This article integrates arguments and evidence from my 2019 monograph Heart to Heart: How Your Emotions Affect Other People. The central claim is that emotions operate as processes of relation alignment that produce convergence, complementarity, or conflict between two or more people’s orientations to objects. In some cases, relation alignment involves strategic presentation of emotional information for the purpose of regulating other people’s behaviour. In other cases, emotions consolidate from socially distributed reciprocal adjustments of cues, signals, and emerging actions without any explicit registration or communication of emotional meaning by parties to the exchange. The relation-alignment approach provides a fresh perspective on issues relating to emotion’s interpersonal, intragroup, and organizational functions and clarifies how emotions are regulated for social purposes.

本文整合了我2019年专着《心连心：您的情绪如何影响他人》的论点和证据。中心主张是，情感是关系对齐的过程，在两个或多个人的对象定向之间产生趋同，互补或冲突。在某些情况下，关系调整涉及战略性地表达情感信息，目的是调节他人的行为。在其他情况下，情绪会从社交分布的线索，信号和新出现的行为的相互调整中合并，而无需交易双方进行任何明确的登记或情感含义的交流。关系调整方法为与情感的人际关系，群体内部和组织功能有关的问题提供了新的视角，并阐明了出于社会目的如何调节情感。