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Admiration is a social emotion felt by observing people of competence, talent, or skill exceeding standards. [1] Admiration facilitates social learning in groups. [2] Admiration motivates self-improvement through learning from role-models. [3]
Sara Algoe and Jonathan Haidt [1] include admiration in the category of other-praising emotions, alongside awe, elevation, and gratitude. They propose that admiration is the emotion we feel towards non-moral excellence (i.e., witnessing an act of excellent skill), while elevation is the emotion we feel towards moral excellence (i.e., witnessing someone perform an act of exceeding virtue). Other authors term both these emotions as admiration, distinguishing between admiration for skill and admiration for virtue. [4] Richard Smith [3] categorises admiration as an other-focused assimilative emotion, leading people to aspire to be like (assimilate to) those they admire. He contrasts admiration with envy (an other-focused contrastive emotion), proposing that envy leads us to feel frustrated about the competence of others, while admiration is uplifting and motivating.
Learning of skills has been so important to our evolution that we have come to feel positively about talented or skillful people, in order to approach them and copy their actions. [5] Admiration is the emotion that facilitates learning in social groups. [2]
Following from the view that admiration's function is learning and self-improvement, [2] some authors have proposed that admiration will only activate when we believe improvement is possible for us, [1] [3] however one empirical study has suggested the opposite, that admiration is akin to passive contemplation of another's superiority, while envy is the motivating emotion which activates when a better performance is attainable to us. [6]
Witnessing admirable acts has been shown to increase motivation for self-improvement in the domain of witnessed excellence (e.g., sporting performance), but also a more general motivation to work towards achieving one's own life goals. [1] Using fMRI, admiration has been shown to be related with higher-level cognitive processes involved in motivation (e.g., planning, pursuit of goals), but also relates to lower-level activating mechanisms, demonstrating that admiration is a physically energising emotion. [4]
Admiration is also associated with a tendency to praise the admired act to others, [1] and a desire for contact and proximity with the admired. [7]
Admiration has also been studied in an intergroup context by Susan Fiske and her colleagues. They propose that admiration is the emotion we feel towards those social groups we perceive as competent (or high-status) and warm (friendly and cooperative) (e.g., in studies involving students in the US, an example of a group perceived as competent and warm is the British). [8] Admiration is related to intentions to associate, cooperate with, and help members from groups that are admired. [7]
Schadenfreude is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another. It is a borrowed word from German, with no direct translation, that originated in the 18th century.
Positive psychology is the scientific study of what makes life most worth living, focusing on both individual and societal well-being. It studies "positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions...it aims to improve quality of life." It is a field of study that has been growing steadily throughout the years as individuals and researchers look for common ground on better well-being.
Motivation is what explains why people or animals initiate, continue or terminate a certain behavior at a particular time. Motivational states are commonly understood as forces acting within the agent that create a disposition to engage in goal-directed behavior. It is often held that different mental states compete with each other and that only the strongest state determines behavior. This means that we can be motivated to do something without actually doing it. The paradigmatic mental state providing motivation is desire. But various other states, such as beliefs about what one ought to do or intentions, may also provide motivation.
Compassion motivates people to go out of their way to relieve the physical, mental, or emotional pains of others and themselves. Compassion is often regarded as being sensitive to the emotional aspects of the suffering of others. When based on notions such as fairness, justice, and interdependence, it may be considered rational in nature.
Moral psychology is a field of study in both philosophy and psychology. Historically, the term "moral psychology" was used relatively narrowly to refer to the study of moral development. Moral psychology eventually came to refer more broadly to various topics at the intersection of ethics, psychology, and philosophy of mind. Some of the main topics of the field are moral judgment, moral reasoning, moral sensitivity, moral responsibility, moral motivation, moral identity, moral action, moral development, moral diversity, moral character, altruism, psychological egoism, moral luck, moral forecasting, moral emotion, affective forecasting, and moral disagreement.
