The Nature of Pride

As the epigraph illustrates, feeling pride in oneself, or having one’s “passions” “cluster about the ego,” is a central part of human nature. Scheff (1988, p. 399) went so far as to claim, “We are virtually always in a state of pride or shame.” Although this statement may be somewhat extreme, Scheff made a prescient observation: our everyday lives are frequently infused with a sense of mastery and achievement, or conversely, frustration and failure, and we react to these self-relevant events with often intense self-conscious emotions. Yet, despite the importance of pride to everyday social life, this emotion has received relatively little research attention, particularly compared with fear, joy, and other socalled basic emotions. Like all self-conscious emotions, pride is generally viewed as a “secondary” emotion (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, & Weiss, 1989), and even compared with other self-conscious emotions pride is something of an underdog. A PsycINFO search found only 208 publications with the words “pride” or “proud” in their title, compared with 1,633 publications with the words “guilt” or “guilty,” and 1,312 with the words “shame” or “ashamed.” Similarly, in Tangney and Fischer’s (1995) volume on self-conscious emotions, not a single chapter provided a review of the extant research or theory on pride, and only four of the 20 chapters discussed it. However, a growing body of research may change all this: new theory and findings support the views of Cooley and Scheff, and suggest that pride is a psychologically important and evolutionarily adaptive emotion. The pleasurable subjective feelings that accompany a pride experience may reinforce the prosocial behaviors that typically elicit the emotion, such as achievement and caregiving (Hart & Matsuba, Chapter 7, this volume;