What Exactly Does Social-Emotional Mean?

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Earlier in my career as a behavioral scientist, I never quite understood why social behaviors and outcomes were often framed as so integrally connected to our emotion systems—so much so that the adjective “social-emotional” is quite prevalent in behavioral science literature.

Years later, I’ve come to form a deep appreciation as to why our social functioning and our emotional functioning are, in many ways, two sides of the same coin. In other words, I genuinely get why the term “social-emotional” is spot-on.

It turns out that our social worlds and our emotional worlds are, in many ways, mirrors of one another. And we evolved this way for very specific reasons. Having an emotion system that is sensitive to one's social standing helped our ancestors to maintain critical social connections and roles as they navigated the treacheries of life.

In his groundbreaking work on the evolutionary psychology of the emotion system, Randy Nesse (see Nesse & Ellsworth, 2009) developed an evolution-based framework for understanding different emotional states—largely making the case that specific emotions (e.g., anxiety) are integrally connected with evolutionarily relevant outcomes, such as the ability to form close bonds with others and to be able to develop meaningful mateships. Setbacks in the social sphere tend to lead to adverse emotional outcomes, such as anxiety. And this fact makes strong sense.

Imagine a human ancestor who ran into various social conflicts across a few days. If that ancient hominid didn’t feel anxious about this fact, that fact could spell trouble. If he didn’t feel anxious, he would possibly continue doing whatever it was that was leading to social conflict with others in his group. And such a pattern could easily lead to outcomes such as estrangement, punishment, being the target of gossip, and even all-out ostracism. In this context, anxiety, although it may well not feel good, serves a pivotal evolutionary function.

In a study that tested this model, my team (see Guitar et al., 2018) found strong evidence for the idea that emotional states track specific social situations and outcomes very strongly. So strongly, in fact, that the phrase “social-emotional” actually makes perfect sense. Often, our inner emotional worlds are direct reflections of our external social worlds. We evolved this way. And, in fact, I would argue that the details of our emotion system largely evolved specifically to help motivate positive outcomes in our social worlds.

How Social Outcomes Lead to Emotional Outcomes

Often, social outcomes lead to emotional states. Being elected to some desirable position (e.g., chair of some great committee) might lead to happiness. Having a negative interaction with a friend might lead to anxiety and despair. Having someone in a position of power tell you that “we need to talk” might lead to anxiety and fear.

In many ways, social outcomes lead to emotional outcomes. Thus, the term “social-emotional” matches so much about the connection between our social and emotional worlds.

How Emotional Outcomes Lead to Social Outcomes

And it works the other way. In the behavioral sciences, we call this phenomenon “bi-directional causality.” Not only do social outcomes shape emotional outcomes, but often emotional outcomes shape social outcomes.

For instance, consider someone who has an uncontrollable fit of anger in some typical social context—such as a parent screaming uncontrollably at an umpire during a Little League game. That situation might not work out so great for that angry parent—this situation may well be at the root of all kinds of gossip in the community for a while.

Or imagine someone who goes to a party in a new town and instead of feeling socially anxious, she feels confident, optimistic, and downright happy going into the place. These emotional states may well shape her social experiences at the party. She may get to know more people, become involved in more group conversations, make important connections with others, etc.

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So while our social outcomes shape our emotions, it’s also the case that our emotions have the capacity to shape our social outcomes.

Some Clear Implications for Living

Understanding what “social-emotional” means, as well as understanding the evolutionary origins of this critical part of the human condition can help us better understand the world around us. This basic idea of using evolutionary work to help shed light on the positives of life is referred to as positive evolutionary psychology (see Geher & Wedberg, 2020). And this approach to behavior seems to have extraordinary potential to help us better understand the world and our place in it.

Here are just a few examples of how holding an evolutionarily informed take on “social-emotional” can help us better understand the human condition.

• Knowing the integral connection between social and emotional outcomes can help us better understand someone who is anxious or depressed. From the “social-emotional” perspective, such a person likely has had some adverse social outcomes that they’ve experienced. So, next time you see someone feeling anxious or sad, it might be helpful to try to understand what has been going on in their social world.
• Similarly, knowing the integral connection between the social and emotional worlds can help us understand erratic social behavior. If someone is behaving oddly in some kind of social interaction, instead of just branding that person as “ weirdo,” we can step back and make the inference that this person may well be having some kind of emotional problems at the time. Someone who is too talkative in a social setting—or unnecessarily belligerent—or conspicuously withdrawn—likely betrays some sort of problems at the emotional level. People demonstrating these kinds of social problems may well be anxious or fearful or sad. Understanding the connection between our social and emotional worlds from an evolutionary perspective is, in fact, critical to our understanding of the human condition writ large.

Bottom Line

Behavioral scientists often put social and emotional processes in the same bucket. Thus the term “social-emotional.” In fact, when examined from a deep evolutionary perspective (see Nesse & Ellsworth, 2009), it makes good sense that our emotions track social outcome—and vice versa.

Want to better understand the human condition? Having a deep, nuanced, and evolutionarily informed understanding of the concept of “social-emotional” can go a long way.

Note: This post is a variant of a post I wrote for my Substack titled "The Human Condition." I own the copyright to the content.