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METAPHILOSOPHY
Vol. 48, No. 4, July 2017
0026-1068

TRUST AS A META-EMOTION

SIMONE BELLI AND FERNANDO BRONCANO

Abstract: The aim of this article is to present trust as a meta-emotion, such that it is
an emotion that precedes first-order emotions. It examines how trust can be
considered a meta-emotion by establishing criteria for identifying trust as a meta-
emotion. How trust plays out differently in aesthetic and ordinary contexts can
provide another mode for investigating meta-emotions. The article illustrates how it
is possible to recognize these meta-emotions in narratives. Finally, it presents one of
the aims of trust, sharing knowledge between agents, when someone who provides
testimony shares knowledge in an epistemic trust process with others. It shows a
relationship construction between subjects and objects thanks to the trust, a meta-
emotion that represents emotional ties between subjects to achieve another emotion.

Keywords: institution, meta-emotion, narrative, testimony, trust.

Trust—1. firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something:

relations have to be built on trust. (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition)

The compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) collocate

“build” and “trust,” which implies that trust must be “constructed.”
Trust, here, is expressed as a belief in a persons ability that exists
between subjects and/or a subject and an object that can be related to.
The OED is touted as “the worlds most trusted dictionary.” A rela-
tionship between the subject (the user) and the object (the dictionary)
is constructed thanks to trust. But this does not mean that every time
a reader uses this tool she thinks, “Now I will consult the OED
because I trust it.” The users trust in the dictionary is an internalized
practice, an “internal” step preceding the action.
This example allows us to introduce trust as a meta-emotion. Trust as
a meta-emotion contributes to the taming and narrowing of the horizons
of the expectable so that our social life becomes possible. We shall present
trust as a meta-emotion between subjects and objects that co-construct a
relation based on love, friendship, and the like—a meta-emotion that
achieves and “funnels in” first-order emotions. A meta-emotion is not
purely an emotion about emotion, as Gottman, Katz, and Hooven (1997)
argue, but also a pre-emotion, a step before. We use the prefix “meta” to
indicate a step before a first-order emotion. Mendonça (2013) explains a

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 TRUST AS A META-EMOTION 431

meta-emotion as “an emotion about the visibility of an emotion, [which]

should be taken as a sequentially experienced emotion and not a second-
order emotion” (2013, 391).
Our question is: Why is trust a meta-emotion? We agree with
Mendonça (2013) about the necessity of considering meta-emotions for
a complete theory of emotion. Since our aim is to present trust as a
meta-emotion that precedes first-order emotions (Salmela 2005), meta-
emotions have a double meaning for us: they are emotions about other
emotions, but also emotional ties that achieve first-order emotions. As
we shall see below, this characteristic depends on the temporal patterns
in which the meta-emotion is produced.
Our thesis here is developed in three sections and a conclusion. In the
first section, we illustrate how it is possible to recognize meta-emotions
in narratives. Research on emotion is crucially dependent on the complex
coactions of language and social interaction (Greenwood 2012; Harre
2009). When we express jealousy, we dont use the word “jealousy” to
express it but instead use an expression that includes certain kinds of
anxiety and certain words to describe the whole situation. Stets (2010)
argues that the different theoretical approaches in the study of emotions
(Stets and Burke 2005; Lawler, Thyne, and Yoon 2009; Scheff 1990) do
not capture the full range of emotions that individuals experience, such
as joy, depression, love, hatred, jealousy, and envy, and so we need to
understand how these specific emotions emerge in narratives. We make
use of Goldies (2012) work to show how these narratives work.
Later, in the second section, we examine how trust can be consid-
ered a meta-emotion (J€ager and Bartsch 2006) and establish criteria for
identifying it as a meta-emotion. We identify instances of trust that
support the meta-emotional level. According to Mendonça (2013), trust
might play out differently in aesthetic and ordinary contexts, which can
provide another mode for investigating meta-emotions. Trust interferes
with other phenomena, such as conflict, relationships, education, argu-
mentation, moral action, economic expectations, and so on.
In the third section, we present one of the aims of trust: sharing
knowledge between agents (Broncano 2008; Faulkner 2000). We show
the relationship between subjects and objects in micro-institutions,
where trust is a meta-emotion that represents emotional ties between
subjects in order for them to achieve other emotions. Objects are not
“things” but situations, where emotions are perceptual constructions of
these complex situations (Roberts 2013).

