2.1. Contempt is intentional or about an object

Contempt is directed toward a particular object or class thereof (Frijda Reference Frijda1986). Unlike disgust (e.g., Wheatley & Haidt Reference Wheatley and Haidt2005) and anger (e.g., DeSteno et al. Reference DeSteno, Dasgupta, Bartlett and Cajdric2004), contempt appears not to be susceptible to priming or misattribution (e.g., Tapias et al. Reference Tapias, Glaser, Keltner, Vasquez and Wickens2007). Contempt “tags” others (Fessler & Haley Reference Fessler, Haley and Hammerstein2003; Hutcherson & Gross Reference Hutcherson and Gross2011), inhering in representations of them more than in a systemic mode of operation in the perceiver.

2.2. Contempt is an enduring evaluation

Contempt entails a relatively enduring change in feeling toward its object (Sternberg Reference Sternberg2003a). Fischer and Roseman (Reference Fischer and Roseman2007) found that contempt increased over a period of days, with short-term anger giving way to longer-term contempt. Hutcherson and Gross' (2011) participants explained the undesirability of being an object of contempt in terms of its duration or difficulty of resolution relative to both anger and moral disgust. Many investigators (e.g., Mason Reference Mason2003) hold that contempt is anchored by enduring attributions about character traits; Roseman (Reference Roseman, Scherer, Schorr and Johnstone2001) distinguishes anger and contempt according to their appraised problem types, where that underlying contempt is intrinsic to the person appraised.

2.3. Contempt follows from cues to low relational value

A number of antecedents have been associated with contempt. These include violations of community expectations (Laham et al. Reference Laham, Chopra, Lalljee and Parkinson2010; Rozin et al. Reference Rozin, Lowery, Imada and Haidt1999), incompetence (Hutcherson & Gross Reference Hutcherson and Gross2011), immorality (S. Fiske et al. Reference Fiske, Cuddy and Xu2002), badness of character (Fischer & Roseman Reference Fischer and Roseman2007; Smith & Ellsworth Reference Smith and Ellsworth1985), and out-group or minority status (Brewer Reference Brewer1999; Izard Reference Izard1977; Mackie et al. Reference Mackie, Devos and Smith2000), especially when perceived competition, superiority, and in-group strength pertain (Caprariello et al. Reference Caprariello, Cuddy and Fiske2009). These causes have in common that the targeted actor or group is a low-value or even worthless relationship partner (Fessler & Haley Reference Fessler, Haley and Hammerstein2003). This may follow from their unpredictability, unreliability, inefficacy, incompetence, impoverishment, incompatibility, or replaceability.

2.4. Contempt entails loss of respect and status diminution

Following from another's cues to low relationship value, contempt emerges as a two-part representation: respect is lost (Haidt Reference Haidt, Davidson, Scherer and Goldsmith2003; Laham et al. Reference Laham, Chopra, Lalljee and Parkinson2010), and the other is viewed as beneath oneself (Keltner et al. Reference Keltner, Haidt, Shiota, Schaller, Simpson and Kenrick2006; Miller Reference Miller1997; Smith Reference Smith, Suls and Wheeler2000; Wagner Reference Wagner2000). Whereas respect for an other follows from efficacy and competence (Wojciszke et al. Reference Wojciszke, Abele and Baryla2009), contempt follows from their absence (Hutcherson & Gross Reference Hutcherson and Gross2011). Whereas respect involves “looking up to” someone (A. P. Fiske Reference Fiske1991), contempt involves “looking down on” someone (Miller Reference Miller1997), even seeing the person as less than human (Haslam Reference Haslam2006; Leyens et al. Reference Leyens, Demoulin, Vaes, Gaunt and Paladino2007; Sternberg Reference Sternberg2003a). Contrary to claims that contempt blends anger and disgust, of the three, only contempt is empirically associated with feelings of superiority (Hutcherson & Gross Reference Hutcherson and Gross2011).

2.5. Contempt creates “cold” indifference

Authors frequently refer to contempt and its concomitants as “cold, ”a polysemous folk metaphor. One meaning of “cold ”refers to the absence of intense qualia in contempt, in contrast to the “hot ”experience of anger or disgust (Haidt Reference Haidt, Davidson, Scherer and Goldsmith2003; Rozin et al. Reference Rozin, Lowery, Imada and Haidt1999). Another meaning of “cold ”refers to the absence of empathic concern and “warm ”prosocial emotions in contempt (Dubreuil Reference Dubreuil2010; Haidt Reference Haidt, Davidson, Scherer and Goldsmith2003; Mason Reference Mason2003). Participants appear to blend these two facets when reporting relatively cool sensations associated with contempt (Nummenmaa et al. Reference Nummenmaa, Glerean, Hari and Hietanen2014). Nonetheless, Frijda et al. (Reference Frijda, Kuipers and Ter Schure1989) found that “contempt” events are associated with “boiling inwardly” (see also Fischer Reference Fischer, Trnka, Balcar and Kuska2011); below, we explain how contempt may sometimes involve this experience.

2.6. Contempt is associated with anger and disgust

In studies with various probes and outcome measures, contempt clusters primarily with anger and secondarily with disgust (Alvarado & Jameson Reference Alvarado and Jameson1996; Reference Alvarado and Jameson2002; Frijda et al. Reference Frijda, Kuipers and Ter Schure1989; Rozin et al. Reference Rozin, Lowery and Ebert1994; Reference Rozin, Lowery, Imada and Haidt1999; Shaver et al. Reference Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson and Oconnor1987; Smith & Ellsworth Reference Smith and Ellsworth1985), although some researchers report the reverse (Ekman et al. Reference Ekman, Friesen, O'Sullivan, Chan, Diacoyanni-Tarlatzis, Heider, Krause, LeCompte, Pitcairn, Ricci-Bitti, Scherer, Tomita and Tzavaras1987; Nummenmaa et al. Reference Nummenmaa, Glerean, Hari and Hietanen2014; Storm & Storm Reference Storm and Storm1987). Many stimuli or situations simultaneously evoke contempt with anger or disgust (Fischer & Roseman Reference Fischer and Roseman2007; Hutcherson & Gross Reference Hutcherson and Gross2011; Laham et al. Reference Laham, Chopra, Lalljee and Parkinson2010; Mackie et al. Reference Mackie, Devos and Smith2000; Marzillier & Davey Reference Marzillier and Davey2004; Rozin et al. Reference Rozin, Lowery, Imada and Haidt1999; Tapias et al. Reference Tapias, Glaser, Keltner, Vasquez and Wickens2007), and the display of disgust is among the behaviors associated with contempt (Fischer & Roseman Reference Fischer and Roseman2007). Contempt and disgust are considered together most commonly because both are associated with action tendencies to exclude or avoid another person (S. Fiske et al. Reference Fiske, Cuddy and Xu2002; Mackie et al. Reference Mackie, Devos and Smith2000). Others have considered anger, disgust, and contempt together because all three are “other-condemning” and motivate hostility (Haidt Reference Haidt, Davidson, Scherer and Goldsmith2003; Izard Reference Izard1977; Sternberg Reference Sternberg2003a). Many authors argue that contempt either is a form of anger or disgust or is built from them (e.g., S. Fiske et al. Reference Fiske, Cuddy and Xu2002; Lazarus Reference Lazarus1991; Ortony et al. Reference Ortony, Clore and Collins1988; Prinz Reference Prinz2007).

2.7. Contempt has many expressions

In studies of facial expressions, the term “contempt” consistently produces low agreement across subjects (Matsumoto & Ekman Reference Matsumoto and Ekman2004; Russell Reference Russell1991c; Reference Russell1991d; Wagner Reference Wagner2000). The term has been associated with the canonical expressions for both “anger” (Alvarado & Jameson Reference Alvarado and Jameson1996; Rozin et al. Reference Rozin, Lowery and Ebert1994) and “disgust” (Ekman et al. Reference Ekman, Friesen, O'Sullivan, Chan, Diacoyanni-Tarlatzis, Heider, Krause, LeCompte, Pitcairn, Ricci-Bitti, Scherer, Tomita and Tzavaras1987). “Contempt” is also chosen to label a neutral expression in the absence of a “neutral” label choice (Wagner Reference Wagner2000). “Contempt” is the predominant label chosen for the unilateral lip curl (Ekman & Friesen Reference Ekman and Friesen1986; Matsumoto & Ekman Reference Matsumoto and Ekman2004), but “anger” and “disgust” are also often chosen (Haidt & Keltner Reference Haidt and Keltner1999; Matsumoto Reference Matsumoto2005; Russell Reference Russell1991c; Reference Russell1991d); in free response, this expression is rarely labeled “contempt” (Alvarado & Jameson Reference Alvarado and Jameson1996; Ekman & Friesen Reference Ekman and Friesen1986; Haidt & Keltner Reference Haidt and Keltner1999; Matsumoto & Ekman Reference Matsumoto and Ekman2004; Russell Reference Russell1991d). The unilateral lip curl is linked to the kinds of situations that elicit contempt (Matsumoto & Ekman Reference Matsumoto and Ekman2004; Rozin et al. Reference Rozin, Lowery, Imada and Haidt1999), but “contempt” is rarely used to label these situations in free-response tasks. This is not due to unfamiliarity with the term (Wagner Reference Wagner2000), but may be due to uncertainty regarding its meaning (Haidt & Keltner Reference Haidt and Keltner1999; Matsumoto Reference Matsumoto2005; Rosenberg & Ekman Reference Rosenberg and Ekman1995).

Beyond facial expressions, research links contempt with a downward gaze and tilted-back head, postures associated with dominance displays and assertions of superiority in animals (see Darwin 1872/1955; Izard & Haynes Reference Izard and Haynes1988; also Frijda Reference Frijda1986). In addition to linking contempt to a nonhuman snarl reminiscent of the unilateral lip curl, Darwin foregrounded derisive laughter and turning away as expressions of contempt associated with the other's insignificance (see also Fischer Reference Fischer, Trnka, Balcar and Kuska2011; Roseman et al. Reference Roseman, Wiest and Swartz1994).

