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4 - Emotions, Habits, and Skills

Action-Oriented Bodily Responses and Social Affordances

from Part 1 - The Sensorimotor Embodiment of Habits

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2020

By
Rebekka Hufendiek
Edited by
Fausto Caruana  and
Italo Testa
Fausto Caruana
Affiliation:
Institute of Neuroscience (Parma), Italian National Research Council
Italo Testa
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi, Parma
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Summary

Emotions are deeply embedded into the social contexts in which they occur. Emotional responses differ largely among various cultures, but also among various social subgroups and individuals. At the same time emotions typically include crossculturally stable bodily and behavioral features and have homologs in other animals like the facial expression in anger or the release of adrenaline in fear. This article will focus on the interplay of bodily responses and social structure that brings about emotions, habits, and skills and their interrelations. Emotions are constituted by a complex pattern of bodily responses that prepare one for action. The relevant bodily responses are tied together through a complex process of socialization in a way that produces typical emotional reactions in certain types of social scenarios that are of relevance for the individual. These social scenarios can be described as affordances that together make up a social structure to which individuals habitually respond.

Keywords

emotionhabitskillaffordancesocial structure
Type
Chapter
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Habits
Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory
 , pp. 100 - 119
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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