1. Narratives of Our Emotions

Emotions tend to appear as complex structures that include more than
one emotion at the same time or in succession in very close temporal

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432 SIMONE BELLI AND FERNANDO BRONCANO

proximity (Barbalet 1998; Benski 2005; Collins 1990; Flam 2005; Scheff
2009; Yang 2000). Benski (2011) suggests adopting the concept
“constellations of emotions” to deal with the complex nature of emo-
tional dimensions, where situations give rise to emotional experiences
that quite often cannot be adequately accounted for by focusing on a
single emotion. Constellations are composed of congruent emotions
amplifying the basic expected behavioral consequences, in which the
different emotions work in a similar direction, as in the case of disgust.
Benski (2005) considers situations in which disgust, contempt, and out-
rage are expressed together by members of the public passing by an act
of protest, intensifying their aggressive reactions to the protesters.
To study this complex panorama, language helps us to discover such
emotions and meta-emotions; they are located in texts and have narra-
tive structures, as we shall show in this section. The work of Gottman,
Katz, and Hooven (1996) introduces the concept of meta-emotion in
the emotional narratives of parents about their, and their childrens,
emotions. The emotions that agents experience are consensually consid-
ered a function of their language and culture, which are necessarily
involved (Greenwood 2012; Harre 2009). In these narratives, emotions
and meta-emotions can take any number of different turns (Stets 2010),
moving from positive to negative and back again from negative to posi-
tive in the narratives. We ought to explain and predict the particular
sequence and type of emotions that can ensue in encounters and the
following narratives. Williamson (2011) speaks of “chains of emotion,”
because emotions are sequenced in our discourses (Baker 2001). Narra-
tives construct emotions that weave through societal history and bring
to the fore certain aspects of society in our lives. Narratives are the
instruments for understanding these emotions. They have two different
roles: one is to describe a situation, the other is to justify what we learn
and make happen in our lives. Hutto (2008) claims that folk psychol-
ogy narratives make sense of intentional actions in our lives. We learn
about our emotions thanks to our narratives from the time we are chil-
dren to the present.
Following Harre (2009), the grammatical subject of most words used
to describe emotion is the person, because he is angry, sad, proud, cha-
grined, joyful, and so on. There is no such thing as embarrassment,
but there are plenty of embarrassed people. So peoples narratives are
composed of an emotion grammar to describe emotions. In emotion
grammar, people make use of such concepts as “love,” “jealousy,”
“trust,” and so on. This type of grammar changes in every context and
includes semantic and syntactic rules and storylines. Thanks to the
work of philosophers and psychologists, we now have concepts to
explain these emotion processes or constructions—these narratives. The
narratives allow to us to understand how such phrases as “being
angry,” “being jealous,” and “being ashamed” are compared. Ryle

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 TRUST AS A META-EMOTION 433

(1949) argued that a mood like “sadness” is a complex of dispositions

to feel, do, and say certain sorts of things. All these things are metapro-
cesses, which at the same time include meta-emotions. Each component
is indispensable to being (and to feeling) sad. Language is a tool of
emotional life that helps to modify and solidify emotional activity
(Mendonça 2008). It is also a creative tool for handling emotional diffi-
culties in our lives.
Another essential point for understanding why narratives are impor-
tant for our emotions is temporal patterns. According to Goldie (2012),
people dont feel the same emotion over time, because time changes,
the context changes, and we observe emotions through an external per-
spective on what happened. Goldie introduces the internal/external
standpoint, which we can observe in this narrative: “Last week, that
person said things very important and intimate to me; I trust him, and
he trusts me enough to confide in me. Today, when I remember that
event, I discover that I love him, and not just trust him.” In my exter-
nal standpoint narrative (today about an event that happened the last
week), I discover an internal emotion, love. I find a sort of emotional
gap, or a retrospective emotion that I did not have at the time (last
week), or that was probably caused by this situation of trust. It is an
action of rethinking the past in order to change the present. In emo-
tional narratives we go through this action many times: something hap-
pens in the past, and it has a different meaning when we re-elaborate it
in the present. Trust appears as a meta-emotion and love as an emo-
tion. So, emotions are singular experiential episodes at discrete points
in time, in response to specific events (Rogers, Schr€ oder, and von
Scheve 2014). For Mendonça (2008), these episodes provide tools for
continually questioning and exploring the emotional world, our con-
stellation of emotions.
We agree with Goldie that narratives are causal accounts; for exam-
ple: “When you grieve, you often look back on the past, on your time
with the person you loved, knowing now what you did not know then:
that the person you loved is now dead” (2012, 65). Causal accounts are
not mechanical processes where A causes B, and B causes C. Causal
accounts in narratives are like A causes B or C, and B probably pro-
duces C or returns to A. In this sense, causal accounts in narratives
show our constellation of emotions. In Goldies example, grief is a
first-order emotion, and love is a meta-emotion. Love is the basis of
this new emotion of grief, while in previous examples trust is the basis
of the new emotion of love. It is always an emotion about an emotional
process. In our example love is a first-order emotion, but in Goldies
example, love is a meta-emotion. Meta-emotions, as we shall see later,
assume different roles, depending on temporal patterns and situations.
In an essay on gay liberation, Britt and Heise (2000) trace the emer-
gence of pride from shame via affect-control processes involving fear

