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Abstract

Emotions are distinct, biologically based psychological entities characterized by short-lived coherent patterns of perception, experience, physiology, and communicative action. At both the intrapersonal and interpersonal levels, emotions shape experience and outcomes in important domains of life, including health, work, and school.

Outline

Introduction
Defining Emotion
Measuring Emotion
Social Functions of Emotion
Emotions and Health
Emotions and Work
Emotions in School
Conclusion

1. Introduction

What role do emotions play in human social life? Western philosophy has traditionally regarded emotions with suspicion, as a disruptive force. The Stoics advocated distancing oneself from an emotional life, whereas more recently Hobbes and Freud believed that following natural inclinations would lead to uncontrolled emotion and societal havoc. Still others, such as Aristotle, took the perspective that at least certain emotions (e.g., anger, jealousy) should be controlled or moderated.

Mounting evidence and theory within psychology has led to the opposite view of emotion, that is, that emotions are well-organized coherent systems that enable humans to respond quickly and effectively to environmental and social problems and opportunities. This research-paper outlines this latter perspective, termed a social functional approach, and delineates how social functional approaches lead to an improved understanding of how emotions influence health, work, and school.

2. Defining Emotion

Emotion is easily recognized and difficult to define. Currently, emotion researchers define an emotion as a short-lived, biologically based pattern of perception, experience, physiology, and communication that occurs in response to specific physical and social challenges and opportunities. This definition helps to differentiate emotions from related phenomena. Whereas emotions are elicited by fairly flexible interpretations of stimuli and have specific intentional objects, moods have less specific causes and endure for longer periods of time. Sentiments are consistent emotional responses to objects that can endure for lifetimes and be passed from one generation to the next (e.g., intergroup hostility). Emotion-related traits, such as hostility and shyness, reflect consistent ways of responding emotionally to broad classes of stimuli. Sensations (e.g., pain, an itch) are not explicitly related to the individual’s strivings.

Most emotion researchers now agree that emotions serve adaptive functions but differ in the questions for which they seek answers. Psychologists who study the structure of emotion systems consider the origins of specific emotions, the behavior associated with emotion experience, and the personal and social consequences of behavior prompted by emotion. Psychologists who study questions of communication and cross-cultural universality focus on facial displays of emotion, taking care to document the distinct muscle movements that characterize some emotions. Their counterparts who are more interested in cultural variation use ethnographic or lexical methods that emphasize unique aspects of emotional experience such as emotion words with no ready translations outside of the society of origin. Researchers who study appraisals of events that lead to emotional experience use narrative methods to study the patterns of stimulus interpretation that differentiate emotions. These various lines of inquiry have led to remarkable discoveries during the past 20 years or so regarding the role of emotion in development, psychopathology, memory, and brain function.

3. Measuring Emotion

Emotions have many facets and can be measured in many ways. Researchers interested in the expression of emotion can capture facial expression with the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) developed by Ekman and Friesen or can rely on ethologically significant gaze, posture, vocal, and/or gestural activities. These methods are fairly nonobtrusive and allow researchers to study emotion outside of the laboratory. Researchers interested in emotion-related appraisal or the understanding of emotion have turned to narrative methods and interview techniques and elaborate coding schemes to discern the meaning processes that give rise to and differentiate emotions from one another. Categorizing emotion words into prototypes of an experience is a method used to understand how individuals conceptualize everyday emotion experience. Other researchers have recorded activity in the autonomic nervous system to ascertain when emotions occur and how they differ from one another, for example, by assessing heart rate, respiration pattern, blood flow to the periphery, and skin conductance. Finally, a great deal of research continues to rely on self-reports of emotion experience through the administration of either formal Likert-type scales, such as the PANAS (which measures the disposition to feel positive or negative emotion), or through more direct inquiry of emotion experience.

4. Social Functions Of Emotion

Darwin and James laid the foundation for the study of emotion in significant and enduring ways. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin contended that emotions must be serviceable. That is, emotions should be functional adaptations that prepare the organism to act and communicate a readiness to engage in a particular behavioral action. This preparation should be expressed through nonverbal displays that should be universal across human cultures. Darwin also argued that particular expressions of emotion should be directly connected to the behavior they prepare the individual to enact. Disgust, for example, is a serviceable habit that prepares an individual to expel harmful contents before they are ingested and whose display includes protrusion of the tongue. This thinking laid the foundation for the study of facial expression and functional accounts of emotion that are so widespread today.

