Like Dr. Frankenstein, Gervais & Fessler (G&F) have brought something dead back to life. Their monster, the concept of sentiment, has been rebuilt from the remnants of early psychology textbooks. As a functional network of emotions and attitudes, a sentiment is a complex assemblage, and the authors' Attitude–Scenario–Emotion model allows emotion theorists to sew it together with surgical precision.
Just how functional “sentiment” will prove to be in psychology's conceptual repertoire remains to be seen, but the idea has several desirable properties. First, it helps to make sense of complex phenomena such as contempt that are not easily assimilated into existing concepts of emotion or attitude but appear to have elements of both. Like Goldilocks' porridge, sentiments are not too affectively hot nor too cognitively cold to do justice to love or respect. Second, G&F's account of sentiments represents a sophisticated synthesis of cultural and evolutionary approaches to emotion. Third, like recent developments in moral psychology (Rai & Fiske Reference Rai and Fiske2011), the concept of “sentiment” places the regulation of social relationships front and center in the study of affective science, where it belongs. Sentiments are embedded in social relations, not confined to individual hearts and minds.
For a social psychologist, “sentiment” is an appealing idea. The concept of emotion has often been poorly integrated into research on core social psychological topics such as stereotypes and prejudice. As a result, this research has tended to flatten complex affective orientations towards others into a single dimension of positive versus negative evaluation. This unidimensional understanding has begun to break down as social psychologists recognize that stereotypes differ qualitatively and that prejudices vary in their affective coloration. This recognition is best known through the work of Susan Fiske and colleagues (Fiske et al. Reference Fiske, Cuddy and Glick2007). Their stereotype content model identifies groups which are targets of prejudices that have different emotional tones – pitying, envious, or disgusted – depending on their perceived status and warmth. Here sentiment-like ideas are permeating the social psychology of attitudes in a direction that G&F's work might advance.
The concept of sentiment also has the potential to bridge personality and social psychology. These fields sometimes seem to be drifting apart on different tectonic plates, one increasingly bound to the idea of universal neurobiologically grounded affective dispositions, the other to contextually variable cognitive appraisals. “Sentiment” offers a point of connection. If a sentiment is a particular configuration of (social) emotions and attitudes directed towards a particular (social) object, then some personality characteristics may be construed as default sentiments, as the authors propose, or as generalized sentiments without particular objects.
If this is the case, then the task of the personality psychologist is not just to identify a latent trait psychometrically and explore its correlates, but to understand the complex cognitive-affective network that underpins individual differences. Sentiments are a promising starting point for this kind of social psychology-informed personality research. Research on dispositions to express single emotions (e.g., trait anxiety, envy-proneness) has proven to be something of a dead end, and exploring tendencies to manifest more complex configurations – “pluripotent” emotions as the authors describe them – may be revealing. G&F's analysis of psychopathy as a trait linked to the sentiment of contempt is encouraging on that point. Future research might link complex traits such as dependency and narcissism to possible sentiments of love and pride.
The real challenges for a future psychology of sentiments will be to demonstrate that “sentiment” has clear conceptual boundaries with adjacent notions of “emotion” and “attitude,” and that a credible classification of sentiments can be developed. On the first point, there is reason for some skepticism. G&F do not make a strong case for sentiments being qualitatively distinct from emotions or attitudes, and, thus, self-evidently needful of their own separate conceptual domain. Emotions vary in their durability and complexity, attitudes vary in their degrees of affective saturation, and sentiments might simply represent an indistinct intermediate zone between the most prototypical emotion and the most prototypical attitude, rather than being a distinct natural kind. This semantic continuum can be carved in different ways in different languages. In the Romance languages, for example, what counts as “emotion” is typically covered by two distinct terms referring to primary and secondary emotions. In French, “emotion” refers to more basic emotional states and “sentiment” to states that are seen as relatively complex, refined, and unique to humans. Thus, the same affective landscape is mapped rather differently in French and English, and in the former the distinction between “sentiment” and “emotion” is drawn in a different place – closer to the emotion prototype – than it is in the authors' formulation. As Wierzbicka (Reference Wierzbicka1999) has written, the French “sentiment” generally resembles the English “emotion” except that it lacks reference to bodily states. These linguistic points relate to everyday word meanings rather than to scientific concepts, but they raise questions about whether a clear distinction between sentiments and cognate concepts can be made. If it cannot, the psychology of sentiments will be undermined.
Whether sentiments can be classified readily is another key challenge. The psychology of discrete emotions is grounded in a well-established, if occasionally questioned, taxonomy. The development of a similarly solid classification of sentiments – whether categorical like the taxonomy of basic emotions or dimensional like the taxonomy of personality – would be a great step forward for a future sentimental psychology. However, this classification will be compelling only if there is general agreement on what phenomena count as sentiments – where the concept's boundary lies – and if the classification does not closely resemble the classifications of emotions or attitudes. If they do, psychologists might question whether the domain of sentiments is truly distinct. Much work remains to be done, but G&F's proposal is a promising first step.