In the ethnographic literature, numerous behaviors and expressions that show a lack of respect are parochially interpreted as indexing contempt, including ignoring others (e.g., Turnbull Reference Turnbull1962), throwing sand at them (e.g., Thomas Reference Thomas1914), spitting at or near them (e.g., Handy & Pukui Reference Handy and Pukui1953), swearing at them (e.g., Campbell Reference Campbell1964), sticking one's tongue or lips out at them (e.g., Pierson Reference Pierson1967), and displaying one's buttocks or genitalia to them (e.g., Archer Reference Archer1984). In American English, “contempt of court” refers to disregarding the rules, etiquette, or orders of a court of law (Goldfarb Reference Goldfarb1961). Contempt is often inferred from disrespectful, irreverent behavior.

2.8. Contempt leads to intolerance, exclusion, and relationship dissolution

Contempt is associated with diverse action tendencies; it has been classed among the “appraisal dominant” emotions, meaning that it can be better predicted from antecedent appraisals than from consequent action readiness (Frijda et al. Reference Frijda, Kuipers and Ter Schure1989). Nonetheless, the motivations and action tendencies associated with contempt have usually been characterized as rejection and exclusion (Fischer & Roseman Reference Fischer and Roseman2007; Frijda Reference Frijda1986; Roseman et al. Reference Roseman, Wiest and Swartz1994). Retrospectively reported contempt events are associated with the goals of social exclusion, coercion, derogation, rejection, and verbal attack (Fischer & Roseman Reference Fischer and Roseman2007). A composite of “contempt” and “disgust” partially mediates reported willingness to move away from an out-group, while anger mediates willingness to move against (Mackie et al. Reference Mackie, Devos and Smith2000). More broadly, contempt may serve to reduce interaction with those who cannot contribute to the group (Hutcherson & Gross Reference Hutcherson and Gross2011), leading to mockery, exclusion, and ostracism (Dubreuil Reference Dubreuil2010). Haidt (Reference Haidt, Davidson, Scherer and Goldsmith2003) argues that “contempt motivates neither attack nor withdrawal” (p. 858), instead pervading later interactions, diminishing prosocial emotions, and leading to mockery or disregard (see also Miller Reference Miller1997). Consonant with these motivational and behavioral outcomes, an important consequence of contempt is relationship dissolution (Fischer & Roseman Reference Fischer and Roseman2007). Famously, contempt is one of the “four horsemen of the apocalypse” in predicting divorce (Gottman & Levenson Reference Gottman and Levenson1992). Finally, contempt is implicated in some of the most heinous of human behaviors. Sternberg (Reference Sternberg2003a) suggests that contempt plays a role in propaganda campaigns designed to foment hate, and implicates contempt in the calculated massacres of Hutus, Jews, and Armenians (see also Izard Reference Izard1977).

3.1. “Contempt” is not a basic emotion

One explanatory approach, exemplified by Ekman and Friesen (Reference Ekman and Friesen1986), maps the folk affect concept “contempt” onto a basic emotion, contempt. This is the approach, at least implicitly, of most contempt researchers (e.g., Fischer & Roseman Reference Fischer and Roseman2007; Hutcherson & Gross Reference Hutcherson and Gross2011; Rozin et al. Reference Rozin, Lowery, Imada and Haidt1999). A related approach, which does not assume basic emotions, maps “contempt” onto an emergent yet cross-culturally salient “modal emotion” sensu appraisal theorists such as Scherer (Reference Scherer2009; see also Colombetti Reference Colombetti2009).

Although contempt evinces features of a prototypical emotion profile, including elicitors, phenomenological concomitants, and motivational and expressive outcomes, other features of contempt do not sit comfortably within a basic emotion or appraisal theory approach: Contempt is a relatively enduring representation rather than a fleeting occurrent response; it shows no evidence of diffuse systemic effects, as in priming or misattribution; it often involves a marked absence of emotion, as in “cold” indifference to another's suffering or threat; and its expressions are diverse across contexts. Despite important cross-cultural regularities (Ekman & Friesen Reference Ekman and Friesen1986; Haidt & Keltner Reference Haidt and Keltner1999; Rozin et al. Reference Rozin, Lowery, Imada and Haidt1999), agreement on the meaning of “contempt” is also uniquely low for a putative basic emotion (Rosenberg & Ekman Reference Rosenberg and Ekman1995). “Contempt” does not map cleanly onto a natural kind emotion.

3.2. “Contempt” is not an attitude

Another approach proposes that “contempt” is an attitude of indifference or rejection towards an object, person, place, or idea viewed as having low value (Frijda Reference Frijda1986; Mason Reference Mason2003). In standard frameworks, attitudes are like emotions in that they are intentional, or about particular objects, but longer lasting – emotions are fleeting responses in context, whereas attitudes are enduring representations (Clore & Schnall Reference Clore, Schnall, Albarracin, Johnson and Zanna2005) that involve little arousal (Russell & Barrett Reference Russell and Barrett1999). The structure of attitudes is generally thought to include affective representations (e.g., prejudice), cognitive representations (e.g., stereotypes), and behaviors (e.g., discrimination) (see Breckler Reference Breckler1984; Eagly & Chaiken Reference Eagly and Chaiken1993; Rosenberg & Hovland Reference Rosenberg, Hovland, Hovland and Rosenberg1960). These three channels are themselves treated as equally evaluative and unidimensional: from like to dislike, from good to bad, and from approach to avoidance, respectively.

This account could explain why contempt is often devoid of emotional arousal, and how it moderates relational behavior across time and situations. However, current attitude theory cannot account for the emotional texture of contempt. The attitude literature is largely isolated from the emotion literature and investigates global evaluations lacking the diverse emotional and behavioral outcomes of contempt. In contrast to the affectively neutral concomitants of indifference, the associations between contempt and anger and disgust remain opaque on the attitudinal account (Fischer Reference Fischer, Trnka, Balcar and Kuska2011).

3.3. “Contempt” is not an untethered construction

Yet another approach to “contempt” could be developed that assumes neither discrete basic emotions nor attitudes. Although they have not been applied to “contempt,” psychological constructionist theories of emotion offer one option. According to one prominent constructionist theory, the Conceptual Act Model (L. F. Barrett Reference Barrett2006b; Lindquist Reference Lindquist2013; see also Russell Reference Russell2003), the features of “contempt” should hang together only because that natural language term chunks the otherwise continuous stream of “core affect” – that is, valence and arousal – into a conceptual schema that integrates concomitant processes across these and other “core systems.” On this account, there is no unifying feature of experience that characterizes all cases of contempt; those affective experiences labeled as tokens of contempt vary widely in their specific features, and individuals and populations vary in their prototypical “contempt” concepts. This approach could account for variation in the meaning of “contempt,” while providing scope for the enduring time course of “contempt” tokens.

In a psychological constructionist approach, a word such as “contempt” is necessary to anchor the coherence of the features categorized as a single emotion; without this anchor for statistical learning, there is only the continuous stream of core affect. However, this or comparable words do not appear necessary for experiencing together the features of “contempt.” In a study of anger, Fridhandler and Averill (Reference Fridhandler, Averill and Averill1982) found that unresolved anger towards a formerly valued relationship partner, dispositional attributions of their shortcomings, and low estimation of the other's value and character were associated with having “less need or affection for the offender” and a “cooling of the relationship with the instigator.” Although these results closely parallel those of Fischer and Roseman (Reference Fischer and Roseman2007) for “contempt,” the word was never used as a prompt. Similarly, the unilateral lip curl is associated with the same kinds of eliciting situations as “contempt,” yet without using that word as a prompt (Matsumoto & Ekman Reference Matsumoto and Ekman2004; Rozin et al. Reference Rozin, Lowery, Imada and Haidt1999). In addition, as we will detail below, the features of “contempt” cohere as a dispositional social stance in clinical primary psychopathy, suggesting that their co-occurrence is far from arbitrary. Finally, a constructionist approach has trouble explaining the translatability of “contempt” across diverse populations (e.g., Ekman & Friesen Reference Ekman and Friesen1986). The features of “contempt” appear to functionally stick together even without that word acting as conceptual glue.

The features of “contempt” are not merely a conceptual construction around core affect. They also approximate neither a basic emotion nor an attitude. Nonetheless, each of these approaches has merit. The basic emotions approach highlights the motivational and expressive components of contempt. The attitude approach can account for the object specificity and durability of contempt. And a constructionist approach is necessary to understand how basic affect systems might manifest as folk affect concepts. Synthesizing these perspectives, we argue that the features of “contempt” are aspects of an underlying sentiment: a functional network of diverse basic emotions moderated by an attitudinal representation of a person. This network evinces statistical regularities across disparate emotional and behavioral outcomes anchored by a common attitudinal core. On this account, the major limitation of the discrete emotions paradigm in the affective sciences is not the assumption of evolved design at a higher level than “core affect” (see L. F. Barrett Reference Barrett2006a); it is the underappreciation of an even higher level of functional organization across discrete emotions in the service of social relationship regulation.

4.1. Sentiments

A higher level of functional design among emotions was appreciated a century ago by British social psychologists exploring consistency in individual personalities and values, despite variable behavior across contexts, that is, “character” (McDougall Reference McDougall1933; Shand Reference Shand1920; Stout Reference Stout1903). Shand (Reference Shand1920) distinguished three levels of character: instincts, or simple embodied impulses; primary emotions, or systems of instincts that organize particular behaviors; and sentiments, which organize and direct emotions across situations with respect to particular relational objects. Sentiments were enduring dispositions to respond emotionally towards their objects in ways consistent with the value of that object. Love and hate were prototypical sentiments; they potentiated happiness, anger, fear, and sadness in quite opposite, yet appropriate, situations, to preserve or destroy their objects, respectively. For Shand, these primary emotions shared the “innate bond” (p. 42) of a sentiment toward a particular object.

