Editorial: The Social Nature of Emotions

The full body text is too long for this field. I am therefore pasting the abstract here.Emotions are an elemental part of human social existence – they pervade our private and professional lives and profoundly shape our relationships and social interactions. Despite their intrinsically social nature, emotions have long been conceptualized and studied as individual phenomena, as if they occurred in a social vacuum. In the past two decades, however, an increasing awareness has emerged that emotions are predominantly elicited, expressed, regulated, perceived, interpreted, and responded to in social settings. A lot of theoretical and empirical ground has been covered in recent years, but new studies and theories have also given rise to new questions that open up new horizons for the affective sciences. Here we synthesize recent developments in research on the social nature of emotions at the individual, dyadic, group, and cultural levels of analysis. We conclude that research at the group and cultural levels is relatively underrepresented, and we call for more work in these domains. We also stress the need for better integration of behavioral, self-report, and physiological measures to further advance scientific understanding of the social nature of emotions.