ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book discusses diverse implications of the notion that group membership allows emotional and self-regulatory processes to operate at the level of the collective self, with important implications for intergroup relations. The impact of concrete social and historical structures on intergroup relations shows up in a variety of ways. The book shows that the group and individual levels are associated with empirically distinct actual, ought, and ideal selves, and hence with distinct types of self-discrepancy and emotional vulnerability. The affective and motivational consequences of self-regulatory systems are often subjectively accessible and noticeable, since one function of these systems is to grab our attention when important events occur. The book explores document emotion specificity, showing that specific intergroup situations lead to differentiated emotions and not just too uniform dislike or negative evaluation.