Despite being hailed as “the main foundation of all social psychology” (McDougall Reference McDougall1933, as quoted in Allport Reference Allport and Murchison1935, p. 807), the sentiment construct fell from use (though see Heider Reference Heider1958). Sentiments were contrasted with “attitudes” (see, e.g., Cattell Reference Cattell1940; McDougall Reference McDougall1937), which, following Allport (Reference Allport and Murchison1935), were embraced by American social psychology. The abstractness and generality of the attitude construct likely helped it gain wider use, especially in experimental studies of impersonal attitudes towards stereotypes, products, and political positions. Other reasons for the waning of “sentiment” likely included behaviorist opposition to the “hormic” teleology of sentiments; greater reliance on unpopular evolutionary (especially Lamarckian) reasoning by proponents; and associations with discredited, yet logically distinct, theories of parapsychology and eugenics (see, e.g., Asprem Reference Asprem2010).

Below, we remodel the sentiment construct in line with the modern tenet of evolved functional specialization (H. C. Barrett & Kurzban Reference Barrett and Kurzban2006). Doing so resolves debates about both the structure of social affect and the sources of variation in folk affect concepts, “contempt” included, thereby both organizing a large body of existing findings and generating discriminant predictions.

4.2. The Attitude–Scenario–Emotion (ASE) model of sentiments

We propose the Attitude–Scenario–Emotion (ASE) model of sentiments (see Table 2). This model specifically addresses social affect, emphasizing the adaptive problems of social relationship regulation (Fessler & Haley Reference Fessler, Haley and Hammerstein2003; A. P. Fiske Reference Fiske2002). We leave open the potential generality of this model for non-social affect. The model includes three kinds of basic affect systems distinguished by their forms and functions: attitudes, emotions, and sentiments.

Table 2. Major features of the Attitude–Scenario–Emotion model of sentiments, including the constructs, functional features, operational indicators, and sample predictions from the model*

* See Section 6.

In our model, attitudes are enduring yet tentative representations of social-relational value (e.g., Fazio Reference Fazio2007). Attitudes are set or updated by cues of relational value, then index or proxy that value through time, moderating behavior regulation systems in light of it. In their form, attitudes approximate Internal Regulatory Variables (IRVs) (Tooby et al. Reference Tooby, Cosmides, Sell, Lieberman, Sznycer and Elliot2008): “indices” or “registers … whose function is to store summary magnitudes … that allow value computation to be integrated into behavior regulation” (p. 253). Tooby et al. propose that IRVs are ubiquitous across levels of the mind, operating in hierarchical systems that aggregate and summarize information at higher levels as a function of outputs from lower levels. Attitudes are IRVs operating at a particularly high, and potentially introspectively salient, level of the social mind.

Attitudes solve a key adaptive problem of social relationships: conditioning social behavior on the fitness affordances – or likely costs and benefits – associated with others. Anyone can approach, offer aid, inflict harm, or die. But the fitness consequences of such events depend on who is involved – on whether they are kin, ally, leader, mate, stranger, or enemy, and on the costs and benefits to self that such categories entail. Fitness affordances are not objective properties but are relative to a perceiver's traits, resources, and current state, requiring subjective representation (see Cottrell et al. Reference Cottrell, Neuberg and Li2007; S. T. Fiske et al. Reference Fiske, Cuddy and Xu2002; Tooby et al. Reference Tooby, Cosmides, Sell, Lieberman, Sznycer and Elliot2008). Moreover, appraised threats and opportunities are often not presently observable but are grounded in past events that revealed an other's skills, propensities, and affiliations. Hence, enduring yet tentative summary representations should commute the past into the present and subjectively weight the value of others. In the ASE model, attitudes serve this function.

In the ASE model, attitudinal representations guide action, but emotions implement action. Following adaptationist and social-functional approaches (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby Reference Cosmides, Tooby, Lewis and Haviland-Jones2000; Ekman Reference Ekman1992a; Keltner et al. Reference Keltner, Haidt, Shiota, Schaller, Simpson and Kenrick2006; Nesse Reference Nesse1990; Nesse & Ellsworth Reference Nesse and Ellsworth2009), emotions are contingent, occurrent, and coordinated shifts across the cognitive, motivational, and movement systems of an organism, creating a state of action readiness (Frijda et al. Reference Frijda, Kuipers and Ter Schure1989). Each emotion is a mode of operation for the organism, contingent on a particular appraisal of circumstance. Functionally, each emotion facilitates adaptive behavior vis-à-vis its eliciting circumstance. In the ASE model, this adaptive behavior regulation occurs primarily in the present, although one function of emotions may be to update attitudes for the future (Baumeister et al. Reference Baumeister, Vohs and DeWall2007; Tooby et al. Reference Tooby, Cosmides, Sell, Lieberman, Sznycer and Elliot2008). We consider canonical moods to be emotions temporally tailored to address protracted threats and opportunities. As with other emotions, their form is systemic and pervades thought and action (see Clore & Schnall Reference Clore, Schnall, Albarracin, Johnson and Zanna2005; Frijda Reference Frijda, Ekman and Davidson1994; Schimmack et al. Reference Schimmack, Oishi, Diener and Suh2000).

Among the diverse behavioral functions served by emotions, many regulate behavior within social relationships (Fessler & Haley Reference Fessler, Haley and Hammerstein2003; Fischer & Manstead Reference Fischer, Manstead, Lewis, Haviland-Jones and Barrett2008; A. P. Fiske Reference Fiske2002; Keltner et al. Reference Keltner, Haidt, Shiota, Schaller, Simpson and Kenrick2006; Kitayama et al. Reference Kitayama, Mesquita and Karasawa2006; Tooby et al. Reference Tooby, Cosmides, Sell, Lieberman, Sznycer and Elliot2008). The specialized relational functions of discrete emotions include building (gratitude) or repairing (guilt) cooperative relationships, and acknowledging reduced status (shame) or elevating another's status (admiration) in a hierarchy. Some emotions function as subjective commitment devices (Fessler & Quintelier Reference Fessler, Quintelier, Sterelny, Joyce, Calcott and Fraser2013) that proxy (A. P. Fiske Reference Fiske2002) and motivationally weight relational value (Fessler & Haley Reference Fessler, Haley and Hammerstein2003; Frank Reference Frank1988; Gonzaga et al. Reference Gonzaga, Keltner, Londahl and Smith2001; Hirshleifer Reference Hirshleifer and Dupre1987). By hypothesis, these mechanisms help sustain long-term relationships by countervailing a host of short-sighted cognitive biases and external temptations and by motivating relational investment and repair (A. P. Fiske Reference Fiske2002). Emotions are not separate from cognition, but function, in part, through cognition as contingent shifts in trade-offs, time horizons, and sensitivities (Cosmides & Tooby Reference Cosmides, Tooby, Lewis and Haviland-Jones2000).

In the ASE model, sentiments are higher-level functional networks of attitudes and emotions; each sentiment is an attitude state and the various emotions disposed by that representation. Within relationships, or towards particular people, the functions of attitudes and emotions are complementary and intertwined. Attitudes “bookkeep” and represent another's relational value to self. These representations adaptively moderate emotions across scenarios involving others' actions and fortunes, such as their approach, departure, or death, imbuing such events with self-relevant meaning. Emotions then implement adaptive behavior. One overarching function of each sentiment – of the emotional syndrome of each attitude – is to implement commitment to the value of the relationship represented by that attitude: Positive attitudes regulate emotions to build and sustain valuable relationships, whereas negative attitudes regulate emotions to minimize the costs of, and maximize the benefits extracted from, worthless or costly relationships. Sentiments are thus the deep structure of social affect, the largely unstudied networks of attitudes and emotions that pattern affect within social relationships.

4.3. The diversity of sentiments and their emotional outcomes

Our model of sentiments includes several additional hypotheses. First, we propose that there are distinct sentiments, subserved by distinct attitude dimensions, that represent the distinct kinds of costs and benefits afforded by sociality – just as there are distinct emotions for implementing distinct behavioral tendencies. As with emotions, each sentiment likely has a distinct evolutionary history and taxonomic distribution (see, e.g., Fessler & Gervais Reference Fessler, Gervais, Kappeler and Silk2010), as well as partially dissociable neural bases (e.g., Panksepp Reference Panksepp1998).

The social world presents many distinct fitness threats and opportunities that cannot be collapsed into a single summary representation of goodness or badness, liking or disliking (see Bugental Reference Bugental2000; Kenrick et al. Reference Kenrick, Griskevicius, Neuberg and Schaller2010; Kurzban & Leary Reference Kurzban and Leary2001; Neuberg & Cottrell Reference Neuberg and Cottrell2008; Rai & Fiske Reference Rai and Fiske2011). Correspondingly, existing findings indicate that there are likely more attitude dimensions than traditionally assumed. Results support orthogonal positive and negative attitude dimensions (Cacioppo et al. Reference Cacioppo, Gardner and Berntson1999), distinct dimensions of “liking” and “respect” for tracking affiliation and efficacy, respectively (S. T. Fiske et al. Reference Fiske, Cuddy and Glick2007; Wojciszke et al. Reference Wojciszke, Abele and Baryla2009; see also White Reference White1980), and possibly four or five different positive forms of regard (e.g., infatuation, respect, attachment, and liking; Storm & Storm Reference Storm and Storm2005). Those few emotion researchers who have addressed attitudes and/or sentiments likewise propose some beyond liking and disliking, including love, respect, and hate (Frijda Reference Frijda, Ekman and Davidson1994; Lazarus Reference Lazarus1991; Royzman et al. Reference Royzman, McCauley, Rozin and Sternberg2005; Scherer Reference Scherer2005).

