Emotion and Social Structures: Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach

This contribution presents an integrative and interdisciplinary approach to emotions and social structures. Combining theoretical accounts from the neurosciences, psychology, and sociology, the role of emotion in the micro-macro link is investigated and the social components of emotion on different levels of analysis are examined. Micro-level analysis explores societal influences on the interaction of cognition and emotion, emphasizing the role of appraisals and of emotion circuits on the brain level. Analysis of the meso-level investigates how emotions are elicited and expressed in social interactions and macro-level investigation scrutinizes how instances of social structural configurations affect the processing and regulation of emotion. The authors conclude with a conceptualization of emotions as a bidirectional mediator between large-scale social structures and individual behavior. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishers