ABSTRACT
Emotions in general do not enable or undermine rationality in decision-making and goal attainment. It is rather that one, or even several, specific emotions can positively or negatively affect rationality. This chapter investigates ten specific primary and secondary emotions, each of which can contribute to or impede rational decision-making and goal-attainment in formal, agonic society. An emotion’s effect of course depends upon how it is managed, including the level of intensity with which it is experienced and acted upon, and its appropriateness to the sociorelational context. Evidence will first be presented linking three positively valenced emotions to the positive experiences of authority-ranked and market-priced social relationships that are definitive of agonic society. These emotions are anger (from AR+), anticipation (from MP+), and aggressiveness (from AR+ and MP+). We then elaborate this analysis by considering the seven additional emotions that represent adaptive reactions to problematic goal attainment, where authority-ranked and/or market-priced social relationships are negatively valenced. These emotions of problematic rationality are: surprise, fear, frozenness and tonic immobility, confusion and confabulation, alarm, anxiety, and outrage. Altogether, it is proposed, these propitious and problematic emotions comprise the ten primary and secondary emotions of rationality.