Susan Tufts Fiske is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition, stereotypes, and prejudice. Fiske leads the Intergroup Relations, Social Cognition, and Social Neuroscience Lab at Princeton University. Her theoretical contributions include the development of the stereotype content model, ambivalent sexism theory, power as control theory, and the continuum model of impression formation.
Jonathan David Haidt is an American social psychologist, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business, and author. His main areas of study are the psychology of morality and moral emotions.
Infrahumanisation is the tacitly held belief that one's ingroup is more human than an outgroup, which is less human. The term was coined by Jacques-Philippe Leyens and colleagues in the early 2000s to distinguish what they argue to be an everyday phenomenon from dehumanization associated with extreme intergroup violence such as genocide. According to Leyens and colleagues, infrahumanisation arises when people view their ingroup and outgroup as essentially different and accordingly reserve the "human essence" for the ingroup and deny it to the outgroup. Whether a "subhuman" classification means "human but inferior" or "not human at all" may be academic, as in practice it corresponds to prejudice regardless.
Wonder is an emotion comparable to surprise that people feel when perceiving something rare or unexpected. It has historically been seen as an important aspect of human nature, specifically being linked with curiosity and the drive behind intellectual exploration. Wonder is also often compared to the emotion of awe but awe implies fear or respect rather than joy. Science fiction can produce a sense of wonder.
Envy is an emotion which occurs when a person lacks another's superior quality, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it.
Awe is an emotion comparable to wonder but less joyous. On Robert Plutchik's wheel of emotions awe is modeled as a combination of surprise and fear.
Reverence is "a feeling or attitude of deep respect tinged with awe; veneration". The word "reverence" in the modern day is often used in relationship with religion. This is because religion often stimulates the emotion through recognition of a god, the supernatural, and the ineffable. Reverence involves a humbling of the self in respectful recognition of something perceived to be greater than the self. Thus religion is commonly a place where reverence is felt.
In social psychology, the stereotype content model (SCM) is a model, first proposed in 2002, postulating that all group stereotypes and interpersonal impressions form along two dimensions: (1) warmth and (2) competence.
Amy Joy Casselberry Cuddy is an American social psychologist, author and speaker. She is known for her promotion of "power posing", a controversial self-improvement technique whose scientific validity has been questioned. She has served as a faculty member at Rutgers University, Kellogg School of Management and Harvard Business School. Cuddy's most cited academic work involves using the stereotype content model that she helped develop to better understand the way people think about stereotyped people and groups. Though Cuddy left her tenure-track position at Harvard Business School in the spring of 2017, she continues to contribute to its executive education programs.
A conflict is a struggle and a clash of interest, opinion, or even principles. Conflict will always be found in society; as the basis of conflict may vary to be personal, racial, class, caste, political and international. Conflict may also be emotional, intellectual, and theoretical, in which case academic recognition may, or may not be, a significant motive. Intellectual conflict is a subclass of cultural conflict, a conflict that tends to grow over time due to different cultural values and beliefs.
Elevation is an emotion elicited by witnessing actual or imagined virtuous acts of remarkable moral goodness. It is experienced as a distinct feeling of warmth and expansion that is accompanied by appreciation and affection for the individual whose exceptional conduct is being observed. Elevation motivates those who experience it to open up to, affiliate with, and assist others. Elevation makes an individual feel lifted up and optimistic about humanity.
Praise as a form of social interaction expresses recognition, reassurance or admiration. Praise is expressed verbally as well as by body language.
Relational models theory (RMT) is a theory of interpersonal relationships, authored by anthropologist Alan Fiske and initially developed from his fieldwork in Burkina Faso. RMT proposes that all human interactions can be described in terms of just four "relational models", or elementary forms of human relations: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching and market pricing.
Moral emotions are a variety of social emotion that are involved in forming and communicating moral judgments and decisions, and in motivating behavioral responses to one's own and others' moral behavior.
An empathy gap, sometimes referred to as an empathy bias, is a breakdown or reduction in empathy where it might otherwise be expected to occur. Empathy gaps may occur due to a failure in the process of empathizing or as a consequence of stable personality characteristics, and may reflect either a lack of ability or motivation to empathize.
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