Pride, Shame, and Group Identification

WTF?! Covid-19, indignation, and the internet

The Covid-19 pandemic has fuelled indignation. People have been indignant about the breaking of lockdown rules, about the mistakes and deficiencies of government pandemic policies, about enforced mask-wearing, about vaccination programmes (or lack thereof), about lack of care with regards vulnerable individuals, and more. Indeed, indignation seems to have been particularly prevalent on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, where indignant remarks are often accompanied by variations on the hashtag #WTF?! In this paper, I explore indignation's distinctive character as a form of moral anger, in particular suggesting that what is characteristic of indignation is not only that it discloses moral injustices but betrays our disbelief at the very occurrence of the offence. Having outlined the character of indignation, I consider how the structure of indignation impacts how we do, respond to, and receive indignation. I explore indignation in action, so to speak, in the context of Covid-19, with a particular emphasis on how indignation occurs 'on the internet'.

Individuality and community: The limits of social constructivism

Is selfhood socially constituted and distributed? Although the view has recently been defended by some cognitive scientists, it has long been popular within anthropology and cultural psychology. Whereas older texts by Marcel Mauss, Clifford Geertz, Hazel Rose Markus, and Shinobu Kitayama often contrast a Western conception of a discrete, bounded, and individual self with a non-Western sociocentric conception, it has more recently become common to argue that subjectivity is a fluid intersectional construction fundamentally relational and conditioned by discursive power structures. I assess the plausibility of these claims and argue that many of these discussions of self and subjectivity remain too crude. By failing to distinguish different dimension of selfhood, many authors unwittingly advocate a form of radical social constructivism that is not only incapable of doing justice to first-person experience but which also fails to capture the heterogeneity of real communal life.

A theoretical review on the role of positive emotional classroom rapport in preventing EFL students’ shame: A control-value theory perspective

Background

Second/foreign language teaching has been considered as a dialogic and interactive job in which teachers’ and students’ emotions and behaviors are closely connected to each other. When there is a harmonious and positive relationship between the teacher and students in the classroom, many favorable academic outcomes may emerge. A bulk of research has endorsed the power of positive emotional classroom rapport in EFL contexts. However, its role in preventing negative students’ emotions like shame, as an achievement emotion, in terms of perceived control and value tasks has rarely (if any) caught scholarly attention.

Objective

This study aimed to provide insights into the role of emotions in L2 education and the way students’ shame can be prevented or curbed in light of a positive emotional classroom rapport.

Method/Design

This article systematically reviewed the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of EFL teachers’ positive emotional classroom rapport and students’ shame in light of the control-value theory.

Results

In this research, it was asserted that by building a positive emotional classroom rapport EFL teachers can block and even eliminate students’ shame.

Implications

The study offers practical implications to EFL teachers, trainers, principals, and researchers by increasing their knowledge and abilities in managing psycho-emotional mechanisms and factors and enriching interpersonal aspects of EFL education.

The Rational Appropriateness of Group-Based Pride

This article seeks to analyze the conditions in which group-based pride is rationally appropriate. We first distinguish between the shape and size of an emotion. For the appropriate shape of group-based pride, we suggest two criteria: the distinction between group-based pride and group-based hubris, and between we-mode and I-mode sociality. While group-based hubris is inappropriate irrespective of its mode due to the arrogant, contemptuous, and other-derogating character of this emotion, group-based pride in the we-mode is appropriate in terms of shape if it is felt over an achievement to which the group members collectively committed themselves. For the same reason, members of I-mode groups can feel appropriately proud of the achievement of their group if they have collectively contributed to it. Instead, group-based pride by mere private identification with a successful group can be rationally appropriate if it manifests the person's reduced-agency ideal and is also part of a coherent pattern of rationally interconnected emotions focused on the same ideal. Moreover, we suggest that pride in the success of one's family member or a close friend is typically felt over the rise of social status that one group member's success grants to the group. However, social status cannot be valued for its own sake as this undermines the values upon which social status is founded. Instead, direct or indirect causal contribution to the success of one's child, friend, or student can warrant group-based pride, which may be justified on the basis of shared values without causal contribution as well. Finally, regarding the size of group-based pride, members of we-mode groups are warranted to experience and express more intense pride than members of I-mode groups. Moreover, the proper intensity of this emotion depends on the particular other(s) to whom the expression is directed. Finally, criteria of appropriate size don't apply to shared group-based pride as sharing increases the intensity of emotion by default.

Empathy, Altruism, and Group Identification

This paper investigates the role of group identification in empathic emotion and its behavioral consequences. Our central idea is that group identification is the key to understanding the process in which empathic emotion causes helping behavior. Empathic emotion causes helping behavior because it involves group identification, which motivates helping behavior toward other members. This paper focuses on a hypothesis, which we call “self-other merging hypothesis (SMH),” according to which empathy-induced helping behavior is due to the “merging” between the helping agent and the helped agent. We argue that SMH should be interpreted in terms of group identification. The group identification interpretation of SMH is both behaviorally adequate (i.e., successfully predicts and explains the helping behavior in the experimental settings) and psychologically plausible (i.e., does not posit psychologically unrealistic beliefs, desires, etc.). Empathy-induced helping behavior, according to the group identification interpretation of the SMH, does not fit comfortably into the traditional egoism/altruism dichotomy. We thus propose a new taxonomy according to which empathy-induced helping behavior is both altruistic at the individual level and egoistic at the group level.

