Emotions From the Individual and Group Perspectives
I have recently been reflecting on the powerful sway emotions hold over our lives as individuals and as members of larger communities. As I have explored the core emotions of fear, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise, I began to see how profoundly they drive our personal survival and group dynamics. I call this dual aspect of emotions the "grindividual" dimension: the way each emotion affects both the individual (the "I") and the group ("we").
By weaving together insights from evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and a scientific humanist framework, I believe these primal emotions help us survive threats on our own and shape how our groups respond to challenges, build cohesion, or sometimes even fragment.
Primal Emotions: An Evolutionary Snapshot
Long before I introduced the term "grindividual," many scholars had already delved into the evolutionary origins of key emotions. In his seminal work "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" , Charles Darwin (1872) proposed that humans share many emotional expressions with nonhuman animals. This suggests that our emotional responses are evolutionarily conserved and serve essential survival functions.
Building on this foundation, Paul Ekman (1972; 1992) identified six "basic emotions"—fear, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise—that seem to be universal across cultures. His research demonstrated that facial expressions associated with these emotions are recognized worldwide, highlighting a biological basis for our emotional experiences.
Adding another layer of understanding, Robert Plutchik (1980) developed the "wheel of emotions," which posits that primary emotions can combine to form more complex emotional states. This model underscores the adaptive benefits of our emotional responses, suggesting that they are intricately connected and serve various purposes in our lives.
Further insights come from Jaak Panksepp, a pioneer in affective neuroscience, who, in 1998, showed that mammals share fundamental neural pathways for emotions such as fear, seeking, and rage. His research provides a biological framework for understanding the primal emotions we encounter daily, emphasizing the deep-rooted connections among our emotional experiences across species.
Together, these insights illuminate the complex landscape of human emotions, revealing their evolutionary significance and biological foundations.
The "Grindividual" Concept
I want to emphasize that primal emotions have a dual nature, serving both individual needs and group dynamics. While these emotions help us navigate personal challenges—such as fear triggering our fight-or-flight response to danger—they also significantly influence how we interact with others.
For instance, fear can alert us and those around us. If I panic in a threatening situation, others will likely sense that alarm, prompting a collective response to the danger. Similarly, anger can inspire a group to unite against injustice, rallying members around a shared cause.
In times of sorrow, sadness encourages those nearby to offer support and care, reinforcing social bonds during moments of loss or failure. On the other hand, happiness cultivates cooperation, fostering a sense of optimism and success that brings people together.
Disgust serves as a protective mechanism, keeping individuals and communities wary of harmful substances or practices, which is vital for preventing the spread of disease. Lastly, surprise captures our attention, highlighting new or unexpected developments—an essential capability for groups needing to adapt quickly to change.
These primal emotions promote personal well-being and contribute to the stability and resilience of our communities.
A Scientific Humanist Lens
When I talk about a "scientific humanist" perspective, I'm referring to a mindset that balances logic and empathy to guide ethical leadership, conflict resolution, and social development. Here's how I apply it:
1. Evidence-Based Inquiry
Understanding how emotions operate, both in ourselves and in groups, is more effective when grounded in data. Classic research—from Darwin's observations to modern neuroscience—demonstrates the robustness of these primal emotions. By looking at cross-cultural studies, physiological responses, and behavioral experiments, we give ourselves a clearer roadmap for handling emotional triggers.
2. Ethical and Inclusive Leadership
Leaders, whether in families, workplaces, or entire nations, are responsible for harnessing these emotions in a way that benefits the community. Fear-based leadership, for example, can cause long-term harm if it manipulates people into compliance. By contrast, leaders who understand the group's emotional landscape can defuse panic, redirect anger into productive action, and encourage shared joy without trivializing serious issues.
