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Emotions are fundamental to our nature as 
a species. They guide how we construe the 
world. They are the basis of our intuitions 
about right and wrong. They give rise to our 
sense of purpose. Despite potent cultural 
shaping, humans communicate emotions 
without words, in the face, voice, body, and 
touch in similar enough ways to recognize, 
and be moved by, the experience of others 
throughout the world. Emotions structure 
our moment-  to- moment interactions with 
other people, supporting the network of so -
cial bonds that is central to human life.
At the same time, emotions richly define 
our individuality. From the first months of 
life, children vary in their emotional ten -
dencies: Some are anxious, others sanguine; 
some move quickly to inconsolable distress, 
others seem preternaturally calm; some re -
spond to any social interaction with delight, 
while others are intensely shy. As we grow 
older, even more distinctions emerge. One 
person easily laughs and is cheerful most of 
the time, another is usually worried about 
something, and a third seems perpetually 
annoyed. One person moves through life on 
an even keel, with little variation in emotion 
over time; another responds to life vividly 
and intensely, changing from one moment to the next. As great writers and artists have 
shown us, the deeper themes of individual 
identity—  life motifs, recurring conflicts, 
challenges, foibles and failures, quests for 
redemption, doubts and epiphanies—  are in -
fused with emotion. We sense each person’s 
uniqueness in their style of laugh, how news 
of a loss crosses their face, the tone of their 
voice and pattern of touch.
To be human, then, is to have access to the 
full repertoire of emotions provided by our 
species’ evolution. To be an individual is to 
experience and express emotion in idiosyn -
cratic and peculiar ways. Our task in this 
chapter is to unpack this paradox: that emo -
tions both reveal what we share with other 
human beings, and at the same time define 
much of our uniqueness as individuals.
To accomplish this goal, we begin by 
briefly summarizing a first wave of research 
on personality and emotion that emphasizes 
individual differences in typical levels of 
positive and negative affect. We then turn 
to four animating developments in the sci -
ence of emotion, many of which emphasize 
universal functions and the observable pro -
cesses and underlying mechanisms of human 
emotional life, and also have significant im -
plications for the study of individual differ -CHAPTER 21
Emotion and  Personality
A Social Functionalist Approach
Dacher  Keltner  
Michelle  N. Shiota