Emotions and social relations

Basic emotions, relations among emotions, and emotion-cognition relations.

From the cognitive theory perspective that emotions are cognition dependent and contain cognitive components, Ortony and Turner (1990) questioned the validity of the concept of basic emotions. They argued that the so-called basic emotions were neither psychologically or biologically "primitive" nor "irreducible building blocks" for generating the "great variety of emotional experiences." In the...

Modeling Social Emotions and Social Attributions

Emotions in Social Computer Games: Relations with Bullying, Aggression, and School Belonging

This article explores the set of emotions expressed by middle school youth (n = 96) when participating in a social computer game. In this article, we present the design of the game, the instruments used to assess bullying in the physical world, and the analysis of the emotions expressed during gameplay and their association with aggressive behaviors. Participants completed surveys on bullying e...

Social emotions and psychological games

Emotions arise from cognitive appraisals and organize adaptive behavioral responses. The appraisals associated with social emotions such as guilt and anger can be modeled with utility functions that depend on both material and psychological payoffs, and their effect on behavior can be mathematically described using game theory. Guilt arises from the belief that an agent has disappointed a relat...

Emotions and social development: Infants' recognition of emotions in others.

Infants generally begin to recognize emotional expressions after 6 months of age; some reports have even observed recognition in neonates. Emotional recognition is important for social referencing, in which infants "read" their parents' expressions to understand events. Three methods for studying how infants come to recognize emotion are described in this article: peek-a-boo, matching faces and...