Integration of these deductive and inductive approaches suggests a provisional set of sentiments – social attitude dimensions, corresponding to distinct social-relational affordances – whose states potentiate unique constellations of emotions. We highlight the positive dimensions love, liking, and respect, and the negative dimensions hate and fear. The positive dimensions correspond to distinct though potentially correlated positive fitness affordances: fitness dependence on an other (love; Roberts Reference Roberts2005; Shaver et al. Reference Shaver, Morgan and Wu1996), the receipt of benefits from an other (like; S. T. Fiske et al. Reference Fiske, Cuddy and Glick2007; Trivers Reference Trivers1971; Wojciszke et al. Reference Wojciszke, Abele and Baryla2009), and an other's efficacy (respect; Chapais Reference Chapais2015; S. T. Fiske et al. Reference Fiske, Cuddy and Glick2007; Henrich & Gil-White Reference Henrich and Gil-White2001; Wojciszke et al. Reference Wojciszke, Abele and Baryla2009). The negative dimensions correspond to distinct kinds of threat or cost imposition: hate tracks an other's ongoing cost imposition, including zero-sum advantages relative to self (Royzman et al. Reference Royzman, McCauley, Rozin and Sternberg2005), while fear tracks an other's willingness and ability to inflict costs under certain circumstances (Evers et al. Reference Evers, de Vries, Spruijt and Sterck2014; Öhman & Mineka Reference Öhman and Mineka2001). A given value on one of these dimensions has the functional role of indexing a magnitude of that affordance and moderating behavior regulation systems, including emotions, to manage it. Each of these dimensions can range in value from nil to high, and each is named for its high value. However, the absence of value on a dimension can be functionally significant, and can be linguistically marked or otherwise psychologically or socially salient. Below we make this case for an absence of respect, which we identify with contempt. In addition, multiple orthogonal dimensions of attitudes can create composite sentiments. For example, equal amounts of liking and disliking can lead either to indifference (when neither is appreciable) or to ambivalence (when both are appreciable; Cacioppo et al. Reference Cacioppo, Gardner and Berntson1999).

A second hypothesis of the ASE model is that each attitude state is emotionally pluripotent, disposing diverse emotions towards its object, thereby constituting a sentiment. Each emotion, in turn, might play a role in numerous sentiments. The functional logic is straightforward: Each attitude-by-scenario interaction creates an adaptive problem best addressed by a particular emotion. Such events might include an other's approach, achievement, misfortune, or death, injury caused to oneself by an other, and an other's witnessing of a transgression by oneself. Each of these scenarios has distinct fitness implications within a relationship, and each means very different things across relationships depending on how the person involved is valued. For instance, if love proxies fitness dependence on an other, as cued, for example, by indispensable coalitionary support, then the death of a loved one should lead to a response that solicits social support to mitigate that potential fitness decrement (e.g., sadness; Keller & Nesse Reference Keller and Nesse2006). In contrast, if hate proxies an other's ongoing costs to self, as cued, for example, by her or his monopolization of resources, then the death of a hated one should evoke a positively reinforcing response (e.g., schadenfreude; Hareli & Weiner Reference Hareli and Weiner2002; van Dijk et al. Reference van Dijk, Ouwerkerk, Goslinga, Nieweg and Gallucci2006). The emotional pluripotence of sentiments helps explain the lack of direct behavioral correspondence between attitudes and behavior – appraised situations and emotions intervene (see, e.g., Cottrell & Neuberg Reference Cottrell and Neuberg2005; Mackie et al. Reference Mackie, Devos and Smith2000).

Though a central feature of the early sentiment construct (e.g., Shand Reference Shand1920), emotional pluripotence departs radically from most recent discussions. These assume a one-to-one correspondence between emotions and sentiments, with sentiments being mere latent emotions awaiting reinstatement by the sentiment object (e.g., hate as latent anger; Frijda Reference Frijda, Ekman and Davidson1994; Lazarus Reference Lazarus1991; see also Averill Reference Averill, Ozer, Healy and Stewart1991; Clore & Ortony Reference Clore, Ortony, Lewis, Haviland-Jones and Barrett2008). Instead, following Royzman et al. (Reference Royzman, McCauley, Rozin and Sternberg2005), we maintain that each sentiment disposes multiple discrete emotions conditioned on the actions and fortunes of the attitude object. A negative sentiment such as hate can dispose positive emotions such as joy at another's suffering, while a positive sentiment such as love can dispose negative emotions such as sadness at another's death -- there is no simple one-to-one correspondence that depends on previous association for emotion elicitation. Instead, there is an adaptive grammar of emotions within relationships resulting from the dispositions of attitudes across social scenarios. Nonetheless, it may be that some sentiments have proprietary emotions among their dispositions that function like latent emotions – for example, an emotion love disposed by an attitude love (Frijda Reference Frijda, Ekman and Davidson1994; Shaver et al. Reference Shaver, Morgan and Wu1996), contributing to the unique structure of the sentiment love. Similarly, the sentiment fear may include a particularly strong association between an attitude fear and an emotion fear. In future work it may therefore be prudent to notate polysemous scientific language when referring to a sentiment network (e.g., FEAR_S, LOVE_S), or to its component attitude (e.g., FEAR_A, LOVE_A) or proprietary emotion (e.g., FEAR_E, LOVE_E).

4.4. The deep structure of folk affect concepts

The ASE model is a novel rapprochement between evolutionary psychology and psychological anthropology: it maintains that human social affect has an evolved, functionally specialized architecture, while theorizing the pathways through which this architecture finds variable conceptual and cultural manifestation. Folk affect concepts are patterned by embodied experience, which is itself patterned by the engagement of basic affect systems by local ecological, social, and cultural circumstances. The structure of sentiments – as functional networks of contingent attitudes and emotions – allows many experientially grounded sources of variation in folk affect concepts.

The ASE model implies that folk affect concepts can vary in whether they emphasize the distinctness of discrete emotions experienced across sentiments, or the relational significance of attitude states that anchor multiple emotions within sentiments. This difference may map onto the contrast in affect concepts of relatively individualistic and collectivistic cultures (Markus & Kitayama Reference Markus and Kitayama1991; White & Kirkpatrick Reference White and Kirkpatrick1985), but it need not be static or absolute. Tran (Reference Tran2015) describes recent changes in Vietnamese ethnopsychologies in and around Ho Chi Minh City spurred by neoliberal reform policies, decollectivization, and rising consumerism. Alongside the traditional folk notion of “sentiment” (tinh cam), which emphasizes durable feelings for others, relational states, and interpersonal obligations, there is an emerging folk concept of “emotion” (cam xuc) that emphasizes discrete and differentiated internal experiences because of exposure to things and people.

Folk affect concepts may also vary in the prototypical emotions associated with particular attitudes, as a result of different social scenarios prevailing within relationships. For example, love can lead to a host of acute emotions, such as contentment and grief, but which are most salient may vary across individuals or populations. Lutz (Reference Lutz1988) describes the concept of “love” (fago) in Ifaluk, a low-lying Micronesian atoll. In this interdependent community with low relational mobility and high extrinsic mortality, love as dependence most saliently begets compassion, sadness, longing, pity, and other concomitants of loss, separation, vulnerability, and obligation. In contrast, love in populations with high relational mobility and low extrinsic mortality may lead most saliently to contentment, joy, and other positive consumatory experiences, as in the canonical English concept of “love.”

The ASE model also indicates that folk affect concepts may vary in whether varieties of an emotion are distinguished based on their attitudinal antecedents (e.g., schadenfreude), and in whether they are suffused with particular relational values and expectations. For example, Tran (Reference Tran2015) describes the distinction in modern Vietnamese between “happiness” (hạnh phúc), traditionally linked with the fulfillment of relational expectations, and “joy” (niếm vui), a newer concept expressing satisfaction from self-motivated choice. Likewise, the concurrence of distinct sentiments within relationships may vary across populations. Concepts that capture the conjunction of respect and fear may be alien to those in putatively meritocratic and egalitarian societies without ascribed hierarchies, but they are salient where dominance and subordinance are valued facets of social life (e.g., Indonesia; Fessler Reference Fessler2004). Finally, clusters of related affect terms may correspond to different contextual or behavioral manifestations of particular sentiments. In the case of contempt, such terms might include “scorn,” “disdain,” “sneering,” “defiance,” “anger,” “disgust,” “derision,” and “haughtiness” (Darwin 1872/1955; Izard Reference Izard1977).

The principal implication of the ASE model for folk affect concepts is that variation in such concepts comes not only from the historical and experiential vagaries of categorization or social construction. To a significant and verifiable extent, it also results from the manifolds of sentiments. Networks of contingent attitudes and emotions create many degrees of freedom for differences in the actual engagement of basic affect systems, and in their conceptual representation across words, individuals, and populations. Nevertheless, variation in folk affect concepts should be predictably patterned, following the joints of sentiments as these are differentially engaged by local circumstances and systems of meaning.

5.1. The sentiment respect

Of the multiple meanings of “respect” (Langdon Reference Langdon2007), most are consistent with an underlying sentiment that tracks an other's practical and moral efficacy in domains relevant to the evaluator (S. T. Fiske et al. Reference Fiske, Cuddy and Xu2002; Wojciszke et al. Reference Wojciszke, Abele and Baryla2009). These standards are subjective, defined relative to the evaluator's goals, abilities, and social options, but they can stem from shared criteria defining a social role or status. Ultimately, respect facilitates forming mutualisms with efficacious individuals (see also McClelland Reference McClelland2011) by motivating tolerance of, and interest in, their continued functioning, and facilitating prosocial emotions (e.g., compassion, guilt, and shame) that foster engagement with, and mitigate harm done to, them. Increasing levels of respect track an other's relative expertise in relevant practical domains, which makes the other an increasingly valuable source of information and positive externalities. While minimal respect engenders tolerance and interest in an other's continued functioning, increasing respect motivates increasing concern, deference, and imitation (Henrich & Gil-White Reference Henrich and Gil-White2001), as well as followership and support (Van Vugt Reference Van Vugt2006). Respect is implicated in many of the social behaviors that constitute human ultrasociality, including reciprocal relationships (Trivers Reference Trivers1971), prestige-biased cultural learning (Henrich & Gil-White Reference Henrich and Gil-White2001), and followership in the resolution of coordination problems (King et al. Reference King, Johnson and Van Vugt2009; Price & Van Vugt Reference Price and Van Vugt2014). In each case, respect plays a role in assortment by indexing which individuals are competent norm adherents, potential sources of cultural skills, and capable leaders. Respect is one proximate mechanism that may implement strategies modeled as explanations for the evolution of cooperation, including partner selection (e.g., Hruschka & Henrich Reference Hruschka and Henrich2006) and indirect reciprocity (e.g., Panchanathan & Boyd Reference Panchanathan and Boyd2004).

