The Price of Being Social: The Role of Emotions in Feeding and Minimizing Conflicts - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 101

important correlation comes to light between emotional competence and social
competence: as complex emotional abilities develop, more complex societies and
social institutions emerge (Gratch et al. 2006 ; Tomasello 2009 ; de Waal 1996a ).
For instance, Tomasello states that a specific emotion, namely, empathy—the
aptitude to think “he is like me” that Nagel ( 1986 ) calls “the view from nowhere”—
constitutes the strongest social glue. In his opinion, empathy represents a typically
human emotion that marks the dichotomy between the human species and all the
rest of animals. From our perspective, this mechanism might have had a key role
in driving the transition from basic to advanced social relationships. In spite of
this claim, our idea is that empathy can be defined in terms of continuity (see
Sect. 6.2 ). We will analyze this specific aspect but at present what is important to
underline is that emotions regulate social interactions according to a hierarchy of
levels. In other words, specific emotions are involved in increasing or deterring
social relationships. For instance, Tiedens and Linton ( 2001 ) argue that people
are influenced by the degree of certainty associated with a particular emotion.
Thus, they claim that emotions such as happiness and anger are associated with
certainty, whereas emotions such as hope and fear are associated with uncertainty.
Happiness creates optimistic expectations that cooperation is likely, and fear creates
the expectation of a competitive negotiation. In this way, emotions lead the trust or
mistrust in developing cooperative or competitive strategies.
In light of these indications, the ability to modulate and regulate emotions
amounts to an essential condition in order to make a group stable. In other words,
emotions define sociality in a constitutive way. In keeping with these observations,
we will side the role of emotions in enhancing the social negotiation process. On
the other hand, a further main purpose of this article is to show that emotions
play an additional and competitive important role, that is, feeding new forms of
conflict. This hypothesis is justified by the dual nature of emotion (e.g., Ekman
et al. 1983 ; Haidt 2003 ): on the one hand, emotional systems facilitate collaboration
probably because they are out of conscious control and so difficult to “fake”
(Ekman et al. 1983 ) and, therefore, provide reliable communication signals among
conspecifics; on the other hand, they are embodied mechanisms which lead and
favor individual behavior, preparing the organism for an appropriate response to
salient stimuli (Levenson 1994 ). Actually, from an individual point of view, the
emotional states have a basic function of directing attention to what happens in the
environment preparing the organism to react appropriately. In this sense, Darwinian
natural selection has fostered the evolution of this immediate answer as a means
of quick evaluation and measure of the perceived situation (González et al. 2009 ).
In other words, emotion signals interests and such interests may be both selfish
and collective—that is, they may condition the subjective qualitative experience
designed to defend the individual or they may promote the connection with others.
Stressing on this constitutive duplicity, we will use emotional devices as a case
study to investigate the relationship between conflictual and cooperative tendencies
inherent to social nature.