The Emotional Climate of Nations and Their Culture of Peace

Abstract

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

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“…Perceived socioemotional climate in participants' country following the terrorist attack was assessed with a set of eight items extracted and adapted to the post-terrorist context from two different instruments: The Emotional Climate Scale (Páez et al, 1997) and The Climate Dimension Scale (de Rivera, 1992;de Rivera et al, 2007). Participants were asked to assess their agreement with statements related to the positive socioemotional climate (i.e., people's institutional trust, manifestation of confidence and cooperation between the various social groups, manifestation of solidarity and mutual helping between people and people's hope about the future) and to the negative socioemotional climate (i.e., feeling insecure because of the amount of recent violence, being afraid of saying of what people really think, feeling of anger and hostility, being afraid and despaired).…”

“…According to the conclusions drawn from the theoretical review of Drozda-Senkowska and Oberlé (2006), the social climate refers to a metaphor-concept related to circumstances in which we are living. Similarly, the emotional climate has been defined as a set of feelings reflecting collective responses to the general situation of the society, including the social, political and economic structures of the society (de Rivera, 1992;de Rivera, Kurrien, & Olsen, 2007). Contrary to personal emotions which refer to strictly personal feelings of individuals, the socioemotional climate refers to a macro-social phenomenon including emotions and social situations perceived by the citizens within a concrete society (Conejero & Etxebarria, 2007).…”

Bad Apples, Bad Barrels, and Broken Followers? An Empirical Examination of Contextual Influences on Follower Perceptions and Reactions to Aversive Leadership

“…Indeed, research suggests that such normative influences can create widely accepted systems of dysfunctional behavior, shape employee perceptions of normality, and promote a variety of negative organizational and employee outcomes (Balthazard et al, 2006;Van Fleet and Griffin, 2006). In fact, several authors have suggested that organizational climates can serve as social control systems based on shared norms (de Rivera et al, 2007;O'Reilly and Chatman, 1996).…”

Bienestar, Valores y Clima Emocional en Personas Expuestas a Procesos de Violencia Política en Ayacucho, Perú

“…Además de lo anterior, investigaciones en contextos post violencia política refieren al clima emocional como una variable necesaria a explorar (Cárdenas, Páez, Rimé, Bilbao & Asún, 2014;de Rivera, Kurrien & Olsen, 2007;de Rivera & Páez, 2007;Techio et al 2011). El clima emocional se define como el conjunto de emociones percibidas como predominantes colectivamente, que son independientes de la emocionalidad personal y que emergen de la interacción social en determinados contextos y momentos históricos (de Rivera et al, 2007;de Rivera & Páez, 2007).…”

“…El clima emocional se define como el conjunto de emociones percibidas como predominantes colectivamente, que son independientes de la emocionalidad personal y que emergen de la interacción social en determinados contextos y momentos históricos (de Rivera et al, 2007;de Rivera & Páez, 2007). La predominancia de ciertas emociones colectivas funcionaría como un factor de influencia en la manera en que se desarrollan las relaciones interpersonales en el endogrupo .…”