You have
Access
Like Dr. Frankenstein, Gervais & Fessler (G&F) have brought something dead back to life. Their monster, the concept of sentiment, has been rebuilt from the remnants of early psychology textbooks. As a functional network of emotions and attitudes, a sentiment is a complex assemblage, and the authors' Attitude–Scenario–Emotion model allows emotion theorists to sew it together with surgical precision.
Just how functional “sentiment” will prove to be in psychology's conceptual repertoire remains to be seen, but the idea has several desirable properties. First, it helps to make sense of complex phenomena such as contempt that are not easily assimilated into existing concepts of emotion or attitude but appear to have elements of both. Like Goldilocks' porridge, sentiments are not too affectively hot nor too cognitively cold to do justice to love or respect. Second, G&F's account of sentiments represents a sophisticated synthesis of cultural and evolutionary approaches to emotion. Third, like recent developments in moral psychology (Rai & Fiske Reference Rai and Fiske2011), the concept of “sentiment” places the regulation of social relationships front and center in the study of affective science, where it belongs. Sentiments are embedded in social relations, not confined to individual hearts and minds.
For a social psychologist, “sentiment” is an appealing idea. The concept of emotion has often been poorly integrated into research on core social psychological topics such as stereotypes and prejudice. As a result, this research has tended to flatten complex affective orientations towards others into a single dimension of positive versus negative evaluation. This unidimensional understanding has begun to break down as social psychologists recognize that stereotypes differ qualitatively and that prejudices vary in their affective coloration. This recognition is best known through the work of Susan Fiske and colleagues (Fiske et al. Reference Fiske, Cuddy and Glick2007). Their stereotype content model identifies groups which are targets of prejudices that have different emotional tones – pitying, envious, or disgusted – depending on their perceived status and warmth. Here sentiment-like ideas are permeating the social psychology of attitudes in a direction that G&F's work might advance.
The concept of sentiment also has the potential to bridge personality and social psychology. These fields sometimes seem to be drifting apart on different tectonic plates, one increasingly bound to the idea of universal neurobiologically grounded affective dispositions, the other to contextually variable cognitive appraisals. “Sentiment” offers a point of connection. If a sentiment is a particular configuration of (social) emotions and attitudes directed towards a particular (social) object, then some personality characteristics may be construed as default sentiments, as the authors propose, or as generalized sentiments without particular objects.
If this is the case, then the task of the personality psychologist is not just to identify a latent trait psychometrically and explore its correlates, but to understand the complex cognitive-affective network that underpins individual differences. Sentiments are a promising starting point for this kind of social psychology-informed personality research. Research on dispositions to express single emotions (e.g., trait anxiety, envy-proneness) has proven to be something of a dead end, and exploring tendencies to manifest more complex configurations – “pluripotent” emotions as the authors describe them – may be revealing. G&F's analysis of psychopathy as a trait linked to the sentiment of contempt is encouraging on that point. Future research might link complex traits such as dependency and narcissism to possible sentiments of love and pride.
The real challenges for a future psychology of sentiments will be to demonstrate that “sentiment” has clear conceptual boundaries with adjacent notions of “emotion” and “attitude,” and that a credible classification of sentiments can be developed. On the first point, there is reason for some skepticism. G&F do not make a strong case for sentiments being qualitatively distinct from emotions or attitudes, and, thus, self-evidently needful of their own separate conceptual domain. Emotions vary in their durability and complexity, attitudes vary in their degrees of affective saturation, and sentiments might simply represent an indistinct intermediate zone between the most prototypical emotion and the most prototypical attitude, rather than being a distinct natural kind. This semantic continuum can be carved in different ways in different languages. In the Romance languages, for example, what counts as “emotion” is typically covered by two distinct terms referring to primary and secondary emotions. In French, “emotion” refers to more basic emotional states and “sentiment” to states that are seen as relatively complex, refined, and unique to humans. Thus, the same affective landscape is mapped rather differently in French and English, and in the former the distinction between “sentiment” and “emotion” is drawn in a different place – closer to the emotion prototype – than it is in the authors' formulation. As Wierzbicka (Reference Wierzbicka1999) has written, the French “sentiment” generally resembles the English “emotion” except that it lacks reference to bodily states. These linguistic points relate to everyday word meanings rather than to scientific concepts, but they raise questions about whether a clear distinction between sentiments and cognate concepts can be made. If it cannot, the psychology of sentiments will be undermined.
Whether sentiments can be classified readily is another key challenge. The psychology of discrete emotions is grounded in a well-established, if occasionally questioned, taxonomy. The development of a similarly solid classification of sentiments – whether categorical like the taxonomy of basic emotions or dimensional like the taxonomy of personality – would be a great step forward for a future sentimental psychology. However, this classification will be compelling only if there is general agreement on what phenomena count as sentiments – where the concept's boundary lies – and if the classification does not closely resemble the classifications of emotions or attitudes. If they do, psychologists might question whether the domain of sentiments is truly distinct. Much work remains to be done, but G&F's proposal is a promising first step.