The nature of contempt: emotion and/or interpersonal attitude

In considering what contempt is, one should regard a great variety of meanings, situations and words used within one or more linguistic areas. Contempt has been considered mainly as a “moral emotion”, implicating violations of social standards and order. According to recent studies (Rozin, Lowery, Imada and Haidt, 1999; Fischer and Roseman, 2007; Hutcherson and Gross, 2011) different groups of moral emotions can be described. A first distinction may be made within a “self-others” axis. Some emotions are related to self-evaluations; some emotions, on the contrary, deal with evaluations of other people's behavior. According to Rozin, Lowery, Imada and Haidt (1999) we can describe, within the realm of violations of social order, a triad concerning self-conscious emotions (shame, embarrassment and guilt, SEG) and a triad concerning other directed emotions (contempt, anger and disgust, CAD). On the other hand contempt may also be considered an interpersonal attitude rather than an emotion for many reasons. We could mention the most important reasons among others: its social nature; its enduring nature; its bidimensional structure (along the continuum appreciation vs depreciation); its expression through some nonverbal signals that are shared with emotions like anger and disgust, but also through other signals such as head position (partial rotation and inclination) and gaze direction (sidelong glance, looking down), which are quite similar to those used to express interpersonal attitudes, such as superiority and refusal.