Collective Emotions in Celebratory, Competitive, and Conflictual Contexts: Exploring the Dynamic Relations between Group-Based and Collective Pride and Shame

Pride and shame are typically viewed as diametrically opposed but dynamically related personal emotions that also occur in group-based and collective forms. Building upon seminal work by Cooley and Scheff to explain the generation and manifestation of these emotions in the imaginations and everyday realities of people’s social-relational individual and group lives, our analysis addresses contemporary developments in social and psychological science (Collins, Mackie & Smith, Reicher & Neville, Skey, Sullivan, von Scheve & Ismer, Wetherell), by highlighting patterns of complex, dynamic relations between occurrences of group-based pride, group-based shame, collective pride and collective shame in prototypical group contexts of celebration, competition and conflict. Our novel analysis includes underexplored group agency and performative details and we argue that mixtures of negative group pride and anger evident in collective hubris or contempt and some forms of aggression directed towards other groups are not necessarily produced by repression of collective shame.