ABSTRACT

The family is the fundamental social group to which humans belong from birth, and it plays a critical role in shaping who we are and how we live, and love, throughout the course of our lives. If we are fortunate, our family provides emotional sustenance and support, a “haven in a heartless world.” For those less fortunate, the family may be a crucible of painful emotions that drive family members to suicide, homicide, or at least, permanent estrangement from one another. For most of us, family life is constituted by a rich and complex array of feelings and emotions, including love, pride, anger, and even at times, hate; it can be the source of our greatest joys and sorrows. Every family member is a potentially powerful source of emotion for every other family member, and every family member’s expression of emotion has a more or less powerful impact on other family members. Emotions, then, are the currency of family relationships, imbuing them with meaning and importance. In the years since the first edition of this Handbook was published, research on emotion

has flourished, though much of it has focused on emotion in a rather abstract, rather than relational, sense. This is starting to change, with scholars from a variety of disciplines now recognizing the fundamentally social nature of emotions and their functions (e.g., see Niedenthal & Brauer, 2012). In particular, there is a growing emphasis on the informational and communicative aspects of emotions and on the ways in which they motivate potentially adaptive behaviors in ourselves and in those closest to us, in the interests of our shared survival. Even so, there are still large gaps in our understanding of the functions of emotions within particular relationship contexts, including the family. My aim in this chapter is to provide an overview of some of the most recent and interesting research on emotion, with a particular focus on the nature and function of emotion communication within families. Following a brief account of the functionalist approach to emotion, I will discuss recent emotion communication research in marital and parent-child relationships, focusing on the nature of emotion socialization within the familial context. I will then discuss the emotional lives of siblings and the dynamics of emotion communication within families, including the creation and transmission of emotion climates. The chapter will close with a discussion of adaptive emotion functioning in families, and

suggest some avenues for future research in this fascinating and important aspect of human relationships.