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434 SIMONE BELLI AND FERNANDO BRONCANO

and anger. This social movement revolves around efforts to transform

shame into pride. Pride and shame are meta-emotions in the Britt and
Heise example. As emotions, meta-emotions can assume positive or
negative conditions, a point we discuss later.
For Velleman (2001), emotion is something temporal that unfolds
differently over time. But it is a performance with certain temporal pat-
terns involving circumstances, physiological reactions, and biological
changes: a form of structured episodes. For Harris (1989), these epi-
sodes mark an important step in emotional development. These narra-
tives work in a causal account, where they dont appear just as a single
event but instead appear as one thing happening after another, where
everything is interconnected. Love, trust, and grief are interconnected,
and it is impossible to mention one without mentioning one or both of
the others. They circulate, and it doesnt matter which emotion appears
first, because its not possible to separate them. Looking on the past,
constructing a narrative, there are actions that allow us to recognize
these emotions and meta-emotions and to put them into words. These
combinations and interactions of emotions are crucial to action (Jasper
2011). For Wollheim (1999), interactions are embedded in the narra-
tives that we associate our emotions with, where we have to learn to
identify our emotions early in life. A narrative then has these two aims:
to describe our world and to justify and make sense of our experience.
Thanks to a narrative account we can analyze the complexity of
emotions. In love or jealousy narratives we can find the “facts”
(McIsaac and Eich 2004). These facts contain experiences of loss of
trust or having trust. These facts are “structured episodes” in our
narratives, and they are composed of elements of emotional experience:
thought, feeling, bodily change, expression, and so forth (Goldie 2012).
In the narratives of Freuds patients, anxiety appears as a meta-
emotion of the first-order emotion of fear of death in their dramatic
episodes. In autobiographical episodes, we use a rather journalistic style
to report what happens to us. Meta-emotions allow us to structure
these episodes and to argue which emotions we have experienced in a
particular circumstance.
Goldie (2012) insists that narrative expression should not necessarily
be seen as a discursive device but rather be seen as a combination of
that which is spoken, written, drawn, acted, sung, mimed, danced,
filmed, and otherwise communicated through. These narratives make
human lives intelligible (Broncano 2008). Narratives are the ultimate
structures of our lives (Zahavi 2005), because we live out narratives in
our lives and understand our own lives in terms of such narratives
(Broncano 2008). For Mendonça (2008), these narratives incorporate a
dynamic nature and are never finished.
Following Mendonça (2008), we argue that experiences before narra-
tives are crucial for understanding the emotional relevance of stories.

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 TRUST AS A META-EMOTION 435

Its for this reason that emotions are open-ended. They are open
because emotions change the impact they have “as time goes by” and
are subject to multiple modes of revision (Mendonça 2008). We are
biologically programmed to experience affects and feelings but are cul-
turally shaped to experience emotions. We live in a historical time
because our identity is culturally shaped as a narrative (Broncano
2008). Narratives give sense to our life, in a continuing agency. Meta-
emotions compose these narratives, build our emotions, and structure
them. They are linked to each other and compose the narratives of our
emotions. Its important to take into account that our emotions and
meta-emotions are in synch with each other.

2. Meta-emotion and Trust

Meta-emotions have a double meaning for us. A meta-emotion is an
emotion about another emotion, but it is also an emotional tie that
gives rise to and colors a first-order emotion. In matters of trust, this
depends on the specific type of trust we are considering. When we take
the bus, we trust the bus driver for the short period of time that our
trip lasts. In this case, trust is a first-order emotion. In this article, we
dont consider this aspect. For our present purposes, trust is a meta-
emotion over an extended period of time in a relationship between two
subjects. So, it is very important to analyze temporal patterns when we
study emotions and meta-emotions. Lack of trust, or an imagined lack
of trust, can produce an attack of jealousy and break down the rela-
tionship between two subjects. This trust is completely different from
our trust of the bus driver. The trust in the bus driver is for the
purposes of that short relationship, to trust that she knows how to
drive safely. But in a long-term relationship, we need another type of
trust to establish this commitment. We need a continual and linear
trust process to maintain a solid emotional tie with the other person in
the relationship. As we have already indicated, in Goldies (2012) view
temporality is a basic aspect in our narratives, and it is important to
consider the nature of this trust. According to Roberts, “A personal
relationship is a disposition of both parties to think, act, and feel in
ways characteristic of the (good or bad) relationship” (2013, 140). One
can gain or lose ones trust in another person, and the first-order
emotion of jealousy probably changes this status. This example
describes how meta-emotions can modify the whole emotional process
and distort it (Mendonça 2013).
People dont have and dont share the same meta-emotions in the
same context. Differences in meta-emotions can be the basis for misun-
derstandings or arguments. When we discover that the other party does
not share our meta-emotions, we show a form of egocentric attribution

