It is well established today that emotions are an important part of mostIn recent decades, social psychology (Fiske, 1981;Zajonc, 1980), as well as other disciplines such as political science (e.g., Marcus & MacKuen, 1993) and sociology (e.g., Scheff, 1990), have shifted their focus from pure cognitive research to a more integrative perspective, which combines aspects of cognition and emotion. This development took place as a result of recognition that emotions constitute a central element of the human repertoire and that the study of their

The objective of this issue is to review the work that has been published on emotional climate and the issues it raises, to present new work that addresses these issues, and to begin the work of relating emotional climate to research on human security and cultures of peace. The issue has three sections. The first focuses on articles that discuss the measurement of emotional climate, how it may be related to a society's peacefulness, and the psychosocial processes involved in its generation. The second involves work on human security and ways it may be restored after societal trauma. The third presents articles that relate emotional climate to cultures of peace.This introduction begins with a discussion of the concept of emotional climate, a review of what we have learned from past studies, the challenges posed by this research, and how some of these challenges are addressed by the authors in this issue. This review is followed by a short description of the concept of human security and how it may be linked to emotional climate. Then, we introduce the concept of a culture of peace and the articles that begin to relate its assessment to measurements of emotional climate. A final section briefly discusses the relationship between emotional climate, peaceful cultures, and peace psychology.

On the basis of a structural analysis of the emotions, descriptive items were created that were postulated to discriminate between elation, gladness, and joy. The items described the situation of each emotion, the different ways in which the body was transformed, the propensity to behave in particular ways, and the different manner in which the emotions functioned to improve the person's life. In the first study, the items were given to subjects who had been asked to recall an instance of elation, gladness, or joy. Ss noted the extent to which each of the items pertained to their particular experience. Analyses of the data establish clear distinctions between elation and gladness and suggest that there may also be a distinct structure for joy. In the second study, the situations for elation and gladness were experimentally created, and objective measures of bodily transformation and behavioral propensity were taken while subjects were in the different emotional states. The results confirmed the structural differences suggested by the retrospective accounts.

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Societies seem to have emotional climates that affect how people feel and act in public situations. Unlike the emotions experienced in an individual's personal life, these modal feelings reflect a collective response to the socio-economic-political situation of the society and influence how most people behave toward one another and their government. A government may foster a climate of fear to ensure social control, or it may encourage the formation of heterogeneous social groups to facilitate a climate of trust between people from different groups. On one hand, emotional climates may be viewed as reflecting the relative peacefulness or violence of a society. Thus, an assessment of emotional climate may provide a subjective index of human security to complement objective measures of democracy, human rights, equality, and other factors that we presume are beneficial to human welfare. On the other hand, we may view emotional climates as influences that act to further or to impede the development of the culture of peace advocated by the General Assembly of the United Nations. Thus, their assessment may have predictive power, and measuring a society's emotional climate may help us to create desirable policy. In this article we show that it is possible to measure some important aspects of the emotional climates of three nations that have different degrees of a culture of peace: Norway, the United States, and India. We show that estimates of the collective emotions that constitute climate can be distinguished from reports of personal emotions in that the former are more influenced by nation and the latter by social class. It is the subjective experience of national emotional climate, rather than personal emotional experience, that appears most related to objective indices for the culture of peace in the different nations.By an emotional climate, we mean a collective emotional field that is objective in the sense that it is experienced as "out there," in the same way that another person's anger or love is experienced as out there rather than in one's self. This