5.2. The sentiment contempt

If respect is necessary for many human social behaviors, then an absence of respect should be functionally significant. We identify the absence of respect as the sentiment contempt (Fig. 1). By hypothesis, the core of contempt is an attitude state that represents others' low intrinsic value to self, due to their inefficacy in adhering to social-relational standards; they have either failed to establish their worth, or shown themselves unworthy of previous positive valuation. This attitude state is constituted by a lack of felt respect and by the cognitive schema of “looking down on” someone, leading to indifference, intolerance, and exploitation through emotion moderation. Together, these dispositions minimize the costs incurred from poor relationship partners and maximize the benefits extracted from them.

Figure 1. A schematic representation of the hypothesized sentiment contempt. Relational cues to an other's inefficacy and low value establish an attitudinal representation of an other that is an absence of respect; he or she is worthless and below oneself. This creates two clusters of emotion dispositions: muted prosocial emotions such as compassion, guilt, and shame, and potentiated hostile emotions including anger, disgust, and mirth. These emotions create both the “cold” and “hot” aspects of contempt phenomenology, and implement indifference, exploitation, intolerance, and exclusion.

Contempt potentiates two clusters of emotion dispositions. First, the prosocial emotions supported by respect are muted, leading to cold indifference and exploitation; that is, contempt undermines emotions that implement subjective commitment (Fessler & Quintelier Reference Fessler, Quintelier, Sterelny, Joyce, Calcott and Fraser2013) to valuable relationships. The target may be ignored, and, as their welfare is not valuable, empathy and compassion are not engaged. There is no valuable relationship for guilt to preserve as a disincentive to exploit the other, nor is there a relationship for guilt to repair following a transgression (Baumeister et al. Reference Baumeister, Stillwell and Heatherton1994; Fessler & Haley Reference Fessler, Haley and Hammerstein2003); any benefit taken is a net benefit lacking a countervailing cost. Moreover, the target's valuation of oneself is not important, and their knowledge of one's own transgressions should not motivate shame. At the same time, accidents befalling them are not perceived as serious for the self, as no valuable relationship is thereby threatened, potentiating mirth and Duchenne laughter (Gervais & Wilson Reference Gervais and Wilson2005).

Second, the hostile emotions mitigated by respect are instead potentiated in contempt, leading to intolerance and exclusion. Any actual or potential cost imposed by the other – including proximity as a cue to cost imposition – registers as a net cost, disposing anger and behaviors that will deter the other in the future (see, e.g., Sell et al. Reference Sell, Tooby and Cosmides2009). The target also presents costs that can be mitigated through the co-opted avoidance tendencies of disgust. These costs include culture contamination – inadvertently copying the practices that may have earned that person contempt in the first place – and image infection, or stigma-by-association (e.g., Neuberg et al. Reference Neuberg, Smith, Hoffman and Russell1994).

Contempt can be inferred from expressions and behaviors associated with its various emotion dispositions, especially as these diverge from civil interaction: being unmoved by another's joy, reacting aggressively to a minor transgression, or laughing at another's misfortune. Contempt is associated with the unilateral lip curl (Ekman & Friesen Reference Ekman and Friesen1986), a mild threat display given the proximity of someone not valued and hence potentially costly (Darwin 1872/1955; Izard & Haynes Reference Izard and Haynes1988). Not surprisingly, within an established relationship, these dispositions and expressions initiate relationship dissolution.

There is convergent empirical support for this model of contempt. Mounting evidence indicates that empathy and concern are moderated by social closeness and relationship value (e.g., Cikara & Fiske Reference Cikara and Fiske2011; Hein et al. Reference Hein, Silani, Preuschoff, Batson and Singer2010). These effects are both direct and mediated by reduced motivation to perspective-take (Batson et al. Reference Batson, Hakansson, Chermok, Hoyt and Ortiz2007) and affiliate (van Kleef et al. Reference van Kleef, Oveis, van der Lowe, LuoKogan, Goetz and Keltner2008). There is also evidence that increasing someone's power (Lammers & Stapel Reference Lammers and Stapel2011) or social capital (Waytz & Epley Reference Waytz and Epley2012) increases his or her indifference and dehumanization towards distant others, consistent with contempt. The down-regulation of concern by those high in relative efficacy is evident in increased rule breaking, exploitation, and cheating by wealthier individuals (Piff et al. Reference Piff, Stancato, Côté, Mendoza-Denton and Keltner2012). Likewise, increased physical formidability enhances anger reactivity (Sell et al. Reference Sell, Tooby and Cosmides2009). The coincidence of in-group love and out-group indifference (Brewer Reference Brewer1999) is explicable as out-group contempt abetted by in-group interdependence and solidarity.

Contempt is plausibly the default social sentiment in psychopathy. Clinical psychopaths are characterized by a constellation of antisocial traits and behaviors, including “cold” affect, arrogance, interpersonal manipulation, impulsivity, irresponsibility, and both reactive (anger-based) and instrumental aggression (Blair et al. Reference Blair, Mitchell and Blair2005; Hare Reference Hare1996; though see Reidy et al. Reference Reidy, Shelley-Tremblay and Lilienfeld2011). Psychopaths thus appear contemptuous in all of their interactions: arrogant, without guilt, empathy, shame, or social sadness; exploitative, reactively intolerant, and externalizing – all adaptive dispositions vis-à-vis someone held in contempt. Supporting this, clinical psychopaths are capable of empathy, but are usually unmotivated to empathize (Meffert et al. Reference Meffert, Gazzola, den Boer, Bartels and Keysers2013), and subclinical psychopathic traits predict the conditioning of concern and relational investment on another's manifest relational value (Arbuckle & Cunningham Reference Arbuckle and Cunningham2012; Gervais et al. Reference Gervais, Kline, Ludmer, George and Manson2013; Molenberghs et al. Reference Molenberghs, Bosworth, Nott, Louis, Smith, Amiot, Vohs and Decety2014).

Lending discriminant value to our approach, contempt differs markedly from hate, though they are often conflated (e.g., Cuddy et al. Reference Cuddy, Fiske and Glick2007). Described as “inverse caring” (Royzman et al. Reference Royzman, McCauley, Rozin and Sternberg2005), hate represents an other as actively competitive or threatening, and motivates harming an other and delighting in her or his misfortune. In contrast, contempt is not the inverse of caring, but merely its absence – it disposes instrumental exploitation and reactive aggression towards a devalued other, but does not intrinsically motivate harming or annihilating that person. A wide variety of harmful acts are motivated not by intrinsic motives to harm the other, but as a means to other ends. This implicates contempt instead of hate in many so-called “hate crimes” and “cold-blooded killings,” as contempt makes the contemned vulnerable to use by the contemnor in satisfying extrinsic goals, including rape, theft, and attempts to signal formidability or in-group commitment.

5.3. The evolution and phylogeny of contempt

How might contempt, as the absence of respect, have evolved? To start with, respect must be a derived capacity within a species' neurocognitive repertoire. Species lacking this capacity – plausibly the prevailing pattern in the animal kingdom, especially among non-social animals – merely evince pseudo-contempt in their intolerance and indifference to conspecifics. Among social species capable of differentiated relationships involving interest, tolerance, coordination, and reciprocity among non-kin (including “friendships”), we might expect that respect evolved to facilitate the establishment and maintenance of valuable relationships with efficacious others. In such species, respect could be gained or lost, making contempt relationally significant.

The ancestral form of respect (protorespect) may have been directed up dominance hierarchies towards especially efficacious conspecifics, motivating interest and investment in exchange for the benefits uniquely available from those of high rank (Chapais Reference Chapais2015). This system, involving “looking up to” another, may have co-opted a physical size schema with even deeper phylogenetic roots in force-based agonistic interactions (A. P. Fiske Reference Fiske1991; Holbrook et al. Reference Holbrook, Fessler and Navarrete2016), just as the emotion systems protopride and protoshame were co-opted from dominance hierarchies for use in prestige hierarchies (Fessler Reference Fessler and Hinton1999; Reference Fessler2004). The cognitive side of contempt – “looking down on” another – likewise finds a plausible homologue in dominance hierarchies (Darwin 1872/1955; Frijda Reference Frijda1986; Izard & Haynes Reference Izard and Haynes1988), especially towards lower-ranking conspecifics that cannot deliver benefits upwards and fail to earn respect. Dominant individuals in many species act contemptuous towards replaceable and low-ranking conspecifics – indifferent, intolerant, even exploitative – while showing respect-like tolerance and cooperation in more valuable relationships (e.g., Smuts & Watanabe Reference Smuts and Watanabe1990; see Chapais Reference Chapais2015). To the extent that high rank is contingent on the support of subordinates, mutual respect may change the quality of dominance interactions and hierarchies (Boehm Reference Boehm1999; Chapais Reference Chapais2015). The interaction of positive yet asymmetrical levels of respect could sustain a legitimate status hierarchy, involving upward support, deference, followership, and propitiation, and downward noblesse oblige and pastoral responsibility, thereby approximating the Authority Ranking (AR) relational model (Fiske Reference Fiske1991).