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436 SIMONE BELLI AND FERNANDO BRONCANO

bias where we think that everybody has the same type of emotions,
expressed in the same way. This happens for two reasons: (1) our atten-
tion gets arrested only at first-order emotions (love, jealousy, anger),
since meta-emotions (trust, sincerity, blame) are not easily distinguish-
able; and (2) meta-emotions can be felt within the same personal struc-
ture (J€
ager and Bartsch 2006). First-order emotions are thought of in a
universalistic way, while meta-emotions are thought of in a particularis-
tic and subjective way. Everybody understands the first case, but the
second case depends on each of the different relationships the subjects
have. Folk psychology narratives recognize such “emotions” as anger,
jealousy, and joy but do not recognize trust, nausea, and suffering as
emotions. The first group are emotions, but the second group represent
something different from the first one, what we called meta-emotions.
So trust is not an emotion in folk psychology narratives but instead
represents something very important in an emotional process of
jealousy or anger. Peoples lack of trust makes it harder to solve or
manage a conflict. When someone tells a lie in a friendship, he causes
pain and sense of deceit in his friend, losing the trust of that person
and provoking an impairment of relation. This means that when we
experience a meta-emotion, the emotion changes and with it the
emotional experience as well. A probable consequence of this sugges-
tion is that it makes meta-emotions, such as honesty, sincerity, lying,
self-deception, blame, and trust, especially relevant to moral psychol-
ogy (Medina 2005; Roberts 2013; Salmela 2005; Scanlon 2008), but it
is not the aim of our article to go in this direction.
Meta-emotional practices have an important role in emotion man-
agement, considering that emotion management is not a conclusion of
a process but a phase of a continuing cycle of activity (Barbalet 2011).
Meta-emotional practices represent a tool (Jakupcak 2003), “an instru-
ment of freedom rather than a tool of self-oppression” (De Sousa
1999, 446), where we cease to think of our emotions as inevitable and
instead view them as open to modification. A person may “regulate”
jealousy or anger with her partner, construct trust, promote rewarding
actions, share knowledge and information, and so forth. Trust can
generate a constellation of emotions, from anger to love, from jealousy
to resentment. The regulation of this meta-emotion has a double
characteristic: it can produce a negative emotion (anger) or a positive
emotion (love).
For Barbalet (2011), emotions can be regulated in an implicit social
regulation and through processes of self-monitoring, in an explicit way.
Such emotions can only be regulated interactionally and so require
cooperation among individuals in trust relations. In managing jealousy
a person may experience trust in his partner or in society. The regula-
tion of the persons jealousy draws on other emotions, such as anger or

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 TRUST AS A META-EMOTION 437

love, and is composed of other meta-emotions, such as sincerity, sym-

pathy, and blame.
Of course, we need to differentiate between a loss of trust and a
break in a situation of trust. In the first case, we have a low level of
trust in someone that is possible to recover, probably through a long
and hard process, but recoverable nonetheless. In a friendship relation-
ship, my friend has violated the norm of this friendship, doing some-
thing in the wrong way. I shall try to explain to her that what she has
done is against our relationship, and she needs to avoid repeating this
action in the future to maintain our friendship. In the second case—a
break in a situation of trust—it is impossible to recover trust. The
same friend has repeated a negative behavior several times, and we
have broken this friendship relation that was based on trust. Both
situations can also generate a constellation of negative emotions in a
romantic relationship. Lack of trust in ones partner or in oneself has a
negative effect on the relationship, often leading to the end of the
relationship. In these two examples, we can understand how trust has a
central role in a certain type of relationship in our lives.
It is very important to recognize and have subjective experience of
our emotions in our lives before trying to analyze them in society as
researchers. For instance, Lutz (1988) recognizes the differences of the
word “fear” in two different cultural contexts from her personal situa-
tion (cited in Harre 2009, 299). In other words, we must become
implicit ethnographers of our own contexts to illustrate our analytical
point. This self-analysis (Jones and Bodtker 2001), or reflective tech-
nique (Kressel 1997), is the first step in recognizing meta-emotions and
exploring the complex world of a given emotion in other contexts.
Meta-emotion is used as a tool of self-analysis to explain complex
emotional states in our lives.
In domestic violence, the abuser expresses anger against his partner,
but often this anger is caused by jealousy processes entailing no trust
in his partner. So in this episode trust is the meta-emotion, and jeal-
ousy and anger are the emotions. The abuser cannot manage his violent
behavior and cannot control his jealousy. Anger management therapy
can help the abuser to control his jealousy and to trust his partner.
Narratives generated by the abuser have two functions: one is to
describe how his anger works in his life, and the other to justify this
emotion. Therapy gets him to describe why it is important to him to
express anger in a specific situation. Therefore, narrative has a norma-
tive function that justifies his practice.
As researchers, we apply linguistic labels so that we may recognize
emotions (Jasper 2011). When people label their own feelings, the labels
they use begin to give their feelings shape and direction (Barrett 2006).
For Mendonça (2013), when we have an experience we are not labeling
emotions according to their level; when we look back on what