3. Group Adaptability
Primal emotions evolve for survival, but groups that embrace them thoughtfully often become more resilient. By acknowledging sadness, a community can heal more effectively; by channeling anger, it can confront injustice. The grindividual approach encourages viewing each emotion as a clue for collective well-being rather than just an individual quirk.
Practical Outcomes
Conflict Resolution: Recognizing that emotions like anger or fear often mask more profound vulnerabilities can guide us in addressing root causes. For example, if team members are constantly at odds, anger might be fueled by a fear of losing resources or respect. Addressing that fear can alleviate tension more sustainably than punishing "bad behavior."
Community Building: Shared joy can unite a neighborhood, while collective sadness can be a powerful bonding experience if approached with empathy. In both cases, a group that acknowledges and supports its members' emotional states builds stronger connections.
Health and Well-Being: Understanding how disgust protects us from contamination can inform public health campaigns. Recognizing fear helps us tackle anxiety in a balanced way—managing legitimate concerns without succumbing to rampant panic.
Systemic Impact: When primal emotions are systematically understood—rather than suppressed or exploited—social structures (educational systems, judicial processes, public policies) can be designed to respect human emotional realities while pursuing rational outcomes.
Moving Forward
Ultimately, the term grindividual underscores that we neither exist in isolation nor melt entirely into the collective. Each of us brings emotional reactions that are uniquely personal, yet they reverberate through social networks, workplaces, families, and broader communities. A scientific humanist framework encourages us to take these emotions seriously, study them, handle them ethically, and harness their power for positive change rather than allowing them to spiral into destructive outcomes.
Research from Darwin, Ekman, Plutchik, and Panksepp suggests that these primal emotions run deep in human stories. We can better steer ourselves and our communities toward a more harmonious, resilient future by blending centuries of scientific insight with a modern, humanist perspective that values empathy, inclusion, and ethical reasoning. Each emotion becomes a guiding signal for personal and collective growth. The grindividual is, in many ways, each of us—and each of us has the potential to drive forward our own survival and the thriving of our broader communities.
References
Darwin, C. (1872). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. John Murray.
Ekman, P. (1972). Universal and cultural differences in facial expression of emotion. In J. Cole (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (pp. 207–283). University of Nebraska Press.
Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition & Emotion, 6 (3–4), 169–200.
Plutchik, R. (1980). Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis. Harper & Row.
Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford University Press.
The Dual Group Centric Approach to Emotions
Individuals and groups of individuals (which we refer to as grindividuals) have 6 emotions that have coevolved — together with mechanisms to share them across any cohesive group. These emotions can be categorized into good emotions (that serve the individual or group and ultimately serve humanity) and bad emotions (that ultimately lead to outcomes that are not good for the survival of the individual and humanity):
Fear is a good emotion as it helps a grindividual react to a perceived threat from another grindividual.
Anger is a bad emotion for a grindividual because it shows a lack of empathy towards another grindividual.
Sadness is a bad emotion which occurs when a grindividual has been excluded from relationship with or membership in some other grindividual.
Happiness is a good emotion that happens when a grindividual has joined with another grindividual.
Disgust is a bad emotion because it leads to the exclusion of one grindividual from another.
Surprise is a good emotion as it alerts a grindividual to a new interaction with another grindividual that needs attention.
All emotions lead to action. In general, any grindividual should act in accordance with the emotion if it is a good emotion and perform the opposite action if it is a bad emotion. For example, if you or your group is angry with another grindividual, instead of attacking them, you should instead seek to empathize — they are human after all.
These emotions can all also be expressed by a grindividual when dealing with an external object (like a lion or poisonous plant for example) in which case they are all good adaptive helpful emotions that help ensure grindividual survival.
This provides a moral code by which grindividuals can act to optimize their own survival chances and the chances of our species surviving. Grindividuals should seek to change the attitudes of any group they are members of away from anger, sadness, and disgust towards another grindividual to fear, happiness, and surprise as appropriate towards that grindividual by exercising empathy rather than its opposite, which is selfishness.
