Speakers conference Moral Emotions
Marcel Zeelenberg
Title: On the Motivational Function of Emotion and its Impact on Decision Making: A Feeling is for Doing Approach
Abstract: Emotions are signals to ourselves that important events or outcomes occur or are about to occur. As such, emotions are motivational states that prioritize behavior that deals with the occurrence of these outcomes or events. The core idea in my presentation is the variety of feeling states exists for the sake of behavioral guidance. The specific behaviors that follow can be understood one realizes that emotions have these motivational functions. I refer to this as “feeling is for doing” and with this I mean that each emotion has its idiosyncratic experiences and motivations attached to it. I will illustrate this approach with examples of our own research in which we show that guilt and shame have different effects on cooperation and that these can be understood in terms of their motivational function.
