Emotional Action and Communication in Early Moral Development.Audun Dahl,Joseph J. Campos &David C. Witherington -2011 -Emotion Review 3 (2):147-157.detailsEmotional action and communication are integral to the development of morality, here conceptualized as our concerns for the well-being of other people and the ability to act on those concerns. Focusing on the second year of life, this article suggests a number of ways in which young children’s emotions and caregivers’ emotional communication contribute to early forms of helping, empathy, and learning about prohibitions. We argue for distinguishing between moral issues and other normative issues also in the study of early (...) moral development, for considering a wider range of emotional phenomena than the “moral emotions” most commonly studied, and for paying more attention to how specific characteristics of early emotional interactions facilitate children’s development of a concern for others. (shrink)
The Nature of Horror.David C. Witherington &Naila V. deCruz-Dixon -forthcoming -Emotion Review.detailsGiven its clinical significance, horror should occupy a prominent place within emotion theory. However, conceptualizations of horror within psychological science are relatively underdeveloped and conceptually confused. Through conceptual analysis of the disparate literature on the emotion, we seek to establish horror as a qualitatively distinct mode of engagement with the world and to remedy its over-intellectualization, as evident in many prior accounts. Given its etymology, we first address horror's characteristic immobilization—at the level of stereotypical facial configuration and action readiness—before analyzing (...) horror's formal object and appraisal structure. In the process, we critique schema accounts of the emotion and argue for conceptualizing horror pre-reflectively by grounding it in appraised violations of the practical dynamics of social engagement. (shrink)