I Feel Different, but in Every Case I Feel Proud: Distinguishing Self-Pride, Group-Pride, and Vicarious-Pride

Various lines of research have hinted at the existence of multiple forms of self-conscious emotion pride. Thus far, it is unclear whether forms, such as self-pride, group-pride, or vicarious-pride are characterized by a similar feeling of pride, and what the communal and unique aspects are of their subjective experiences. The current research addressed this issue and examined the communal and unique characteristics of the subjective experiences of self-pride, group-pride, and vicarious-pride. Using recalled experiences, two experiments demonstrated that self-pride, group-pride, and vicarious-pride could be separated on the basis of their subjective experiences. More specifically, Experiment 2 demonstrated how self-pride, group-pride, and vicarious-pride were related to feelings of self-inflation, other-distancing vs. approaching, and other-devaluation vs. valuation. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that not only the responsibility for the achievement but also the number of people who had contributed to the achievement could influence the experience of other-oriented forms of pride. The current findings revealed that self-pride, group-pride, and vicarious-pride were all forms of pride with distinct subjective experiences. These findings provided valuable insights into the emotion of pride and might lead to divergent consequences for sociality, self-consciousness, and behavior.

COVID-19 as Natural Intervention: Guilt and Perceived Historical Privilege Contributes to Structural Reform Under Conditions of Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has been described as an unmasking of persistent racialized inequalities linked to South Africa’s oppressive past. However, such observations lack empirical support. Here we examined whether COVID-19 lockdown conditions encouraged greater perceptions of continuing structural racism together with motivational and behavioral support for social justice, and whether guilt or empathic concern undergirded such responses. A national sample of White South Africans’ data suggests that the pandemic served as a natural intervention, fostering greater acknowledgement of structural racism and support for redress through increased awareness of historical privilege and guilt in response to Black hardship. Guilt furthermore predicted a social justice motivation in relief efforts, whereas empathic concern predicted only charity motivation. These results suggest that “White guilt” is more consequential than empathic concern in contributing to structural reform but would require longer-term processes to support the translation of its motivational push into sustainable contributions to social justice.

Collective Emotions: A Case Study of South African Pride, Euphoria and Unity in the Context of the 2010 FIFA World Cup

Collective emotions experienced as existing objectively and widely shared challenge traditional views of emotions based on personal or private interests. This paper extends theories of group and crowd emotions focusing on social appraisal, social identity, emotional contagion, and ecstatic nationalism, and adds an interdisciplinary approach to research on international mega-sporting event impacts and legacies by examining the national-level collective emotions produced by a mega-sport event-the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. The novel case study approach triangulates ethnographic observations of life in downtown Johannesburg before and during the World Cup with a critical thematic analysis of qualitative interviews of 10 South Africans and the author's and publicly posted videorecordings of individual and collective behavior. I explore how citizen support for efforts to pursue national projects combined with international attention to generate widespread and genuinely coordinated collective emotions of euphoria and pride. The social ontology-based analysis considers bottom-up and top-down mechanisms of emotional spread and influence along with important expressive-performative contributions of culture-specific forms of group-based and collective action tendencies. Moreover, the study shows how group agency in the form of coordinated ritualistic bases realized group affects spontaneously and normatively as South Africans desired, accepted and celebrated achieving team and host-related group goals. These results provide new insights into the emotions that occur in public events in two phases, (1) creation of collective normative commitment in practice related to group ethos and national interests and goals prior to the tournament start, and (2) during the tournament when dynamic relations between group-based and collective emotions also generated feelings of unity and solidarity. Together they highlight unique predisposing cultural and historical features of the emotional and affective-discursive practices associated with the World Cup for South Africans, limits to the spread of emotions of enthusiasm from urban cities to rural areas, forms of excitement and celebration in public spaces, instances of ambivalence about efforts to enact support for the nation's World Cup team and host role, and indicate how collective emotional experiences are internalized, embodied and reproduced in accounts of national transformation, concerns about fragile intergroup solidarity, and instances of group-based hubristic pride.

Empathy and moral emotions in post-apartheid South Africa: an fMRI investigation

Moral emotions elicited in response to others' suffering are mediated by empathy and affect how we respond to their pain. South Africa provides a unique opportunity to study group processes given its racially divided past. The present study seeks insights into aspects of the moral brain by investigating behavioral and functional MRI responses of White and Black South Africans who lived through apartheid to in- and out-group physical and social pain. Whereas the physical pain task featured faces expressing dynamic suffering, the social pain task featured victims of apartheid violence from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to elicit heartfelt emotion. Black participants' behavioral responses were suggestive of in-group favoritism, whereas White participants' responses were apparently egalitarian. However, all participants showed significant in-group biases in activation in the amygdala (physical pain), as well as areas involved in mental state representation, including the precuneus, temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and frontal pole (physical and social pain). Additionally, Black participants reacted with heightened moral indignation to own-race suffering, whereas White participants reacted with heightened shame to Black suffering, which was associated with blunted neural empathic responding. These findings provide ecologically valid insights into some behavioral and brain processes involved in complex moral situations.