PREDICTING EMOTIONS FROM SOCIAL-RELATIONS

Although research shows wide agreement that emotions are responsive to social incentives and environmental outcomes, there is little agreement about how to characterize the social environment productively in order to predict emotions. I review here several approaches, selecting a model of social relations in two dimensions, called here power and status, that is well supported in the research literature across diverse domains as well as cross cultures. I use a theory of emotions based on power-status outcomes of social relations to 'predict' a set of 162 emotions reported by respondents in the eight-nation study of emotions by Scherer, Wallbott, and Summerfield (1986). Hypotheses about four emotions-fear, anger, sadness, and joy-are supported in two studies. Finally, I discussed the interpretative issues in the method used here.