In his 1884 essay titled ‘‘What Is an Emotion?,’’ James extended some of Darwin’s claims in proposing that each emotion should be defined by a specific physiological response. This radical notion fell out of favor but is now supported by studies indicating that amusement, anger, disgust, embarrassment, fear, love, surprise, and sadness all are associated with distinct physiological responses in the autonomic nervous system. More controversially, James also claimed that emotional experience followed rather than preceded emotion-relevant behavior. For example, crying would precede feelings of sadness. During the mid-20th century, this counterintuitive idea generated a great deal of interest among psychologists who prioritized cognitive and information explanations over motivational and emotional explanations of human behavior.

What distinguishes contemporary social functional approaches to emotion? First, a social functions perspective builds on Darwinian theorizing about emotion to consider how the challenges and opportunities of the human evolutionary environment led to the development of specific emotions. Importantly, this perspective is complemented by a consideration of how human cultural practices elaborate on human biology to influence emotion experience and meaning. Second, a social functions approach considers the effects of specific emotion processes at the intrapersonal level of individual experience and at the interpersonal level of ongoing social interaction among individuals. Thus, there is consensus that the experience of emotion guides information processing in functional ways, triggering specific memories and patterns of perception and categorization. The autonomic nervous system activity of emotion is thought to support specific kinds of action (e.g., fight or flight). And the communication of emotion conveys specific feelings, intentions, and dispositions, evoking specific and adaptive responses in observers. Finally, a social functions approach is concerned with the consequences of emotion, emphasizing how emotions facilitate the successful navigation of the social environment. In contrast to previous approaches that viewed emotions as disruptive forces, a social functional perspective regards emotions as evolved answers to the problems and opportunities presented by human social life across our evolutionary past. In this view, emotions are specific efficient responses tailored to address the problems of physical survival and social living. Emphasis is placed on the utility of emotion in the contexts in which it evolved, whether it remains useful in current environments or has become inappropriate or maladaptive. Framing emotion in this way generates a series of important and interrelated questions about emotion:

Why do humans have emotions?
How do emotions influence survival and adjustment?
What are the interrelated parts of the emotion system?
What are the beneficial consequences of emotion?

A social functions approach naturally directs attention to the role of emotion in navigating the complications of human social life. Diverse theorists converge on three classes of problems and opportunities that emotions were designed to solve. Several emotions, such as disgust and fear, help humans to meet the problems of survival, including avoiding predators and toxins. Still other emotions, including filial love, desire, compassion, and rage, help humans to meet the problems of reproduction that center on finding mates, maintaining monogamous bonds, and raising offspring to the age of viability. Finally, still other social emotions, such as gratitude, anger, embarrassment, and awe, help humans to meet the problems and opportunities related to group governance. More specifically, these emotions are thought to promote and maintain cooperative alliances and help humans to fold into social hierarchies and mete out justice and punishment. The article draws on this perspective to outline an understanding of seven emotions that will prove to be particularly relevant to health, work, and school settings.

4.1. Anger

Anger is historically regarded as one of the most disruptive emotions. Functional accounts of anger have shed light on the beneficial aspects of this misunderstood emotion. Anger has been shown to be elicited by the perception that an injustice has been intentionally committed against the self by another. This attribution of blame for an unfair outcome motivates an individual to (a) seek redressive action and (b) signal the intention to aggress if redressive action is not taken. To this end, anger is received as a threat by the target. According to emotion theorist Robert Frank, anger has two beneficial consequences. First, anger prepares an individual to aggress in response to serious transgressions, if need be, by directing blood to the face and arms. More important, signaling that one is genuinely likely to aggress is threatening and reduces the likelihood that a given individual will be cheated or taken advantage of by another. Signaling honest anger may be all the self-defense that is necessary to motivate a target to take redressive action or flee. Indeed, incidents of anger leading to actual aggression or violence are infrequent relative to the emotional experience.