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438 SIMONE BELLI AND FERNANDO BRONCANO

happened, we are capable of determining the meta-emotional level of a

certain emotional occurrence, but when we experience a certain emo-
tional situation we do not mention that meta-emotion. We dont use
this type of description in narratives: someone says that a particular
person feels love for her because in this “act” of feeling love she feels
different meta-emotions, and trust is one of them. To love someone is
just one first-order emotion, the emotion of love, but in order to per-
form just one action, more actions are probably necessary. Emotions
are essential to actions and thoughts, according to Roberts (2013). We
need to trust in this person, we need to put our life in his hands, we
need to accept this loss of individuality or autonomy, and so on (and
vice versa). The complexity of the study of emotions is represented in
the following example, where the action of loving someone is composed
of different meta-emotions. According to Anscombe (1957), one action
has different descriptions, “each dependent on wider circumstances,
and each related to the next as description of means to end”; “A wants
X and X ranges over all describable objects or states of affairs”
(Anscombe 1957, 46, 67).
So for us it becomes: there is trust in love, I will “have” love and I
will find trust. In loving someone or being loved by someone, trust
plays an important role—it colors the emotion of love. In Harres
(2009) example of jealousy, A and B have a preemptive right to a cer-
tain good, say X (trust). In this episode, A and B probably experienced
anger, or fear of loss, or failure to achieve X between them. B feels an
unpleasant combination of bodily feelings, including tearfulness, anxi-
ety, and so on. B doesnt have trust in A, because B doesnt recognize
the legitimacy of A to have X. And jealousy appears in the relationship
between A and B from this lack of trust. Trust works as a meta-
emotion in this example. People rarely express fear, anger, jealousy,
chagrin, joy, and so on by using the corresponding words in a self-
description (Harre 2009). An angry person might verbally show anger
by shouting “F-ck you!!” but not by saying “I am angry with you”
without turning red in the face. Emotions and meta-emotions in our
narratives emerge in multiple ways, rarely using the corresponding
words. This matters for how we recognize our use of these meta-
emotions in our narratives and in our social contexts.
Spiraling out first-order emotion, there are all sorts of meta-
emotions that depend on tacit knowledge of the first-order emotions.
Harre (2009) suggests analyzing which words are common in the
expression of emotions. What do the uses of the words “jealousy” and
“anger” have in common? What about “jealousy” and “love”? Meta-
emotions help us answer these questions, analyzing what it is words
and expressions have in common in the context of these emotions.
Anger and jealousy are used when the bodily component of the emo-
tional occasion is unpleasant. But jealousy and love involve different

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 TRUST AS A META-EMOTION 439

experiences. Jealousy stands as the polar opposite of trust. The latter is

a prime ingredient in the basis for describing ones emotional experi-
ence as love for someone. The first-order emotion of love is always a
kind of process in which this emotional process is composed of
meta-emotions. The only way to observe the differences between these
emotional experiences is to analyze narratives. In empirical research,
narratives offer the single means to access the emotions and their
meta-emotions.
Overall, meta-emotions assume six roles in emotion research:

(1) meta-emotions give rise to first-order emotions;

(2) meta-emotions color first-order emotions;
(3) meta-emotions make visible something invisible, like a regulative
activity;
(4) meta-emotions structure individual emotions;
(5) a change in a meta-emotion produces effects in a first-order
emotion;
(6) meta-emotion is a tool in emotion management and emotion
regulation in virtue of its role in self-analysis.

To better explain these six points, we discuss in the next section how
meta-emotions work in context.

