Emotional Dynamics in Encounters

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Emotions are perhaps as important as culture and language in forging the bonds that make encounters and, ultimately, larger sociocultural formations possible. Virtually every social interaction is emotionally valenced along a negative and positive continuum; and without emotions, individuals would not develop commitments to each other, to culture, and to social structures. And, of course, with the capacity to generate negative emotions, individuals can strike out at others and virtually any social structure. As I have sought to document in a variety of places (Turner 2000a, 2002, 2006, 2007a), the human brain is wired to produce a wide variety of emotions of dramatically varying intensity; and this capacity is the outcome of intense selection pressures on the ancestors of present-day humans to become more social (see TenHouten2007 for another view).

Humans are not as social as social scientists normally argue (Turner 2000a; Maryanski and Turner1992); and to the degree that we have hard-wiring for sociality, most of this wiring is for emotional arousal, which indirectly produces bonds among individuals. Indeed, the fragility of encounters is the result of the fact that humans, as evolved apes, must work rather hard compared to most other mammals to create and sustain social bonds, as is evident by the complexity of microdynamic forces examined so far. This last force – emotional arousal – is the underlying mechanism for all microdynamics; and as we will see in the next chapter, it is the force that binds people and sociocultural formations together as well as the force that tears social relations apart.