotions are:
- Admiration
- Embarrassment
- Inhibition
- Confusion
- Blame
- heartbreak
- Detachment
- Spite
- Contempt
- Strangeness
- Gratitude
- Indignation
- Unsafety
- Pride
- Patriotism
- I can
- Modesty
- Remorse
- Ridiculous
- Blush
- Sympathy
- Blush
- Shame
- Shame of others
- Vulnerability
Emotions, even social ones, are not the same for everyone; On the contrary, they are conditioned by the predisposition and the environment of belonging: Not all people have the same emotional correlations. For example, those who live on the Asian continent express different emotions, in different ways, than Europeans. A situation due to the way in which emotions are regulated by the reference culture, capable of making some of them prevail over others. In the West, individual emotions prevail, while in the East the subject is not a priority; it is the good of society that also counts to the detriment of the self-sacrifice of individuals.
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
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Bibliography
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