4.2. Anxiety

Unlike anger, anxiety is not always defined as an emotion. It has not been documented to have a distinct nonverbal display or to be accurately decoded. Instead, anxiety has been related to fear, either as a subset of the broader fear category or as a more generalized moodlike state. The experience of anxiety appears to be a concomitant of threat-related cognitions when an individual perceives a challenge in the environment that may exceed resources. Small amounts of anxiety have been shown to enhance performance on a challenging task, but profound levels of anxiety have been shown to impair the ability to perform.

4.3. Embarrassment

The emotion of embarrassment is a clear example of individual experience diverging from larger social consequence. Embarrassment is marked by a brief display consisting of a downward gaze, a brief non-Duchenne smile, and the movement of the hand to the face. It is felt in response to unintended inappropriate behavior such as social gaffes, pratfalls, and uncontrolled bodily functions. Calling someone by the wrong name and tripping in public are typical triggers of embarrassment. Although embarrassment is an unpleasant individual experience, the audience present for an embarrassing incident is frequently amused or sympathetic toward the target. For this reason, embarrassment has been posited to serve an appeasement function. By feeling and displaying embarrassment, a person signals

to others that he or she realizes the inappropriateness of the behavior and is asking to be absolved of blame. At the level of the social interaction, the display of embarrassment restores social balance. Studies have shown that individuals who display embarrassment are better liked than their nonembarrassed peers and show greater concern for social norms. Adolescent boys who display embarrassment, for example, are less likely to engage in delinquent behavior than are their less embarrassment prone peers.

4.4. Fear

The emotion of fear prepares an organism to flee from threats that pose an immediate danger or are perceived to be likely to overwhelm the system. Displayed through raised eyebrows, opened eyes, and an open mouth, the biological basis of fear has been well documented. In contrast to anger, which sends blood to the arms, fear sends blood to the legs, facilitating a flight response. In studies of fear response, young monkeys exposed to either a snake or a flower for the first time expressed a fear of snakes immediately, suggesting that they are prepared to feel a fear of snakes. Interpersonally, humans have been shown to be sensitive to the fear cues of others, valuing the warning that fear displays can provide. When a facial expression of fear is presented among a large group of smiling faces, the fear face is identified more quickly than is a happy face among a large group of fearful faces. The work of LeDoux has connected fear to the amygdala, an almond-sized structure of the brain shown to process fear-related information. Amygdala damage is associated with deficits in perceiving and attending to obvious threats.

4.5. Happiness

The emotion of happiness comprises the most general and recognized level of positive emotion. Happiness is universally recognized and signaled by the Duchenne smile, a combination that lifts the muscles of the mouth and crinkles the skin around the eyes. Unlike other types of smiling, Duchenne smiling reflects an individual’s internal positive emotional state. The disposition to experience happiness has been associated with higher levels of life satisfaction and a cognitive style marked by optimism and diminished concern with social comparison. There is also some evidence that displays of happiness promote positive social relationships, perhaps by evoking positive social responses in others. A recent study showed that women whose college yearbook pictures showed Duchenne smiling married earlier, had more positive relationships with partners and children, and reported higher levels of life satisfaction up to 30 years later.

4.6. Love

Love is traditionally regarded as an enduring attitude of affection toward another or a style of relating to romantic partners, and recent research on love has found evidence of emotion-like properties. Love is signaled through a series of affiliation cues that generate movement toward the love object and has been theorized to promote commitment between love partners. Consistent with this theorizing, the self-reported experience and display of love correlate with constructive conflict resolution and perceived trust during moments of relationship threat. Feelings of love are also associated with a greater willingness to engage in prorelationship behavior, even at a cost to self-interest.

4.7. Sadness

Felt in response to a perceived uncontrollable loss, sadness is marked by eyebrows pulled in toward the nose and a downturned mouth. Initially, sadness is marked by crying and other intense displays of grief, but prolonged sadness shuts down the body. This shutting down of the body is theorized to conserve the body’s energy until a time when a person is better able to cope with the loss. Sadness is associated with cognitions of having little control over personal outcomes. For example, individuals who attribute positive life events to external causes and regard negative life events as having been brought on by internal characteristics of the self are prone to episodes of sadness.