3. Epistemic Trust as a Form of Sharing Knowledge

Thanks to communication, we obtain and we offer information. Speech
is the action of sharing information that we count as knowledge
(Faulkner 2000; McDowell 1994). But to have trust in a persons words,
we must think that he offers true information; we regard “testimony”
as “presentation-as-true.” When a speaker presents her testimony as
true, the listener is entitled to accept it in a trust relationship. But
many times we are skeptical about the speaker and dont trust her. To
better understand the process of trust as a meta-emotion, let us con-
sider the issue of testimony (Broncano 2008). Testimony presents a
kind of social bond, created by the mutual intention of sharing knowl-
edge, where trust is presented as the symptom of the relation that both
parties are involved in, such as a social bond. For Craig (1990), trust-
ing others means sharing knowledge where one would be able to be a
good informant, and Origgi (2004) adds to this that every situation of
testimony involves strong bonds of trust between the speaker and the
listener. Trust is the basis of this relationship; speaker and listener
share this meta-emotion. We agree with Origgi that trust goes deeper
than what is supposed by mere inference from the reliability of anoth-
ers beliefs and the probability of them being true given the history of

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440 SIMONE BELLI AND FERNANDO BRONCANO

the speaker. Trust is not, however, the main objective in a testimony

relationship, yet the obtaining of this knowledge is required, as it is the
main purpose of such a relationship.
We can use the example of the confidence that a partner in a couple
has in the others loving trustworthiness; possible unfaithful behavior
could hardly be considered likely without destroying the trust between
them (Broncano 2008). As Mendonça (2013) argues, it is impossible to
quantify the meta-emotions value. That is why Origgi (2004) postulates
a sort of epistemic trust, according to which the speakers commitment
to her own words is a condition for the acceptance of the testimony on
the part of the listener.
Epistemic trust is composed of several actions based upon feelings
of expectation, hope, and confidence (Barbalet 2011; Giddens 1990;
Rose-Ackerman 2001), and also accuracy, sincerity, honesty, and open-
ness (Daukas 2006; Williams 2002). Fear and despondency (James
1956) lead the chiefly communicative act of sharing information
between agents. These agents can be the speaker and the listener, trust
giver and trust taker, or, simply, partner and partner. These actors are
always involved in cooperative activity and cooperative behavior. We
take the testimony of others and trust them to be a source of knowl-
edge (Daukas 2006). Sharing knowledge and information represents a
form of trusting others. When these meta-emotional mechanisms are
broken and trust doesnt work, disappointment is one of multiple nega-
tive emotions produced, as well as anger, rage, and jealousy against the
trust breaker, but also self-reproach and self-blame (Barbalet 2011;
Bennett 2013) for giving importance to a failed relationship. In
Scanlons (2008) opinion, blame is essentially bound up with an impair-
ment of relations with the offender and a withdrawal from the offender,
which reflects that impairment. It involves the impairment of the rela-
tionship between subjects. The relationship is impaired because the sub-
jects intolerable practices make the person hard to trust. Trust is
something that established the relationship between these subjects, and
it will be modified by action. Someone or something has violated the
basic terms of some trusting relationship, and therefore they reorient
or downgrade the relationship through the expression of negative emo-
tions. For Bennett (2013), the reasons for changing the terms of the
relationship are prudential reasons of self-protection. When subjects
revise their expectations and intentions in a relationship, it is to change
or modify their relationship with each other or an object. Friendship,
for instance, is composed of several meta-emotions, such as trust, con-
fidence, closeness, and sharing. Each of these meta-emotions regulates
this friendship, and the meta-emotions probably act within different
ranges for each friend. We cannot consider as a friend someone who
does not treat us as a friend. This relationship is composed of certain
meta-emotions that parties have for one another. When one party

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 TRUST AS A META-EMOTION 441

