Commentary: Pride, Shame, and Group Identification

In the target article, Alessandro Salice and Alba Montes Sánchez argue that people sometimes feel proud and ashamed of the actions of others whom they perceive to belong to the same group as themselves. The authors maintain that the social self is the target of emotion whereas the other is merely its focus—a background object that makes intelligible the target's instantiating the formal object of the emotion type. We accept the authors' phenomenological analysis of the intentional structure of hetero-induced shame and pride. Instead, we raise a question about the appropriateness of these emotions that the authors address only briefly by claiming that hetero-induced pride and shame are appropriate in some cases, without specifying what these cases might be. Conventional emotion norms provide one guideline, but they are not consistent. For instance, parents' and grandparents' pride in the success of their offspring is a warranted emotion in American family ideology, perhaps elsewhere in the world as well. Yet children's shame of the drunken or criminal behavior of their parents is regarded as an inappropriate emotion from which children should emancipate themselves. These examples show that we need a more systematic approach to the appropriateness of hetero-induced pride and shame. An important distinction in appropriateness concerns the shape and size of an emotion (D'Arms and Jacobson, 2000). An emotion is appropriate in terms of shape if its particular object has properties that render it an instance of the formal object of the emotion type, whereas it is appropriate in terms of size when the emotional response is neither too intense nor too mild, both in feeling and display. But how to cash out these criteria for hetero-induced pride and shame? Richard Lazarus defines the formal object or core relational theme of pride as " enhancement of one's ego-identity by taking credit of a valued object or achievement, either of our own or that of someone or group with whom we identify " (Lazarus, 1991, 122). Interestingly, this definition already involves the case of hetero-induced pride, unlike shame that according to Lazarus is felt about failure to live up to one's ego-ideal. Yet we believe that it is possible to give appropriateness conditions for both hetero-induced pride and shame. In group contexts, it is one thing to celebrate the achievement of one's fellow group members, thereby expressing one's membership, and another thing to feel proud of oneself by virtue of such achievement. …