The preceding seven emotion states do not cover the range of emotions currently studied by emotion researchers, nor do they encompass the states whose status as emotions generates the most agreement. Instead, these seven states comprise emotions whose relevance to the applied settings of health, work, and school has been most clearly documented.

5. Emotions And Health

The literature on emotions and health is vast but can be summed up schematically with two fairly robust claims. First, positive emotions promote positive health and a longer and more satisfying life. Second, negative emotions impair health and place individuals at risk for poor health outcomes ranging from depression to heart disease. These empirical summaries are based on studies of specific emotional states (e.g., fear) but more typically emerge out of studies of emotion-based dispositions such as anxiousness, hostility, and happiness.

The emphasis on the beneficial aspects of positive emotions notwithstanding, positive emotion routes to better health remain understudied relative to negative emotions. Rather, the disposition to positive emotion and the cognitive concomitants of positive emotional experience have been related to better health. For example, dispositional optimism, which is related to happiness, is associated with longer life in the face of terminal illness. The positive illusions of individuals who overestimate the likelihood of surviving cancer or a stroke appear to act as protective resources, prolonging life and helping individuals to find positive meaning despite illness.

The relationship of positive illusions to health has been the subject of lively debate. In one study, optimism was measured in men recovering from coronary artery bypass surgery. A man’s dispositional optimism was related to the release of liver enzymes that promoted recovery, and these men were quicker to recover the ability to sit, walk, and return to work than were their less optimistic counterparts. Other studies show that dispositional optimists are more likely to engage in health-protective behaviors such as taking vitamins, eating a well-balanced diet, and exercising. Still, researchers have contended that happiness and positive illusions should negatively affect health, perhaps by promoting denial or underestimation of the likelihood that illness will happen. In support of this view, unrealistically high levels of optimism have sometimes been related to a diminished likelihood of engaging in health-protective behaviors. Nonetheless, positive illusions remain one avenue through which positive emotional states have been shown to lead to improved health outcomes. Turning to the negative emotional dispositions, it has become increasingly clear that anger, sadness, and (more recently) shame can have deleterious effects on health. Although previous research connecting health outcomes to the disposition to experience anger or sadness has oversimplified the relationship, the connection exists. Prolonged episodes of negative affective states, rather than a brief episode of negative emotion, are chiefly responsible for the relationship between negative emotion and health. Small doses of negative emotion, such as anxiety and guilt, are associated with engaging in preventive health behaviors and being willing to seek help. However, more enduring chronic affective states, such as depressed mood and chronic anxiety, have been linked to impaired immune functioning, coronary heart disease, memory decrements, and other major health conditions.

Similarly, the propensity to experience frequent and intense episodes of anger is commonly related to poor health outcomes. The association of ‘‘Type A’’ behavior with heart disease is well known in scientific and popular circles. More recent research has shown that one component of the Type A profile, the propensity to experience hostility and anger, is the principal mediator of this association. Studies of Type A individuals who are less prone to hostility show that the goal driven persistence that marks Type A may actually promote compliance of rehabilitative regimens, whereas the hostile component of Type A predicts future coronary episodes.

Prolonged episodes of sadness are also predictive of heart disease, but the emotional experience of sadness and its related cognitions have been most directly linked to depression. An attributional style that blames the self for negative life events and perceives little ability to control or create positive outcomes has been associated with the development of depression. More directly, the tendency to ruminate on negative events by persistently directing thoughts toward negative events and possible negative outcomes leads to a greater likelihood of suffering depression. In one study of coping in the aftermath of a strong earthquake, individuals who reported ruminating about their quake experience during the weeks afterward also reported more depressive symptoms and were more likely to seek health services. This coping style is more characteristic of women, and indeed, women make up a disproportionate number of depression sufferers.

Depression is associated with both increased negative affect (e.g., sadness, anxiety, anger) and decreased positive affect. Administration of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) tends to decrease experience of negative affect and increase experience of positive affect in clinically depressed populations. These drugs produce parallel effects in normal populations. Nondepressed individuals administered SSRIs for 4 weeks were rated as less hostile by clinicians, self-reported less negative affect, and showed more affiliative behavior in a dyadic social interaction than did individuals administered a placebo.

