A Brief History of Human Society: The Origin and Role of Emotion in Social Life

By D. Massey. American Sociological Review, 2002

329 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Human society emerged over 6 million years of hominid evolution. During this time group size steadily increased, and to maintain group cohesion human beings gradually evolved a well-developed social intelligence based on the differentiation and refinement of emotions. The neurological structures for emotional expression are part of the primitive brain and developed long before the cognitive equipment for rational intelligence evolved. Indeed, full rationality came rather late in human evolution, and it has only been within the last 100 years that the social conditions emerged for a mass culture based on rationality. A review of the evolution of human society and human cognition illustrates the creation and workings of the human emotional brain and show how it operates independently of and strongly influences the rational brain. If sociology is to advance, research and theory must grapple with both rational and emotional intelligence and focus particularly on the interplay between them.

Subfields: Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/83b1ac6eca15f2026461595a4082713016781456

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In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Animal Spirits: Affective and Deliberative Processes in Economic Behavior (2004, unknown): “As Ledoux (1996:19) notes, “while conscious control over emotions is weak, emotions can flood consciousness.”
Gender and the Meanings of Adolescent Romantic Relationships: A Focus on Boys (2006, background): “Researchers have recently accorded greater significance to the role of emotions in human behavior (e.g., Katz 1999; Massey 2002; Turner 2000).”
Sociological Realms of Emotional Experience1 (2004, background): “American Journal of Sociology 1110 encing perceptions, coloring memories, binding people together through attraction, keeping them apart through hatred, and regulating their behavior through guilt, shame, and pride” (Massey 2002, p. 20).”
Status As a Valued Resource (2004, background): “What makes us human is the addition of a rational mind to a preexisting emotional base” (Massey 2002:2; also see Runciman 1998; Tooby and Cosmides 1990).”
Do Adolescents Engage in Delinquency to Attract the Social Attention of Peers? An Extension and Longitudinal Test of the Social Reinforcement Hypothesis (2006, background): “…given research suggesting that learning may take place without conscious awareness (Berry and Broadbent 1984; Claxton 1999; Lewicki et al. 1992; Massey 2002), measures of delinquents’ conscious “motivations” would not necessarily prove sufficient for falsifying the vicarious-reinforcement…”