Direct and Indirect Verbal and Bodily Insults and Other Forms of Aggressive Communication - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 237

of knowledge, and acquiring and keeping resources, but also the goals of equity,
attachment and affiliation, image and self-image. Humans experience positive
emotions for the achievement and negative ones for the thwarting of these goals;
hence, emotions can be clustered in families depending on the type of goal they
monitor (Poggi 2008 ). Anger, but also pity and sense of guilt, monitors the goal of
equity and is triggered by an undeserved imbalance between the fortunes of people.
Shame and pride are “ image emotions ” that monitor the goals of image and self-
image: we feel shame when we think that what we are or do may cause others or
ourselves to have a negative evaluation of us, and we feel pride for something that
enhances our self-image (Poggi and D'Errico 2012b ). Further, since we also have
the goal of making up an image of others, to decide whether to have positive or
negative or no social relationships with them, we feel “ others ' image emotions ”:
admiration (Poggi and Zuccaro 2008 ), which confers highly positive evaluations on
the other and possibly a goal to imitate him, or else pity and contempt, the former
giving the other a negative evaluation of impotence and inducing us to help him
(Castelfranchi 1988 ), the latter assigning to him an evaluation of ethical baseness
and inducing us to reject any relationship with him.

13.2.3 Communication

Communication (Poggi 2007 ; Poggi and D'Errico 2012a ) takes place when a
System S (sender) has the goal of having another System A (addressee) come to
have Belief K and, to achieve this goal, produces a signal s that is linked to K
as its Meaning M, according to the rules of a Communication System CS. s is
a behavior or a morphological trait produced by some organs of S's body, to be
perceived by A in some receptive modality (e.g., visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile).
The unit of communication is the communicative act: a single signal or a set of
signals that conveys, as its meaning, both a performative and a propositional content.
The performative is the specific communicative goal of the sender -e.g., to state,
confirm, approve, order, implore, ask, promise, wish - and all performatives can
be grouped into one of four types: to provide information (generally expressed
by declarative sentences), ask a question (interrogatives), request some action
(imperatives), or express a desire (optatives). The propositional content is the object
of the communicative goal: the information provided by a declarative sentence or
asked by a question, the action requested by an imperative, the desire expressed by
an optative. Any act of communication, through its performative or propositional
content, provides information about the world (states or events concerning persons,
objects, their time and space), the sender's identity (age, gender, ethnicity, geograph-
ical and cultural roots, projected self), and the sender's mind: the beliefs, goals, and
emotions held during and about the present communicative act.
The signal side of a communicative act may be verbal or bodily behaviors (words,
gestures, gaze, posture) or traits (like a blush), and the whole communicative act
may be conveyed either by one holophrastic or more articulated signals. In the