The experience of shame and self-blame may uniquely relate to negative immunological changes. Relative to a control condition, individuals induced to feel shame by writing about a past traumatic experience for which they blamed themselves showed increases in proinflammatory cytokines, negative immunological response, and the stress hormone cortisol. Self-reports of shame, but not of guilt or other negative affect, specifically correlated with these physiological changes. A study of HIV-positive gay men found that shame-related cognitions, such as poor self-worth and excessive concern with social rejection, are associated with lower CD4 count (a negative immunological marker) and higher AIDS mortality.

The literature connecting the disposition to feel negative emotion to poor health is extensive, but emerging advances in this area suggest that parts of this story have yet to unfold. Guided by social functional analyses emphasizing the beneficial aspects of emotion, researchers have begun to examine how negative emotion experience might affect health in positive ways. One proposed path through which negative emotions may positively affect health is by promoting ‘‘toughness’’ or resistance to the harmful effects of stress. For example, mice exposed to repeated stressors at an early age showed faster patterns of both physiological arousal and recovery, suggesting an increase in the effectiveness of the stress response over time.

In a related vein, the disclosure and free expression of negative emotions have also been shown to promote health. According to Pennebaker, one source of ill health is a repressive coping style that is characterized by an effortful inhibition of emotional thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In support of this view, repressive coping has been associated with the release of cortisol. Focusing primarily on trauma sufferers who have not shared their experiences with others, Pennebaker found that sharing traumatic experiences by either talking or writing in journals leads to reduced physiological arousal and fewer visits for health care during the ensuing months. Similarly, other studies have shown that confiding or disclosing traumas, even secondhand traumas, is associated with better immune system functioning.

Consistent with a social functional account of emotion, negative emotion is not harmful per se and can be an adaptive response to a situation. Grief, for example, is not associated with the negative immunological changes that characterize depression. Grief may be an adaptive response to loss, whereas depression is maladaptive. Studies of HIV-positive individuals who have lost partners or close friends to AIDS find that depressed mood is associated with negative immunological changes and more rapid HIV progression, whereas high levels of grief without depressed mood are not.

6. Emotions And Work

A great deal of modern-day social interaction takes place in work environments. Consequently, a consideration of emotion in the workplace is particularly benefited by an interpersonal perspective. In the workplace, individuals must initiate relationships, strive for distinction and status, seek cooperation, seal commitments, and optimally, be personally satisfied with their work lives. These endeavors are facilitated by the communicative aspects of emotion, where people observe and respond to each other’s emotions in ways that often help to resolve or change the relational problems of everyday life.

How do emotions influence work satisfaction and productivity? As with health, positive emotion is also associated with beneficial outcomes. The expression of positive emotion has been shown to positively relate to both work satisfaction and achievement. In one study of 272 employees, the expression of positive emotion was associated with more favorable supervisor evaluations, higher pay, and more support from supervisors and coworkers 18 months later. A related issue, and perhaps a conceptually dominant one, concerns the contextual factors that support the experience and display of positive emotion. Research suggests that much of the variance associated with job satisfaction is attributable to a perceived sense of efficacy in carrying out a task. Perceived efficacy is related to lower levels of chronic stress and higher levels of subjective wellbeing. Individuals who are given tasks that challenge, but do not exceed, their ability may achieve a state of ‘‘flow’’ in their work, where interest is high and the tasks are engaging. In contrast, perceiving the challenges of the work environment to be overwhelming can lead to unhappiness and high levels of job stress.

Serious negative occupational outcomes are also closely tied to interpersonal emotion. Job burnout is a response to interpersonal stressors on the job, where an overload of contact with people results in changes in attitudes and behaviors toward them. Field research has established that burnout involves three dimensions, with each dimension highlighting different emotions. Anger and anxiety are expected to be high in the dimension defined as emotional exhaustion, that is, feelings of being emotionally overextended and drained by one’s contact with other people. Reduced experience of empathy and compassion is implicated in the depersonalization dimension, defined as an unfeeling and callous response toward people on the job. Decreased experience of pride appears to be central to the third dimension, where feeling low competence and low successful achievement in one’s work leads to a reduced sense of personal accomplishment.

