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Special Issue "The Social Influence of Emotions on Sustainability"

  • 1.  Special Issue "The Social Influence of Emotions on Sustainability"

    Posted 05-08-2022 07:12

    Dear Colleagues,

    Emotions carry significant social influence and impact (e.g., van Kleef, Homan and Cheshin, 2012; van Kleef, van Doorn, Heerdink and Koning, 2011). In this Special Issue, we would like to focus on how emotional displays impact issues related to sustainability. The goal is to harness the social impact of emotions on sustainability issues in the broadest sense, relating to environmental, economic and social aspects. We see sustainability as the actions and abilities that help society flourish, endure and enhance wellbeing for all, while coexisting without causing harm to nature or exploiting resources (whether physical or mental) (e.g., Eizenberg and Jabareen, 2017; Florea, Cheung, and Herndon 2013; Gaur, 2020; Magee, Scerri, and James, 2012). We would like to receive work that helps to promote the sustainability of individuals, groups, relationships, teams, professions, organizations, societies, and the environment. We echo the call from Chapman  et al. (2017) to offer new ways to assess the communication of emotions regarding climate change, but also to rethink on how sustainability elements can be adapted to emotional aspects of work-teams and organizations. The contents of this Special Issue should be built on previous work concerning the social components of emotions and sustainability-for example, the work of van Zomeren and colleagues that dealt with hope and collective action regarding environmental change (e.g van Zomeren et al., 2019), or the work of Kates and DeSento (2020) which showed that feelings of gratitude can act as sustainability catalysts, as they protect against the exploitation of resources in a depleted-resources dilemma. Another example is the work on emotional labor, which has demonstrated how deep acting and surface acting exploit personal resources differently and have an impact on sustainable customer/client relationships (e.g., Feinberg, Ford, and Flynn, 2020; Grandey, Rupp, and Brice, 2015; Xanthopoulou, Bakker, Oerlemans, and Koszucka, 2018). Thus, we hope to promote work that supports sustainability by using the social powers of emotion. We encourage researchers to submit empirical and theoretical work.

    Dr. Arik Cheshin
    Guest Editor



    https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/special_issues/Social_Influence_Emotions_Sustainability