ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the power of emotion to reshape relationships, for better and for worse. It focuses on emotional experiences and expressions that appear to reshape human connections. Emotions are both reactions to our relationship experiences and the constituent elements that shape those same relationships. Routine interactions with strangers, fellow commuters, or store clerks are, with a few exceptions, mostly unemotional. Scholars who study emotion from an evolutionary perspective have long wondered about its role in complex relationships and communities, such as those formed by humans and other obviously social creatures, such as monkeys and elephants. The survival value of emotional signals extends well beyond those associated with fear. People often feel emotion in response to violations or affirmations of the written or unwritten codes that make relationships feel right, worthy, or good, in the moral sense of those words.