Another area of study has examined required emotional displays such as expressing positive emotion toward customers by workers in the retail industry or negative emotion toward debtors by workers at collection agencies. Termed ‘‘emotional labor,’’ the use of positive emotional expression has been shown to elicit liking and a desire on the part of the customer to reciprocate in kind. On the other end of the spectrum, debt collectors are pressed to convey irritation to debtors and adjust their expressed emotions in response to debtor demeanor. This emotionally difficult work can clash with the collectors’ genuine feelings toward debtors. This use of emotion may be task-effective, but emotional labor has been associated with decreases in felt positive emotion for expressing workers, and some organizations openly encourage employees to develop cognitive reappraisal skills to better cope with the emotional demands of the job.

How do emotions help individuals to navigate the social interactions of the workplace? How do they help them to initiate relationships, manage hierarchy, and procure the cooperation of coworkers? Anger and gratitude play important complementary roles in promoting cooperative alliances and creating stable long-term relationships. The initiation of cooperative relationships is assisted by liking and gratitude, which motivate the initiation of bonds and reward cooperation, respectively. Expressed anger can punish actions that threaten to undermine cooperation such as inappropriately taking credit and overusing resources. Threats that induce fear rather than anger have been found to be successful in changing the behavior of others. However, threats risk inducing anger rather than fear, and eliciting a strong angry response might pose a worthwhile risk only when interest and positive emotional interaction have proven to be ineffective.

The formation and maintenance of cooperative alliances take place within an existing hierarchical structure, and successful management of hierarchy is important to workplace success. Research suggests that the emotions of high-status individuals are of primary relevance for two reasons. First, the outcomes of subordinates are strongly tied to individuals at higher ends of the hierarchy in most work environments. Second, the emotional experience of high-power individuals has been shown to differ from, and exert an effect on, the emotional state of subordinates. High-power individuals are more disinhibited in their emotional expression, expressing both negative and positive emotions and being less attune to how their emotional expressions are perceived by others. Status is conferred and reinforced by displays of anger rather than sadness, in part because the display of anger is associated with greater personal competence. Over time, the emotions of lower status people have been shown to converge to be more similar to the emotional experience of high-status people. This convergence is proposed to help coordinate the thoughts and behaviors of relationship partners, increase mutual understanding, and foster social cohesion. In the workplace, this emotional cohesion is likely to foster stable, mutually satisfying hierarchies.

In a workplace, decisions must be made and courses of action must be agreed on by relevant parties. How do emotions influence workplace decision making? One means is through emotion-related appraisals. Happy people view the world optimistically, perceiving situations to pose low risks and expecting positive outcomes. Fearful people perceive the world as threatening and are vigilant about risks and negative outcomes. These emotion-specific appraisal tendencies produce emotion congruent effects on perception, reasoning, and decision making. People who feel happy readily notice and remember positive information, including other people’s happy expressions. Bolstered by the accessibility and salience of positive information, happy people tend to view risks optimistically and make more risk-seeking choices. They label people using more positive categorizations (e.g., ‘‘good worker’’) and are more reliant on mental short-cuts in their decision making, and this can lead to less thorough information processing. In contrast, sad people tend to notice and remember negative and sad information, memories, and facial expressions. They tend to process information thoroughly when making judgments, presumably because doing so might help to explain or resolve their underlying negative mood. Appraising the world as threatening, fearful people assess risks pessimistically and make more risk-averse choices than do happy people. However, not all negative emotions lead to more careful decision making or judicious risk assessment. Anger is associated with

certainty and feeling control over a situation, and angry people behave more like happy people, assessing risks optimistically and making risk-seeking choices. Perceiving the world as under their own and others’ control, angry people are more likely to blame individuals than to blame situational factors for negative events.

7. Emotions In School

A large literature has addressed the factors that undermine academic achievement and social adjustment in school. The subset of the literature that relates to emotion has chiefly examined how anxiety leads individuals to underperform in, avoid, and mistrust particular academic domains or school in general. At a more interpersonal level, research on peer relations suggests important roles for anger, fear, sadness, and embarrassment in social adjustment.