changes his meta-emotion, the relationship changes. When, for some

reason, one has lost trust in ones friend, this meta-emotion will prob-
ably be changed into a negative meta-emotion, like blame. This change
of meta-emotion is to protect us in the future from that person. The
change is useful for revising a relationship when someone acts in a way
that makes it inadvisable to continue to have the same relationship
with her (Bennett 2013). In Bennetts example, the blame expressed
toward murderers and rapists takes the form of not trusting them, not
helping them, and not hoping things go well for them. The meta-
emotion of blame is converted into an expression of disapproval for
some bad action. So, such relationships require certain sorts of mutual
attitudes of concern on the part of their members.
The point is not just how a subject will act in the future but also
what happened in the past, and what it indicates about a subjects atti-
tude toward a relationship (Scanlon 2008). That is why epistemic trust
is a good indicator of joint action (Gilbert 2006). Trusting signals a
sort of social bond between two persons engaged in a common plan of
action, such as walking together in the same direction, with the same
rhythm, enjoying interesting conversation, such as between coworkers
during lunch break. Walking together is not the purpose, conversation
is. It is a social activity for sharing knowledge and obtaining informa-
tion. Walking together represents a meta-purpose, the basis for cooper-
ating together. If it is impossible to share this basis, it is impossible to
construct a solid relationship in social life. Social relationships, like
romantic relationships and friendships, take form thanks to joint
actions that require explicit collaborative intentions and can be concep-
tualized in terms of social interactions based on trust. In this interac-
tion with other people, the subject generates a sense of involvement
(Barbalet 2011; Kemper 1978), and involvements are constructed
thanks to trust as a meta-emotion. Using Scanlons example in the
context of an ongoing relationship characterized by shared interaction,
“I might . . . cease to value spending time with him in the way one does
with a friend, and I might revise my intentions to confide in him and
to encourage him to confide in me” (2008, 129–30). To trust someone
is actually to hold modified attitudes of this kind toward him.
Losing trust in someone means not sharing this knowledge and not
obtaining this information. In romantic relationships, when a partner
loses trust in her partner, she does not have access to this informa-
tion, or probably doesnt trust her partners words. To obtain this
information, or to solve this lack of trust, she feels the desire to spy,
eavesdrop, or read her messages, mail, or personal diary. A lack of
trust, or an imagined lack of trust, produces these kinds of actions, in
which the trust taker feels the emotion of jealousy. This practice repre-
sents a way of obtaining information and knowledge in an indirect way.

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442 SIMONE BELLI AND FERNANDO BRONCANO

A change of this meta-emotion produces effects in a first-order

emotion.
The social bond constructed by trust is particularly interesting to
observe in an intercultural context. In China there is a social phenom-
enon called guanxi: “an intricate and pervasive relation network which
Chinese cultivate energetically, subtly, and imaginatively” (Sennett
2012, 135). For instance, a Chinese person newly arrived in a foreign
city feels free to call a cousins friend to help him look for a job and
somewhere to sleep. Guanxi means trust in social relations and in
social networks, where my word is my bond. This informal cohesion is
composed of a dialogic exchange, a negotiated process based on episte-
mic trust. To trust others is not the main purpose of this guanxi rela-
tionship; instead, the purpose is to obtain information and knowledge
to live in a new context. Epistemic trust is present as a meta-emotion
that constructs this emotional tie between two subjects that dont know
each other in a direct form, only through a third person, the cousin.
Guanxi is a distributed form of trust in every subject of a persons
network (such as the cousins friend). In everyday life, we “use” this
meta-emotion of trust in a way pretty similar to guanxi. Epistemic trust
is a dialogic social experience embodied in everyday practices. Commu-
nication requires that we presume testimony to be generally reliable,
like a sense of epistemic trust in others (Coady 1992). Epistemic trust
is a social epistemic meta-emotion because it depends on appropriate
attitudes toward others as well as toward oneself as epistemic agents
(Daukas 2006). Trust is only given to, or received from, persons
showing certain interpersonal and mutual dependence in particular
situations. Responsibility emerges from a reciprocal understanding of
the situation as a situation in which the person involved is answering
to the epistemic needs manifested by others.
The meta-emotion of trust is a dialogical exchange displayed in verbal
and nonverbal communication (Remland 1999). We trust someone
thanks to a knowing look or a positive bodily predisposition. Trust is
internalized in our practices, in a conscious or unconscious way. Social
gestures and looks of understanding are small actions that allow us to
internalize this meta-emotion in our relationships. Norms of trust are
internalized in social practices. We dont think every time we meet the
same person “I trust her” or “I dont trust her,” because we have inter-
nalized in different episodes with this person that we trust her or not.
Trust is a relation of epistemic dependence between agents and soci-
ety through a communicative process. Every communicative process
represents a narrative, a testimony. This article is a testimony because it
represents scientific research produced in a scientific community. It
offers information and knowledge, and it represents a form of epistemic
dependence based on trust between writers and readers. This trust is a
meta-emotion in this process because it is not its main purpose that the

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 TRUST AS A META-EMOTION 443

