ABSTRACT
From a sociological perspective, human social organization is created and sustained by the capacity for symbolically mediated interaction among individuals. The complex array of emotions that humans exhibit and use in both verbal and nonverbal attunement, sanctioning, and conformity to moral codes is built on a small number of primary emotions that represent evolutionary elaborations of more basic aversive, aggressive, and passive dispositions of lower mammals. This chapter analyzes emotions with respect to their consequences for the three group-organizing processes that guided selection during the course of human evolution: attunement, sanctioning, and moral coding. Fear would first be elaborated into variants like generalized anxiety and apprehensiveness that give negative sanctions an extra edge; and in turn, such first-order combinations of emotions as guilt, worry, and awe would provide even more force behind negative sanctions. Such considerations must be part of any Darwinian explanation for the evolution of the emotions, as these are used in nonverbal communication among human beings.