Anxiety is considered to be the major cause of student underperformance on examinations. Students who consistently experience severe levels of anxiety are proposed to have a trait tendency known as test anxiety that involves increased anxiety and stress when specifically taking tests. Test anxiety has been associated with reduced motivation, suppressed immune functioning, and impaired test performance. Several mediators have been proposed, drawing on appraisal tendencies associated with anxiety and fear. Feeling afraid heightens a person’s vigilance for threats in the environment. Studies find that test anxiety can impair performance by increasing a student’s susceptibility to threatening external distractors. Other studies find that internally generated anxious thoughts disrupt performance by reducing the available cognitive resources in taking the test.

Anxiety is also considered to be a major cause of stereotype threat, a specific type of academic underperformance. Stereotype threat occurs when a negative stereotype about a group of which a person is a member becomes personally relevant, usually in the context of an experience the person is having. Stereotype threat is the resulting sense that the person can be judged or treated in terms of the stereotype or that the person might do something that would inadvertently confirm the stereotype. At each of level of academic skill, students sharing certain social identities get lower scores than do other students. Female students are outperformed by male students in math at each level of skill. Relative to White students, African American, Native American, and Hispanic American students underperform on tests measuring overall academic ability. The anxiety-related processes believed to underlie stereotype threat have been proposed to be a primary cause of these groups’ impaired performance. Self-reported anxiety has sometimes been found to mediate these groups’ impaired performance, although in some cases only for those individuals who are sensitive to the group stereotype. One study found that African Americans did not report more anxiety than did Whites during an intellectual ability test; however, African Americans’ blood pressure increased significantly from baseline relative to that of Whites.

How can the anxiety of stereotype threat be mitigated? Over a decade of research has found that the performance of students vulnerable to stereotype threat is improved when stereotype threat is removed from the test-taking situation, for example, when students are told that a particular test produces no group differences in performance. Other means of reducing stereotype threat include creating an academic setting that communicates identity safety, for example, when a teacher tells minority students that he or she will hold them to high academic standards and believes the students can meet them. The importance of combating stereotype threat is evident in the link with negative outcomes in academic domains that are negatively stereotyped for an individual’s group identity. Students experiencing stereotype threat tend to avoid the domain where the stereotype applies, self-handicap in that domain, and/ or situationally disengage their self-esteem and ability appraisals from performance on tests in that domain. The chronic experience of stereotype threat risks instilling devaluation of success in that domain, a disengagement of identity from that domain, and a distancing from careers relevant to that domain.

Other emotions play critical roles in another dimension of school, that is, psychological adjustment and the negotiation of peer relationships. Anger is an important component of conduct disorder and externalizing problems in children. Children’s self-reported tendency to experience and express anger correlates with their ‘‘acting out’’ behaviors in normal and clinically diagnosed populations. Children who engage in antisocial behavior are rated by parents, teachers, and peers as being more hostile and angry. Anger-prone children are found to expect hostility from their peers and respond to ambiguous situations with hostile behavior, which elicits rejection from other children. In contrast, children experiencing internalizing disorders, such as depression and anxiety, tend to feel fear and sadness. For example, measures of depression in fifth graders are associated with self-reports of sadness as well as anger in the case of boys.

The social–moral emotions, those that encourage moral behavior, socialization, and adaptive assimilation into society (e.g., embarrassment, shame, guilt), appear to motivate children to avoid social transgressions. Less guilt, for example, is positively associated with externalizing problems such as antisocial behavior and is negatively associated with moral development. One study of the psychological adjustment of adolescent boys tested for the roles of anger, fear, and embarrassment by coding facial expressions during a structured social interaction (an intelligence test). Boys categorized by teachers as having externalizing problems displayed increased expressions of anger, whereas boys categorized as having internalizing problems displayed increased fear. Interestingly, both groups of boys displayed less embarrassment during the task than did nondisordered boys, indicating that embarrassment signals normal social–moral development.

8. Conclusion

The three domains of health, work, and school are important contexts where life outcomes are shaped. Emotional experience and disposition shape individual experience and social interaction in ways that influence these life outcomes.

References:

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