readers would like to read the article, and it is not the main purpose of
the writers to offer trust. Trust is the social contract necessary for the
presentation of some other thing—that is, knowledge about a topic,
enjoyment of a text, creativity, and so forth. This contract between
writers and readers is stipulated thanks to trust, but trust is not the
aim of the contract. In the case of a family in Harriss (2012) work, it
is shown how children trust parents because they consider them a reli-
able source of information and knowledge. But when children are not
satisfied by the answer of their parents, they offer a counterexample or
continue asking. Children in this institution of the family use epistemic
trust as a dialogical process with their parents because in this relation-
ship between trust giver and trust taker nobody is a passive receiver.
When an essay is rejected by reviewers or criticized by readers, it
denotes a negotiation process based on this epistemic trust, where
social functioning requires epistemic cooperation. This epistemic coop-
eration requires trust (Daukas 2006). Every testimonial situation
involves strong bonds of trust between the speaker and the hearer
(Harris 2012; Origgi 2004).
Trust is an internalizing norm that determines what degree of confi-
dence is appropriate to have in others under certain circumstances
(Daukas 2006). Given the intrinsic value of sincerity, certain norms of
trust are internalized in social practices, and such norms are preserved
and sustained by corresponding psychological mechanisms. Trust, as a
modality of action requiring a commitment to act in the absence of evi-
dence concerning its outcome, involves both emotional apprehension
and emotional engagement (James 1956). Trust represents a meta-
emotion in a situation where information is absent or not readily acces-
sible. According to Barbalet (2011), trust requires a positive feeling of
expectation regarding another persons future actions.
Trust involves an internal attribution (Luhmann 1990). Broken trust
reflects not only on the trust breaker but principally on the judgment
of the trust giver (Barbalet 2011). Trust is in the middle of a relation
between the trust giver and the trust taker, and it is an explicitly nonre-
gulated emotion, generated and constructed from a consequent itera-
tion between subjects. Latour (2013) suggests that we cannot place our
trust at any given moment in an institution, and yet we know that we
can also rely on it. For Latour, if we agree not to separate ourselves for
a second from the continuous flow of scripts, being-as-other ends up
also being an excess of attention to, vigilance of, and precaution in our
relationship of trust in institutions.
Emotional closure allows us to connect with others from the proper
perspective. Many times when we would like to share “something” with
others, it means “putting this something in common” (Larsson 1997,
11). The meta-emotion of trust is the right way to allow putting some-
thing in common with the other. Its the first step of a social

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444 SIMONE BELLI AND FERNANDO BRONCANO

interaction. Trust can be viewed as an entrenched attitude in our lives,

which covers a great variety of communicative acts, including emotions.
When a trusting relationship is accepted, it is possible to share knowl-
edge and first-order emotions in different contexts and at different lev-
els of our society.

Conclusion
Jasper (2011) suggests that as social scientists we need to build on
natural-language labels of people but also need to make better analytic
distinctions about them. In emotion research, we need to consider
meta-emotions in order to construct a complete theory of emotions.
The complexity of the study of emotions comes from taking into
account communication and language as a rich source of data. Meta-
emotions are the structure of emotional experiences in narratives. We
agree with Harre (2000) that language is the main instrument through
which such creations and modifications come to be. The narratives of
our lives are fundamentally perspectival, and they can deeply distort
reality, truth, objectivity, and our ideas of what it is to be a person
(Goldie 2012). Moreover, emotion is a work in progress, as we build
emotion simultaneously with our use of language to refer to emotional
states (Wilce 2014).
In recent years, researchers have focused on the regulation factors of
emotions. Meta-emotion research allows an understanding of how emo-
tion regulation and emotion management generate collateral emotions.
We have presented trust as a meta-emotion, which explains this process.
There are few concepts that are as present in our everyday lives as trust
is, and as difficult to treat.
The central aspects of trust are emotional and epistemic. Trust as a
meta-emotion constitutes an epistemic space for people sharing knowl-
edge. Trust is not only needed to gain access to knowledge, it is essential
to becoming a socially situated self, to engaging in public conversations
with others. Trust as a meta-emotion is internalized through social prac-
tices, in our discourses and in our practices. In the model we have used,
we have observed how trust is essential to becoming a socially situated
self. Without trust, the subject feels negative emotions.
Although trust and distrust are fundamental to the construction of
social ties, we still need to understand how they work or how to figure
out their nuances and distinctions. Trust becomes a meta-emotion that
brings the future onto the horizon of the expected, of that which we
count on, of that which we feel more or less sure about. Trust contrib-
utes to narrowing the horizons of the expectable so that our social life
becomes possible. The construction and maintenance of the emotion
and bond of trust appears to be crucial in our daily relationships, and

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 TRUST AS A META-EMOTION 445

we dare to suggest that it appears as a crucial issue far beyond the sys-
tem of intimacy. We depend on narratives to take decisions, and trust
is the basis of these decisions. In our analysis, this meta-emotion forges
the bond between subjects, from which an emotional constellation is
produced by the emotional tie.
We defined how trust works in ones narratives and how it is an
internalized and dialogical process. We suggest that future research
take this model to analyze different contexts where testimony is rele-
vant, such as trust in institutions.

Simone Belli
School of Social Sciences and Innovation
Yachay Tech, Hacienda San Jose
100115 Urcuquı
Ecuador
sbelli@yachaytech.edu.ec

Fernando Broncano
Department of Philosophy
Charles III University of Madrid
Calle Madrid, 12628903 Getafe
Spain
fernando.broncano@uc3m.es

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