Beyond a capacity for conditional respect, in a few species we might expect further derived mechanisms that facilitate social tolerance and the discovery of mutualisms on a wider or faster scale. Two possible mechanisms are an elevated baseline level of respect towards conspecifics and prepared, one-shot cue-based learning. Such mechanisms are plausibly found in humans, owing to the co-evolution of risk-pooling, obligate cultural learning, expanding social networks, and ratcheting interdependence (e.g., Hill et al. Reference Hill, Walker, Božičević, Eder, Headland, Hewlett, Magdalena Hurtado, Marlowe, Wiessner and Wood2011; Tomasello et al. Reference Tomasello, Melis, Tennie, Wyman and Herrmann2012). Contempt can be implicated in facilitating the evolution of human ultrasociality once prestige and community expectations gained a foothold in our lineage. Contempt implements low-cost or indirect punishment, such as exclusion from cooperative ventures, potentiating social selection (Boehm Reference Boehm2012; Nesse Reference Nesse2007). Specifically, contempt as relative devaluation should have selected for strategies for its avoidance – including adherence to norms for the sake of predictability in joint enterprise (Fessler Reference Fessler and Hinton1999; Reference Fessler, Carruthers, Laurence and Stich2007); social niche differentiation and the cultivation of worth to others (Sugiyama & Sugiyama Reference Sugiyama and Sugiyama2003; Tooby & Cosmides Reference Tooby, Cosmides, Runciman, Smith and Dunbar1996); and sociocultural competence culminating in leadership and prestige (Chapais Reference Chapais2015; Henrich & Gil-White Reference Henrich and Gil-White2001; Price & Van Vugt Reference Price and Van Vugt2014). Efficacy in adhering to community moral expectations could likewise engender respect and mitigate contempt (see Rozin et al. Reference Rozin, Lowery, Imada and Haidt1999). It may be the significance of lost respect, especially for moral failings, that makes contempt particularly salient in human social life; that is, contempt may be a uniquely human moral sentiment, but only insofar as humans are unique in their moral expectations. One upshot of this phylogenetic history may be a kludgey solution to relational tracking that evinces phylogenetic legacies in its proximate instantiation (Fessler & Gervais Reference Fessler, Gervais, Kappeler and Silk2010), including bleeding across the bases for contempt, such as in metaphors of possessing “weak” moral fiber, engaging in “low” actions (Lakoff Reference Lakoff1995), or having a “small” intellect.

5.4. The deep structure of “contempt”

The ASE model of the sentiment contempt lays the groundwork for understanding the features of the folk affect concept “contempt” (see Table 1). “Contempt” is parsimoniously explained as a conceptual schema patterned by contempt as we have characterized it; it is anchored by a relatively stable attitude state and incorporates, to variable degrees, the cues, emotions, experiences, and behaviors causally linked with that attitude. In other words, the folk affect concept “contempt” is a conceptual and cultural construction built on and by the functional structure of the sentiment contempt.

“Contempt” is (1) object-focused and (2) enduring. These are basic features of attitudes as enduring representations of the value of particular people or objects. “Contempt” specifically results from (3) cues of another's physical, cultural, or moral inefficacy, and entails (4) loss of respect and status diminution. These features are key aspects of the function of contempt as a representation of another's low relational value to the perceiver. This attitude is facilitated by attributions that the other is unable to change, hence the salience of character attributions as beliefs that support “contempt.” The phylogenetic analysis of contempt suggests a source domain for the representational feature of “looking down on” someone.

“Contempt” is associated with (5) “cold” indifference. This conceptual metaphor follows from the role of contempt in reducing the “warm” feelings associated with friendship, respect, and committed relationships (Kövecses Reference Kövecses2003); contempt undermines emotional engagement and compassion, thus potentiating “cold-blooded” treatment. In other situations, “contempt” is associated with (6) anger and disgust. This is the second, “hot” constellation of emotions potentiated by contempt. Experienced as “boiling inward” in the study by Frijda et al. (Reference Frijda, Kuipers and Ter Schure1989), these emotions mitigate costs incurred from low-value partners. Anger and disgust may also be involved in the establishment of contempt. Anger gives rise to contempt when intrinsic attributions and low control attend relational transgressions (Fischer & Roseman Reference Fischer and Roseman2007; see also Fridhandler & Averill Reference Fridhandler, Averill and Averill1982). Disgust and contempt co-occur when the same information that cues low value also cues a threat that can be addressed through avoidance.

That contempt moderates diverse emotions and behaviors explains why (7) “contempt” can be expressed in so many ways: a mild threat signaling “stay away” (e.g., Ekman & Friesen Reference Ekman and Friesen1986); largeness or a downward glance signaling “I'm better than you” (e.g., Izard & Haynes Reference Izard and Haynes1988); disappointment signaling “you're not good enough for me” (e.g., Russell Reference Russell1991d); anger (e.g., Alvarado & Jameson Reference Alvarado and Jameson1996), disgust (e.g., Ekman et al. Reference Ekman, Friesen, O'Sullivan, Chan, Diacoyanni-Tarlatzis, Heider, Krause, LeCompte, Pitcairn, Ricci-Bitti, Scherer, Tomita and Tzavaras1987), indifference (e.g., Wagner Reference Wagner2000), and laughter (e.g., Miller Reference Miller1997) as emotion dispositions that index contempt in context; and also ridicule, disrespect, vulgarity, and a lack of shameful modesty in the other's presence, which index lack of regard for him or her. Finally, the outcomes associated with “contempt” – (8) intolerance, exclusion, exploitation, and relationship dissolution – follow from the emotional dispositions created by contempt, which function to minimize the costs incurred, and maximize the benefits extracted, from low-value individuals.

The ASE model of contempt thus organizes the existing contempt literature and makes sense of the eight features that cohere in the “contempt” concept. This includes the findings for which contempt has been labeled a “special case,” most notably individual variation in the meaning of “contempt,” diverse expressions, both “hot” and “cold” phenomenology, and “nebulous” association with anger and disgust. In addition to shedding light on existing data, the ASE model generates predictions about how the “contempt” concept should be patterned across studies, individuals, cultures, and social ecologies. In the next section we flesh out these predictions and future directions, after which we develop more general implications of the ASE model for studies of basic affect systems and folk affect concepts. In evaluating the utility of the ASE model, we stress that it makes predictions about the structure and variation of folk affect concepts where few, if any, other theories do. Folk affect concepts are the most directly observable affective phenomena and the most experience-near for participants, lending added value to any theory that can explain and predict their form.

6.1. Predicting variation in contempt and “contempt”

In addition to explaining the coherence of the features of the “contempt” concept, the ASE model of the sentiment contempt hypothesizes many dimensions along which the meaning of “contempt” can vary or change over time. This multifaceted architecture explains the lack of consensus on the meaning of “contempt” (Matsumoto Reference Matsumoto2005; Rosenberg & Ekman Reference Rosenberg and Ekman1995), while generating predictions and insights into variation and change in “contempt” and related folk concepts.

In the ASE model, attitudes and emotions are tightly linked causally as well as temporally. Owing to this functional dependency and close association in experience, attitudes and emotions should be readily conflated in folk affect concepts (Frijda et al. Reference Frijda, Mesquita, Sonnemans, Van Goozen and Strongman1991). Nonetheless, it should be possible to probe sentiments for their distinct functional components. For example, at the synchronic level of psychology experiments, the meaning of “contempt” should be fluid as different frames or primes make salient different aspects of the underlying sentiment – not only the “hot” or “cold” emotion constellations of contempt, but also whether it resembles an emotion or an attitude. Asking about “a time” one felt contempt should foreground the occurrent emotionality of contempt establishment or situational reactivity. In contrast, asking about a person towards whom one feels contempt should foreground the enduring evaluation of the relationship and its cold consideration. More broadly, a productive line of research might explore the malleability of affect concepts, and whether apparent individual or cultural differences in affect concepts can be erased or reversed through the foregrounding of different aspects of relational experience grounded in emotions or attitudes.

The ASE model also suggests that the same sentiment may manifest differently in different relationships if the targets share a core fitness affordance (e.g., inefficacy for contempt), but differ in other affordances or social contexts. For example, within individuals but across their relationships, “contempt” likely takes different forms. If one person held in contempt is frequently encountered, and is thought to impinge on the contemnor, contempt will be suffused with the “hot” constellation of anger and disgust dispositions. In contrast, a contemned person who is rarely encountered may be coldly considered. Contempt may also co-occur with other attitudes. If someone low in efficacy is nonetheless a source of fitness benefits (e.g., via relatedness), contempt may co-occur with love, buttressing prosocial emotions and creating experienced “pity.” In contrast, if someone of low moral efficacy evinces cues to cost imposition and competition, she or he may also be hated, amplifying anger and adding resentment and spiteful motives to experienced contempt. On its own, contempt should not potentiate schadenfreude-like pleasure at another's misfortune (see, e.g., Cikara & Fiske Reference Cikara and Fiske2012), but instead indifference, or Duchenne laughter only if his or her misfortune satisfies the incongruity condition of humor (Gervais & Wilson Reference Gervais and Wilson2005) (see Fig. 1).

Although contempt is distinct from hate, it should insidiously facilitate hate by generating credulity toward portrayals of the other as threatening, even evil (Sternberg Reference Sternberg2003a). The cost/benefit ratio of believing vilifying information about an other hinges on the value of the other as a potential relationship partner. If, as in contempt, the other is presently represented as worthless, then the costs of erroneously believing new false denigrating information are low, as no benefits are forsaken; conversely, the costs of erroneously rejecting true derogatory information will be high, as threats to the self would be overlooked. When uncertainty attends decision-making, evolved systems should be biased toward the less costly error (Haselton & Nettle Reference Haselton and Nettle2006). Hence, contempt should enhance credulity toward vilifying information. Writ large, contempt creates an attractor (Sperber Reference Sperber1996) for villifying information, and is implicated in the success of propaganda campaigns and “witch hunts,” especially those directed at contemned statuses, minorities, or outsiders.

Because sentiments subjectively represent the fitness affordances of others, they should be calibrated to individual differences in variables that influence one's own relative value and the value of social relationships more generally. Individual differences in sentiment profiles – differences in emotion dispositions created by differences in attitude baselines – may be an important yet overlooked source of so-called trait emotions and personality differences. This implies that, across individuals, there should be differences in proneness to respect and contempt that influence the varieties of “contempt” experienced. Clinical psychopathy may be an extreme case of obligate contempt across relationships. More commonly, these differences are a function of one's own perceived efficacy and value relative to others. For example, high resource-holding power should circumscribe the number of others deemed valuable, making one “contemptuous.” High resource-holding power in a steep, unstable social ecology should sensitize one to threats to resources from others, making “contempt” relatively “hot.” In contrast, a stable dominance hierarchy insulates those at the top from such threats, while making them enduring sources of costs for those on lower rungs; in the thermodynamics of rigid hierarchies, “cold” contempt should sink, whereas “hot” contempt rises.

