Emotional Climate Culture of Peace

Journal of Social Issues, 2007

Journal of Social Issues, 2007

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 socioeconomic 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

Journal of Social Issues, 2007

This article examines how objective measures of sociostructural dimensions of a culture of peace are related to subjective national values, attitudes, and emotional climate. National scores on objective measures of four sociostructural dimensions were correlated with national means from a number of cultural value data sets and national indexes of emotional climate. Liberal Development was congruently associated with egalitarian, individualist values, a low negative emotional climate, and less willingness to fight in a new war. By contrast, Violent Inequality was associated with lower harmony values and less valuing of intellectual autonomy. State Use of Violent Means was strongly associated with low harmony values. Nurturance was associated with horizontal individualism, tolerance, cooperative values, and positive emotional climate. The conclusion discusses how the construction of a culture of peace must be based on values as well as objective sociocultural factors.

2015

This blog post discusses the concept of 'emotional cultures', focusing on how widely-held, socially and historically constituted forms of feeling can either perpetuate political antagonisms or promote cultures of peace.

Peace is much more than simply the absence of war. This so-called negative peace concept has been supplanted with more holistic and inclusive conceptions of positive peace that include such features as human rights, sustainable development, and access to justice. At a UNESCO congress in 1989, the idea of promoting a Culture of Peace that could provide a contrast to a culture of war was embraced (De Rivera, 2009). UNESCO recommended and subsequently the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for nations and citizens to promote values, attitudes, and behaviors that reject violence, address the root causes of conflict, and focus on the resolution of disputes through discussion and negotiation (United Nations General Assembly, 1997). Boulding (2000, p. 1) expresses that such a Culture of Peace “includes lifeways, patterns of belief, values, behavior, and accompanying institutional arrangements that promote mutual caring and well-being as well as equality that includes apprecia...

New England Journal of Public Policy, 2021

The essence of conflict resolution and therefore peacemaking is summed up in the phrase "mutual needs satisfaction." This concept presupposes an understanding not only of physical needs but also the emotional needs of all parties involved. This article describes the emotional needs, calling them "human givens" (because they are innate in us) and the innate resources that help us get those needs met. It also describes the three main ways that can interfere with needs being met. It suggests that this knowledge should be absorbed in the political and diplomatic spheres because our emotional needs motivate our behavior and drive learning. Learning is not the same as indoctrination, which is the methodology of cult formation, and the random way people approach peacemaking must change soon.

Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 2004

Culture of peace is an exciting and important political proposal, but the extent to which it might be a coherent and fruitful concept in the realm of social sciences is arguable. In our view, there are three basic problems for the development of empirical studies on culture of peace. First, the concept takes for granted that culture is static and coherent, but current approaches to culture emphasize that culture is rather changeable and contradictory. Second, the concept takes for granted that peace must be defined according to Western political principles, such as state sovereignty. Third, the concept characterizes violence and war as basically similar phenomena. With these problems in mind, we suggest an alternative definition of culture of peace as a changeable script. This script involves lower levels of endorsement of three sets of values that are related to the main definitional activities of war: strategic disposal of individuals, logistics that subordinate wealth to honor, and rhetoric of injustice as intelligence. We empirically tested this hypothesis by ascertaining the extent to which individuals valued society more than family, wealth more than honor, and life more than justice, and examining the ways in which their choices related to their tolerance for war as measured by the Peace Test (McAlister, 2000). Psychology is a peculiar science in that its concepts do not always result from an empirical, inductive search. In some cases, concepts arise from a moral or political necessity, an a priori point of departure that has no necessary connections with empirical evidence. A conspicuous example of this is the popular concept of "emotional intelligence." Salovey and Mayer originally suggested the concept

Springer eBooks, 2017

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American Psychologist, 2013

In this article, we analyze the relationship between positive psychology and peace psychology. We discuss how positive emotions, engagement, meaning, personal well-being, and resilience may impact peace at different levels, ranging from the personal and interpersonal to community, national, and global peace. First, we argue that an individual's positive experiences, personal well-being, and personal resilience, as defined in current positive psychology, may in fact contribute to personal and interpersonal peace but can also entail detrimental consequences for other individuals, communities, and nations. Second, we describe how peace psychology contains traces of positive psychology, especially with its focus on the pursuit of social justice. Third, reviewing and extending the concept of community resilience, we outline directions for further conceptual and empirical work in positive psychology inspired by peace psychology. Such work would do well to transcend positive psychology's current bias toward individualism and nationalism and to conceptualize well-being and resilience at the level of the "global community." This extended "positive peace psychology" perspective would have important implications for our understanding of how to overcome oppression and work toward global peace.