Pride

Pride is a universal human emotion recognized by people in all cultures. It would be difficult to overstate the role played by feelings of pride—in the lives of children, in the development of character, and in human relationships more generally. This entry reviews the nature of pride, the development of feelings of pride in young children, and the importance of this emotion for psychological well-being throughout the life span.

In contemporary emotion theory, pride (along with shame, embarrassment, and guilt) is understood as a self-conscious or self-evaluative emotion. Many emotions have a component of self-evaluation. For example, when a person is angry, anxious, or sad, the intensity of these feelings depends, in part, on an intuitive assessment of the person’s ability to cope with the opportunity or challenge presented. Pride, however, is intrinsically self-evaluative. People feel sad, anxious, or angry about things that have happened (or may happen) to them in the world. They feel proud (or ashamed) of themselves (and those they closely identify with), especially how they feel about themselves in the eyes of others.

From an evolutionary perspective, the emotions of pride and shame are thought to represent opposite poles of a single emotion system, derived from instinctive expressions of social status. In this analysis, the emotion of pride evolved from expressions of dominance and still involves displays of dominance. Competitive victory may be the prototypic experience of pride. The triumphant boasting of young children, the more (or less) socialized exhibitionistic displays of victorious adults, and the bragging of parents and grandparents about the accomplishments of their offspring are all instinctive expressions of the emotion of pride.

The characteristic action tendency associated with pride is an outward movement and the inclination to show and tell others to exhibit or show-off. Pride is expansive, both in action and imagination. When a person feels proud, the person’s posture is erect, gaze is direct, and manner is relaxed. A feeling of pride raises aspirations and a person’s confidence in what the person is able to do.

Shame is the antithesis of pride. The action tendency associated with shame is concealment. People instinctively attempt to hide from others’ actions or personal qualities of which they feel ashamed. Shame contracts, again, both in posture (gaze is averted, shoulders hunched) and imagination—in the setting of goals and what people consider possible for themselves.

Like other self-evaluative emotions, pride is also an interpersonal emotion. When children feel proud (e.g., when they have built a tower or won a game), they instinctively turn to others to share in their pride (and when they feel ashamed, they look away). Somewhat more speculatively, feelings of pride also seem to intrinsically involve a close [Page 1733]personal relationship, especially a parent-child relationship (or a relationship with someone regarded as an authority or a person who is admired). In this respect, pride may be unique among human emotions. Other emotions (e.g., anger, anxiety, sadness, or even shame) do not depend on this kind of relationship. People often look to friends and colleagues for understanding and emotional support, but they look to parents and teachers (and, later, spouses) to be proud of them. Even as adolescents, when children increasingly turn to their peers to satisfy emotional needs, they do not often look to their peers to feel proud of them. This is a feeling that parents and admired teachers are especially, perhaps uniquely, able to provide.

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