The love of God is the force that holds the universe together. Thus, it is asserted that love is a single principle permeating all things, from the material through the spiritual, and that this principle is the dynamic factor in cosmic change. There is no difference in essence between the attraction the elements have for one another and the forms of love that exist in human beings. Love, shame, gratitude, contempt, jealousy, and other affective states are experiences frequently and vividly in everyday social life. These states often include a psychic excitement expressed through bodily gestures, and, therefore, may seem to be too private and psychological to bear much relevance for sociology or to be amenable to sociological analysis. The sociological perspective allows us, however, to demonstrate how seemingly individual behavior and experience are shaped by social features, culture shapes the occasion, meaning, and expression of affective experience. Love, pity, indignation, and other sentiments are socially patterns of feelings, gestures, and meaning. One must lose oneself in order to find oneself, but in so doing, one finds that what one has really discovered is God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6

Differences in feeling, action, and meaning among sorrow, guilt, and love are socially created, and that is how we learn enduring societal relationships. Social life produces emergent dimensions of emotion that resist reduction to properties inherent in the human organism. One strong tradition takes the conscious feeling to be the emotion. Thus, a passion of the soul is perception, a conscious state, in which the soul is passively affected, as in sense perception, but in which what is perceived is attributed to the soul itself, rather than some physical body. Emotion is merely a sensual feeling, but is refined by communication and sympathetic imagination in primary-group relationships. Thus, love is a sentiment, while lust is not; resentment is, but not rage; the fear of disgrace or ridicule is, but not terror. Shame originates through the organizing influence of social processes upon arousal sensations, bodily gestures, and other emotional elements. If similar sentiments are found in different societies, their origin should be sought in similarities among social relationships, rather than in innate human nature. The one and only way to know what love, happiness, joy, and remorse is, is to actually experience these feelings. Gratitude, for example, supplements exchange and reciprocity relationships everywhere as a powerful means of social cohesion that effects the return benefit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6

Thus, the emotion is only cognitions which give rise to it and its expressions, whether voluntary or involuntary. A socially emergent dimension of affect is the prolonged time span of love, hatred, resentment, and most other sentiments. In enduring social relationships, previous interaction and anticipations of the relationship’s future course influence feeling. These social affects transcend the single situation, while rage, surprise, terror are confined to the duration of intense arousal and its transient stimulus. In contrast, a feeling like love or hatred reflects the developing properties of the social relationship over time. The significant sociological problem here is how changes in the social relationships are linked with shifts in the associated feelings. Sometimes when we say what we are feeling, we are actually saying what we are thinking. For example, “I feel that you are not hearing me” is a statement of perception or opinion, rather than of actual feeling, a statement that is debatable (unlike a straightforward statement of real feeling). If you cannot figure out what emotion(s) you are feeling, then give data about what sensations you are feeling: “There is a good fragrance in here” or “My heart is fluttering” or “I feel like a light just turned on in my head.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 6

Many people suffer by shutting themselves off from their own depths. The structural coherence of feeling, gesture, meaning, and occasion for jealousy or indignation is maintained by social, not psychological, forces. The structure or pattern of jealously, for example, is socially constructed and meaningful. Jealously can be accompanied by diverse psychological dynamics and motives across individuals. One person may be mainly angry at the rival, another person may fear losing his or her partner, while yet another’s jealousy has to be prompted by pressure from concerned friends. The structural coherence of jealousy does not derive from these diverse psychological factors, but from social forces, such as how people respond to expressions of jealousy and how the course and meaning of jealousy are socially defined. Faithfulness to a relationship gradually supplements the psychic forces that originally brought the relationship about. These initial feelings and motives gradually weaken, but in spite of all variety of origin, the original psychic states attain, in the form of faithfulness, a certain similarity. Even a relationship begun for extrinsic reasons develops its own faithfulness which, in turn, gives rise to deeper and more adequate feeling states. That is how that popular term “catch feelings” came to be. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6

Truly fulfilling relations encompass empathy, vulnerability, and capacity for emotional literacy. The true power and resolve of relationships also comes from their authenticity, their capacity to anchor themselves in real integrity. Emotion is the modifiability of feeling, expression, and meaning in response to social interaction and cultural norms and beliefs. Love, guilt, and compassion are not fixed in innate human nature. Instead, we identify and act upon them in terms of social events, relationships, and values. Psychologists usually conceive of emotion as acting through the person, motivating and directing his or her behavior and experiences. In addition, that activation process may work mainly in the opposite direction, from consciousness and ongoing action toward feeling and gesture. The social person is sentient, reflecting upon feelings and sometimes changing feeling about how they are interpreted. For example, we may summon up feelings of love, or strive to diminish their intensity. We can also try to mobilize love in another person, directing our gestures to shape their feelings. There is a deeper life for humanity, a life in which responsibility and freedom are connected, a life in which happiness not the foundation of what we have, but in what we fundamentally are. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6

On a larger, historical scale, love and other sentiments change in how they are expressed, where they are appropriate, and what they mean culturally. These social levels of change in feeling and expression are irreducibly independent from the physiological dynamics of emotion, and are an appropriate and important subject for sociological explanation. Emotion is activity and reactivity of the tissues and organs innervated by the autonomic nervous system. An emotion can occur without its typical overt expressions. One can be happy, or feeling love, or excited, or overjoyed, or even angry without anyone else even knowing it. Thus, it seems that the emotion itself is something inner which may or may not issue in overt behavior. Each of your emotions is worth getting to know very well—its nature, its purpose, its expression, its containment, its values, your history with it, your use and misuse of it. Even plants have emotions. I have two potted trees that have been touching for eight years, I move one of them, it took a month, but the other started leaning towards its mate. “And blessed at thou because thou hast established a church among this people; and they shall be established, and they shall be my people. Yeah, blessed is this people who are willing to bear my name (God); for in my name shall they be called; and they are mine” (Mosiah 26.17-18). #RandolphHarris 6 of 6