Social-Emotional World: Mapping a Continent*

This essay describes two basic aspects of the social-emotional world: degree of connectedness (solidarity/alienation) and a group of discrete emotions. This field needs to be clarified, mostly because of the use of vernacular words rather than clearly defined concepts. Two sets of definitions are proposed. The first involves conceptual and operational definitions of degree of connectedness. The second offers a preliminary taxonomy of six emotion concepts. The connectedness formulation establishes an alienation/solidarity axis with three points between complete solidarity and complete alienation. Studies of pluralistic ignorance and false consensus, drama theory, and other applications fall in these middle parts of the axis. The emotions taxonomy can be a first step toward better understanding their role in social life in relation to connectedness. The theory implied by these definitions can be viewed as a beginning map of the social-emotional world. This article proposes that degree of connectedness and emotion are the main dimensions of the social-emotional 1 world (SEW). Although these domains are closely linked, they are separate entities. The first dimension is harder to envision than the emotions, because it is usually taken for granted between individuals, individuals and groups, and between groups. C.H. Cooley made the clearest and most general statement: “...we live in the minds of others, without knowing it.” (Cooley 1922, p. 11, emphasis added), as will be discussed below. The literal contents of ordinary speech and gesture are so ambiguous as to be confusing if not completely incomprehensible. A whole school of thought, deconstructionism, has been built up on this fact. However, this kind of analysis is misleading, since it leaves out a key ingredient in social transactions, role-taking. By five or six, most children have learned to try to understand speech not only from own point of view, but also from the point of view of the speaker. Comprehension depends on success in taking the role of the other. Little by little the child gets so good at guessing the other’s viewpoint and at going back and forth between the two points of view as to forget what he/she is doing. In forgetting, the child becomes the kind of adult that modern societies imagine us all to be, a self-contained individual. Connectedness It is possible that this dimension, the degree of connectedness, is both cause and effect of most emotions. Human beings need to be connected with others as much as they need air to breathe, a social oxygen. Disconnected from others, one is alone in the universe. Deep connection, even if only momentary, can feel like union, not only with the other(s) but also with the universe. Varying degrees of disconnect at the level of individuals and of groups lead to a vast array of problems, large and small. An example of disconnect at three levels is provided by Bush’s comment to a reporter after an Iraqi threw his shoes at him in Bagdad: “I don’t know what his beef is.” This response suggests the failure of connection by one individual with another individual and with another group. It further implies the same lack by one group (the U.S government) toward another group (the people of Iraq). *I am indebted to Bernard Phillips for the idea of a web of concepts, to Bengt Starrin for introducing me to the work of Bruhn and Wolf, to Keith Oatley for calling my attention to the work of Wilkinson and Pickett, and to Suzanne Retzinger for everything else. 1 In the field of child development there is a large literature on social-emotional education. However, the term socialemotional is not clearly defined. It is used to mean the opposite of standard academic education. 2 Another glaring example of individual-group disconnect comes from my own experience. After many weeks with no difficulties in a small (20) class for freshmen, I was shocked by a moment of utter disconnect. I began this particular meeting by introducing a new idea, “genuine love.” No sooner having said it, the class went dead. I had experienced brief moments of disconnect before, usually in large classes. But the length and depth of silence in the small room was unique. It felt physical, like gasping for breath, drowning. After what seemed like forever, I finally choked out ” What’s wrong? Talk to me.” After another painfully long silence, one student said “We are all too young to know anything about that.” My term had profoundly embarrassed them, because it might reveal what they apparently thought of as a deficit in themselves. It took much reassurance to get the class started again. This shattering episode suggested I had been taking connectedness for granted. Even in the earliest versions of the class, when the format was wrong in many ways, I had experienced connection with the majority of the students. I realized only in retrospect that there had been a few moments of disconnect, but brief enough so that I had ignored them. All of these years I had been floating on a sea of solidarity without knowing it, like a fish taking an endless ocean for granted. It may be that the extent and accuracy with which we live in the minds of others is the key to many of the problems of our civilization, especially those concerning health, welfare, and happiness. Beginning in the 1970’s, a study that seems to support this idea was conducted by Bruhn and Wolf (1979; 1993). Wolf, a physician, had found out by chance that in the town of Roseto, in Pennsylvania, there was a group of poor Italian immigrants whose health and welfare were hugely better than their neighbors, who were comparable in most other ways. Challenged by this situation, Wolf, in collaboration with the sociologist Bruhn, made an exhaustive study of the lives of every immigrant family in Roseto, and a comparable study in a near-bye, nonimmigrant town. They found that over a period of some twenty years, health and welfare were dependent on what they called cohesion. As the younger generation adopted American ways, their health and welfare levels decreased to the level of the neighbors. Using vastly more data, at the level of nations and other large groups, Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) have reported similar findings, not only with health, but also many other kinds of problems, such as education and crime. Their formulation is somewhat different: the greater the distance between the highest and lowest incomes in a nation, the less the overall health, and the more social problems. They explain this finding in terms of what they call the level of trust. For example, at one end of their charts, in Sweden and Norway, there is a high level of trust, and a low level of ill health and social problems, just the reverse of the US, Singapore, and Portugal at the other end. There are a large number of terms in use that are related to, but are more general than what Bruhn and Wolf called cohesion, and Wilkinson and Pickett called trust: intersubjectivity, mutual awareness, and solidarity are some examples. None of these terms have been adequately defined. Schacht (1994) has noted that the term alienation is used in the literature with eight different meanings. Neither he nor anyone else that I know about has offered a usable definition. The purpose of this paper is to provide definitions of both connectedness and in a preliminary way, a group of emotions. One way to start is to note that not only Cooley, but also Marx and Goffman had ventured into this arena. Marx, Cooley, and Goffman In his early writing, Marx suggested that connection with other humans was the basic species need (Tucker 1978). He went on to discuss alienation from the means of production, others and self.