This chapter begins with a discussion of Avishai Margalit’s misrecognition-based theory of political humiliation. For Margalit, humiliation is primarily understood as the culpable denial of self-respect. Margalit notes that political humiliation usually takes one of three forms – removing people from the human community (as when we liken them to animals), the negation of control (as in torture), and ignoring or looking through others. After providing an account of this theory, we argue that Margalit does not sufficiently consider the contagious nature of political humiliation nor the possibility that the feeling might be present even when recognition is offered or, conversely, that we might be humiliated even by those whose recognition we don’t want. We also look at the conceptual differences between humiliation, shame, and embarrassment. We note that despite these clear differences the way these emotions are experienced sometimes feels similar. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the effect of technology and, in particular, social media on the character of contemporary political humiliations.

Caryl Emerson distinguishes Chekhov from the nineteenth-century Russian prose tradition of Gogol and Dostoevsky through his specific evocation of embarrassment, an emotion so ubiquitous in Chekhov’s writing as to become fused with his poetics and his worldview. While Dostoevsky and Tolstoy built their plots on more assertive acts and emotions, Chekhov, as Emerson shows, runs his path to redemption and discovery through the moral capacity to cringe at one’s own words and behavior.

Chapter 3 looks at what the campaigns in the Middle East and Macedonia meant to soldiers. In the early stages of the campaigns, many soldiers were fed up at being ‘exiled’ from the Western Front and embarrassed not to be fighting Germans. So far from the Western Front, they had to find a different meaning for their campaigns. Some soldiers found a personal meaning in the greater likelihood that they would survive the war, while others, mostly pre-war regular soldiers, were concerned about career mobility. Strategic and moral meanings were also found. In diaries and letters home, soldiers argued that they were contributing to the global war effort and the defeat of the Central Powers. Others argued that they were liberating Arabs and Jews from Ottoman misrule and bringing the benefits of liberal imperialism to the supposedly backward peoples of the Middle East and the Greeks. In both this chapter and in Chapter 5, it is impossible not to see in the writings of soldiers and ex-servicemen an argument for Britain’s imperial project – that, to them, the war and the aims of British liberal imperialism were compatible and mutually reinforced each other.

A central function of many emotions is to influence other people. Indeed, people often engage in emotion regulation precisely to modify or extend the interpersonal regulatory functions that emotions already serve. This chapter focuses on these regulatory functions, and on how emotions acquire them in the first place. According to social functional theories, emotions play a role in achieving interpersonal goals relating to affiliation, interpersonal distance, dominance, or appeasement. Supporting this account, many socially oriented emotions are directly attuned to their actual and anticipated interpersonal consequences. Emotions not only communicate appraisals and relational orientations, but also provide more direct incentives and disincentives that motivate other people’s responses or prompt their cessation. Emotion components such as facial and bodily movements serve social functions too, either by communicating information, or by cuing adjustments in attention and action more directly. Although natural selection contributes to the development of many of these functions, emotions only consolidate into integrated strategies of social influence over the course of socialisation and enculturation.