Social emotions

Social emotions are emotions that depend upon the thoughts, feelings or actions of other people, "as experienced, recalled, anticipated or imagined at first hand".^[1][2] Examples are embarrassment, guilt, shame, jealousy, envy, elevation, empathy, and pride.^[3] In contrast, basic emotions such as happiness and sadness only require the awareness of one's own physical state. Therefore, the development of social emotions is tightly linked with the development of social cognition, the ability to imagine other people's mental states, which generally develops in adolescence.^[4][5] Studies have found that children as young as 2 to 3 years of age can express emotions resembling guilt^[6] and remorse.^[7] However, while five-year-old children are able to imagine situations in which basic emotions would be felt, the ability to describe situations in which social emotions might be experienced does not appear until seven years of age.^[8]

People may not only share emotions with others, but may also experience similar physiological arousal to others if they feel a sense of social connectedness to the other person. A laboratory-based study by Cwir, Car, Walton, and Spencer (2011) showed that, when a participant felt a sense of social connectedness to a stranger (research confederate), the participant experienced similar emotional states and physiological responses to that of the stranger while observing the stranger perform a stressful task.^[9]

Social emotions are sometimes called moral emotions, because they play an important role in morality and moral decision making.^[10] In neuroeconomics, the role social emotions play in game theory and economic decision-making is just starting to be investigated.^[11]