good question. i don't think it does because i don't think the whole feed is published, but just a summary for visitors to read and then click through
No RSS feeds will not hurt your site. Your feed will usually be displayed on pages containing other content as well so duplicate content is not an issue
Make sure that google is crawling your site nicely.. If the duplicate content get indexed first than your site.. then Google may consider that your site is spam.
RSS feeds is a totally separate thing when it comes to Google ranking and it does not play ant role in increasing or decreasing the Google rank. Regards Tehmina
once you submit 1 rss feed to various rss feed dir. it will give good quality backlinks and that will help you in backlink.
Yes, it can play a role to increase your pagerank and i can tell how- There are many websites running who provide options to publish the snippet of your full length articles. Now say you publish snippet of your articles to 10 such websites. Now with every PR update, those pages will also get PR and all those pages are linking back to your articles, so your pagerank will also increase.