Collective pride, happiness and celebratory emotions: aggregate, network and cultural models

Collective pride is of increasing interest to interdisciplinary emotion researchers. Proud positive emotional climates, waves of celebratory emotion, and elevated group moods occur in large groups such as organizations, communities, and nations in response to success in mega-sport events, positive international attention, praiseworthy group behavior, and the successful completion of projects that confirm a collective’s strengths or enhanced status. This chapter first confronts sources of skepticism about the existence of collective pride as a discrete positive collective emotion. Aggregative, network, and cultural models of collective emotion are then examined through instances of positive group emotion generated in the contexts of mega-sport competitions, social movements and group conflicts. Analysis of several examples follows, and demonstrates the need for a clear distinction between celebratory emotions and predominantly negative forms of defiant and narcissistic group emotion. Conceptual-discursive and phenomenological grounds are used to explore connections between collective pride and collective shame as well as to argue that collective hubris has unique emotional contours. Publisher statement: Pages 266-280 of Collective Emotions edited by C. von Scheve & M. Salmela, 2014, reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199659180.do .