Within populations, folk affect concepts should be fluid over time, influenced by changes in the lived costs and benefits of social relationships, as well as shifting normative discourses pertaining to self, society, and morality. The turn toward “emotion” in urban Vietnamese ethnopsychologies (Tran Reference Tran2015), discussed earlier, indexes the increasing salience of discrete emotions per se, a shift apparently driven by urbanization, market integration, and individualization. Historical shifts may also occur with respect to particular sentiments. For example, the predominant meaning of “contempt” and its nearest translations may be fluid over historical time. We suggest that one reason for the common conflation of “contempt” with “anger,” “disgust,” and “hate” is that successive civil rights movements in America have undercut the public legitimacy of contempt. Many such movements are responses to contempt and hinge on counterclaims to dignity and respect – from the “unalienable rights” listed in the Declaration of Independence, to the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls that “all men and women are created equal” (Stanton Reference Stanton and Gordon1848/1997, p. 75; emphasis added), to the more recent affirmation that “black lives matter” (see: blacklivesmatter.com). In the moral discourse of a “dignity” culture (Leung & Cohen Reference Leung and Cohen2011), all people have, and ought to be treated as though they have, inviolable rights and worth. This prescribes respect and renders illegitimate, even contemptible, looking down on or treating as worthless many historically contemned statuses – a pattern that potentially explains the more than five-fold decrease over the last two centuries in the proportion of words in English-language books that are “contempt” (Google Ngram: Michel et al. Reference Michel, Shen, Aiden, Veres, Gray, Brockman, Pickett, Hoiberg, Clancy, Norvig, Orwant, Pinker, Nowak and Aiden2011). In this context, only those universally viewed as morally depraved – such as Nazis, pedophiles, or, within political parties, the other political party – remain legitimately and publicly contemptible. This normative stance conflates in discourse and experience contempt and hate and their conjoint emotional outcomes anger and disgust. It may even “unmark” many cases of cold contempt, making them even more insidious, for instance in implicit racial biases. If this account is correct, differences in the texture of “contempt” should be evident in comparisons of the corpuses of early and recent American English, older and younger Americans, and American and British English speakers, wherein modern American contempt should be relatively “hot” and bound up with anger, disgust, and hate. Generally, any transition from an autocracy to a democracy should be accompanied by a shift in the content of the nearest cultural model of contempt away from the cold, matter-of-fact representation of inferiority, towards hot emotional reactions to the trampling of rights and dignity.

Across populations, folk affect concepts should also vary in systematic ways. For example, the nearest translations of “contempt” will vary in content as a function of differences in social organization and the frequencies of particular relational events, in addition to local moral discourses. In contrast to the “hot” contempt of dignity cultures (discussed above), “contempt” will take on cold tones of disappointment and indifference in contexts where failings or essentialized differences are consensual grounds for devaluation. This includes honor cultures, in which respect has to be earned and contempt plays a legitimate role in everyday social life (e.g., Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod1986). In populations with low relational mobility and high interdependence – for example, some “face” cultures (e.g., Doi Reference Doi and Bester1973) – contempt will be infused with pity from the parallel engagement of love by that interdependence. In autocratic stratified settings, “contempt” should involve cold instrumentality directed downwards, and hot indignation and resentment directed upwards. “Reverence” as the conjunction of love and respect may be more common in social structures with freely conferred status differences, while such societies may lack terms, common elsewhere, for the composite sentiments of respect and fear. Specific variables of interest that might influence the manifestation of contempt and other sentiments include the structure, size, and fluidity of social networks, levels of risk pooling and collective action, rates of within- and between-group violence, and the presence of interaction rituals that cue different relational affordances – in short, any variable that influences the perceived costs and benefits of social relationships. As with individual differences, we would implicate culturally variable sentiment profiles as a source of genuine cultural differences in emotional proclivities and social behavior. Nonetheless, there should be deep similarities across populations in the contingencies that obtain between particular valuations of relationships and the emotional concomitants of those relationships in particular appraised scenarios – “context-dependent universals” (Chapais Reference Chapais2014) in attitude–scenario–emotion linkages.

6.2. General ASE predictions and future directions

The preceding predictions about folk affect concepts hinge on the underlying structure of basic affect systems as characterized in the ASE model of sentiments, especially our model of contempt, which exemplifies the structure of sentiments and the consequences of this structure for folk affect concepts. Of course, our predictions about variation in concepts of “contempt” could be wrong without imperiling the underlying model of contempt, if, for example, our assumptions about the relationship of basic affect systems and folk affect concepts are mistaken. Likewise, our specific model of contempt could be wrong without imperiling the more general ASE model of sentiments; contempt may not be an absence of respect, or it may not be a sentiment at all. For these reasons, it is worth sketching more general empirical contributions of the ASE model, as well as meta-theoretical virtues of this approach.

The ASE model distinguishes attitudes and emotions by their computational form and function. In so doing, it pioneers an explicit evolutionary psychological approach to attitudes to complement that which exists for emotions (e.g., Nesse Reference Nesse1990; Tooby & Cosmides Reference Tooby and Cosmides1990). The venerable attitude literature has continually reconsidered the nature of its own constructs and redefined “attitude” across the years (Allport Reference Allport and Murchison1935; Eagly & Chaiken Reference Eagly and Chaiken1993; see Gawronski Reference Gawronski2007). Emphasizing form–function fit, functional specialization, and the adaptive problems of personal social relationships, the ASE model extends this tradition in the direction of consilient social theory.

Empirically, there are a number of operational indicators that may be used to distinguish attitudes and emotions (summarized in Table 2, column 3). For example, in natural language use, the object-specificity of attitudes should manifest in statements regarding “feelings about” someone, while the more diffuse and systemic operation of emotions should manifest in statements regarding “feelings because of” some event. Phenomenologically, it should be possible to introspect present attitudes coldly and dispassionately, while emotions remain relatively “hot” during their operation. As enduring representations, attitudes should have a relatively stable time course updated only by new object-relevant information, whereas the course of emotions should be relatively fleeting, lasting only as long as the eliciting scenario (however protracted). Structurally, attitudes are principally evaluations of someone and require only that object (real or imagined) for their activation. In contrast, the structure of emotions is that of systemic mobilization without necessarily a clear object, but instead patterned changes across the organism (Kragel & LaBar Reference Kragel and LaBar2013). No single heuristic is likely to clearly distinguish emotions and attitudes in all cases; their casual and temporal dependencies, which mask their distinction in folk affect concepts, will likewise complicate scientific attempts to empirically disentangle them (see also Frijda et al. Reference Frijda, Mesquita, Sonnemans, Van Goozen and Strongman1991). For example, this may explain why “hate” and “anger” are not reported to vary in their duration (Royzman et al. Reference Royzman, McCauley, Rozin and Sternberg2005): If hate requires anger (among other emotions) to mobilize action, and if anger can follow recurrently from hate, then their conceptual representations may well overlap. Distinguishing attitudes and emotions in such folk affect concepts will require carefully crafted probes that assess the statistical clustering of multiple functional features across measures, including self-reports, physiology, neural signatures, and behavior.

The ASE model invites a host of novel questions about the psychological and functional interactions of emotions and attitudes. The attitude and emotion literatures have remained largely isolated for a half-century; little research has explored how attitudes articulate with the appraisal processes theorized in the emotion literature, or how and when emotions influence attitudes (though see, e.g., Clore & Ortony Reference Clore, Ortony, Lewis, Haviland-Jones and Barrett2008; Cunningham et al. Reference Cunningham, Zelazo, Packer and Van Bavel2007). Considering how attitudes articulate with emotion-eliciting appraisals can inform relational models of appraisal, which attempt to specify the information that influences appraisal processes (see Smith & Kirby Reference Smith and Kirby2009). For example, the valence or intrinsic pleasantness of a stimulus (see Scherer Reference Scherer, Dalgleish and Power1999), important in the front end of appraisal, potentially cleaves closely to the evaluative representations of attitudes. Attitudes may play a direct role in appraisal by coordinating goals or more proximate motives vis-à-vis attitude objects (Frijda Reference Frijda, Ekman and Davidson1994; Shand Reference Shand1920). Attitudes may also influence attention and perspective-taking, mediating, for example, empathic concern (Batson et al. Reference Batson, Hakansson, Chermok, Hoyt and Ortiz2007). Likewise, attitudes may influence ascriptions of causal locus, including ascriptions of intent for behaviors with positive versus negative outcomes (e.g., Peets et al. Reference Peets, Hodges and Salmivalli2008). Reciprocally, emotions may update attitudes. This idea is central to the latent-emotion approaches to attitudes and sentiments (see also Baumeister et al. Reference Baumeister, Vohs and DeWall2007), but conceptualizing attitudes as internal regulatory variables, each updated by diverse emotions, greatly expands this underexplored area (see Tooby et al. Reference Tooby, Cosmides, Sell, Lieberman, Sznycer and Elliot2008).

