Identity Sentiments and Emotion Signals in Contemporary Relationships: Modeling Relational Change through Affective Expectation | Emotion Researcher

Language is the repository of culture, identity and behavior labels define social situations, and the identities that we enact in them—personally performed but culturally contextualized—motivate our behaviors. Throughout these social interactions, felt emotion serves as a barometer concerning the success or failure of our attempted identity affirmations. In other words, who we are affects how we feel; when we interact with other people, we use how we feel to tell us who we seem to be (in the...