Two additional hypotheses of the ASE are (1) the existence of diverse orthogonal dimensions of interpersonal attitudes, and (2) the emotional pluripotence of attitude states. Together these features motivate the characterization of sentiments as higher-order attitude–emotion networks and constitute key criteria for distinguishing sentiments from stand-alone attitudes or emotions. Sentiments should have some of the functional attributes of attitudes described above, including intentionality and durability, but will “feel” respectively like attitudes or emotions depending on circumstances. One signature of sentiments will be the tendency of people to infer them from diverse emotional expressions. For example, love may be indexed by joy, anger, fear, or sadness in different contexts. This is readily testable in a modified emotion recognition paradigm with social-relational framings. Rather than asking which emotion a pictured person feels, researchers might ask how the pictured person feels about another person given his or her expression at that person's fate or action – a smile at that person winning the lottery or dying, for example. A similar paradigm, measuring emotional reactions to scenarios with a manipulation of target identities, could be used to characterize the precise emotional grammar for different values of each putative attitude across events. Distinct attitudes should produce divergent emotional outcomes in at least some circumstances – such as envy or schadenfreude-like joy following from hate but not contempt, or approach-induced anxiety that scales with respect but not love. Under our reconceptualization of interpersonal attitudes, it is unclear that any will be simple attitudes with only one emotional disposition. We have focused on respect and contempt as the anchors of one among many attitude dimensions, merely sketching a larger set of dimensions, and general functional links among cued affordances, attitudinal representations, and emotional dispositions. In doing so, we sought a middle ground between parsimony and functional specialization. Much more research is necessary to catalogue and characterize the pantheon of sentiments, in particular in personal relationships. Most work on the dimensionality of attitudes has focused on stereotypes and impersonal judgments, arguably a distinct domain from personal relationships that entails its own adaptive problems and functional structure (see Fiske & Fiske Reference Fiske, Fiske, Kitayama and Cohen2007 for discussion).

One fruitful line of research into the diversity of attitude dimensions would be to investigate their interactions and conjoint emotional outcomes within relationships. Because individuals are multifaceted, different features of an other may be represented via different attitudes, and these may conflict. For example, an actor may both love a close kinsperson and hold them in contempt for their divergent politics, a conflict that can produce “pity” as the conjunction of (perceived) superiority and affection (Fessler Reference Fessler and Hinton1999) – a prediction quite different from that which limits the objects of contempt to the “lowest of the low” (i.e., Cuddy et al. Reference Cuddy, Fiske and Glick2007). Children may be a common object of such affectionate contempt across populations. While this may seem counterintuitive, given the Western folk affect concept of “contempt,” consider that, by the same logic, hate and respect can likewise intersect, as, for example, in the sentiments of a military leader towards a skilled and formidable foe. Some intersections of attitude dimensions may be common, whereas others are unlikely or even incommensurate, owing to the clustering of relational affordances in the world. What terms are there in the world's affect lexicons for mixed-attitude relationships? If more than hyperbole, a “love/hate relationship” would illustrate the upper boundary of information summarization in the social mind, providing evidence of ambivalence at the coexistence of competing relational affordances, such as dependence and exploitation. Interpersonal ambivalence may be an important signature of the multi-dimensionality of attitudes (Cacioppo et al. Reference Cacioppo, Gardner and Berntson1999). It also distinguishes the ASE model from the theory that there is a single streamlined summary variable regulating self-other trade-offs (i.e., the Welfare Tradeoff Ratio; Tooby et al. Reference Tooby, Cosmides, Sell, Lieberman, Sznycer and Elliot2008). Studies of reaction times in social decision-making could quantify the magnitude of ambivalence from different combinations of attitude states, while priming studies that foreground different facets of targets should be able to increase or reduce such ambivalence experimentally.

The ASE model links to and extends a growing literature in primatology on cost/benefit bookkeeping within social relationships (sensu Silk Reference Silk and Hammerstein2003). Researchers studying social bonds, reciprocity, and assortment in nonhuman primates have proposed that emotions are the proximate mechanisms that track relational costs and benefits, adaptively regulating social behavior without explicit cognitive account keeping (e.g., Aureli & Schaffner Reference Aureli and Schaffner2002; Evers et al. Reference Evers, de Vries, Spruijt and Sterck2014; Schino & Aureli Reference Schino and Aureli2009). The ASE model clarifies the functional systems in question, distinguishing the complementary forms and functions of bookkeeping attitudes and commitment emotions in networks of sentiment. Highlighting a deep but previously unappreciated connection between bookkeeping and commitment, the ASE model grounds the commitment functions of emotions, including social engagement versus disengagement (Kitayama et al. Reference Kitayama, Mesquita and Karasawa2006), or affiliation versus distancing (Fischer & Manstead Reference Fischer, Manstead, Lewis, Haviland-Jones and Barrett2008), in antecedent bookkeeping indices of relational value. In so doing, the ASE model provides a novel lens for investigating the neurobiological bases of social relationship regulation.

The functional features of sentiments map closely onto the functional properties of some neuroendocrine systems, facilitating contingent behavior across social-relational contexts (Trumble et al. Reference Trumble, Jaeggi and Gurven2015). The ASE model creates a framework for testing how particular hormones and neural networks represent relationship value, update such representations, or implement behavior conditionally on such representations. For example, the proposed functions of the neuropeptide oxytocin range across these processes, including social memory, social bonding, and modulated tolerance, trust, and parochialism (De Dreu et al. Reference De Dreu, Greer, Van Kleef, Shalvi and Handgraaf2011; Insel Reference Insel1992; Kosfeld et al. Reference Kosfeld, Heinrichs, Zak, Fischbacher and Fehr2005). However, a careful examination of the evidence in light of the ASE model suggests that the functions of oxytocin are not the attitudinal encoding of value itself, but are specifically emotion-like, implementing a mode of behavior conditional on an existing representation of value (e.g., Crockford et al. Reference Crockford, Wittig, Langergraber, Ziegler, Zuberbühler and Deschner2013), or updating that representation, given new cues to relationship value (e.g., Wittig et al. Reference Wittig, Crockford, Deschner, Langergraber, Ziegler and Zuberbühler2014). Evidence that oxytocin tracks relationship quality (e.g., Holt-Lunstad et al. Reference Holt-Lunstad, Birmingham and Light2014) should not be taken as evidence that oxytocin is in some sense the social bond. Instead, we suggest that oxytocin release is moderated by a separate index of relationship value – an attitude – and implements adaptive behavior (e.g., tolerance, trust, investment) within a relationship thus indexed. The effects of exogenous oxytocin do appear contingent on other evaluative representations, such as those tied to group membership (De Dreu Reference De Dreu2012; though see Leng & Ludwig Reference Leng and Ludwig2016), suggesting that simply boosting oxytocin does not get one a bonded relationship; targeted updates to the representation of the relationship, or the attitude, may be necessary.

What neural systems, then, encode relationship value and moderate the release of, and the effects of, oxytocin and other neurotransmitters? Insight into social-relational valuation may be gained from pathologies thereof, as in psychopathy or frontotemporal dementia. Though typically conceptualized as pathologies of emotion, we reconceptualize these as sentiment disorders in which atypical attitudinal representations disrupt downstream social emotions. Previous work on these conditions can thus be interpreted as nominating candidate neural networks for encoding social valuation (or attitudes), including the basolateral nucleus of the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, anterior insula, and superior temporal pole (see Anderson & Kiehl Reference Anderson and Kiehl2012; Filippi et al. Reference Filippi, Agosta, Scola, Canu, Magnani, Marcone, Valsasina, Caso, Copetti, Comi, Cappa and Falini2013; Yoder et al. Reference Yoder, Harenski, Kiehl and Decety2015). These areas are key components of the “salience network” (Seeley et al. Reference Seeley, Menon, Schatzberg, Keller, Glover, Kenna, Reiss and Greicius2007) regulating the motivational import of social information, in line with a proposed function of attitudes. How these areas relate to the regulation of neurohormones – their release and effects, for example – is a key outstanding question for the neural implementation of sentiments. The construct of sentiment disorders can also challenge received wisdom. For example, rather than an empathy deficit disrupting the development of attachment in psychopathy (Blair et al. Reference Blair, Jones, Clark and Smith1997), an inability to value others may be primary in psychopathy and underlay psychopaths' diminished empathy and resistance to socialization.

We have characterized sentiments as systems of endogenous affect that regulate social-relational behavior. This is not to say that the engagement of these systems within any given relationship is the only determinant of behavior within that relationship. Strong norms backed by punishment, or obligations and expectations linked to reputation, can channel and constrain social behavior, motivating generosity, or disincentivising exploitation, even in the absence of compassion or respect. At the same time, the existence of norms such as “hate the sin, not the sinner” suggests that communities often need norms to countervail the endogenous tendencies of social attitudes (Wilson Reference Wilson2002). Despite extensive research on the individual and societal determinants of relational dynamics, the nature of the psychological interactions between these influences on social behavior remains under-researched. What work there is suggests significant cultural variation in the relative weight of relational attitudes and internalized role expectations in determining social behavior. For instance, among Indian participants, an internalized sense of duty can abet prosociality, even within relationships that are devoid of warmth, thus establishing two pathways to “intrinsically” motivated prosocial behavior (Miller & Bersoff Reference Miller and Bersoff1998; Miller et al. Reference Miller, Das and Chakravarthy2011). However, the interaction of sentiments and internalized norms is likely more intertwined than such cases suggest; internalization itself may be mediated by sentiments towards community members generally, or towards authority figures (including supernatural agents) in particular. Theorized as a psychological commitment device evolved to enhance norm conformity and the social benefits thereof (Fessler Reference Fessler, Carruthers, Laurence and Stich2007), the internalization of norms should hinge on the perceived fitness affordances of the holders of normative expectations. This is because the fitness benefits of internalization apply only vis-à-vis those whose judgments are valuable as means to social, cultural, and material resources. In other words, the costs of not internalizing norms follow from the negative judgments of valuable allies or authorities. This implies that, over and above cultural variation in normative expectations, individual and cultural differences in the internalization of norms may reflect variation in respect for authority, or love for other group members, producing differences in the commitment emotions regulated by these attitudes. This, in turn, predicts variation in the success of the social control of behavior; love or respect for authorities or role models may be necessary to curb the enactment of contempt or hate in other social contexts within a group. Clinical psychopathy may be noteworthy as multi-hit sentiment disorder involving deficits in love, respect, and fear, profoundly impacting sensitivity to socialization. Normally, dramatic changes in an individual's circumstances vis-à-vis a group, with corresponding changes in the relational value of group members, may alter the degree to which norms are internalized as a function of changes in sentiments: a sudden rise in an actor's coercive power may lead to a decline in her or his respect for authority and the motivational import of previously motivating norms, whereas defeat and assimilation by an outside group may lead to the abandonment of prior norms in favor of those of the new group on which one becomes dependent (cf. Cantor & Price Reference Cantor and Price2007).