Sociology of emotions

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My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love - a picture of Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in a socialist fraternal kiss.

The sociology of emotions applies sociological theorems and techniques to the study of human emotions. As sociology emerged primarily as a reaction to the negative effects of modernity, many normative theories deal in some sense with emotion without forming a part of any specific subdiscipline: Karl Marx described capitalism as detrimental to personal 'species-being', Georg Simmel wrote of the deindividualizing tendencies of 'the metropolis', and Max Weber's work dealt with the rationalizing effect of modernity in general.

Contents

Theory

Emotions are, on one hand, constitutive of, embedded in, and on the other hand manipulated or instrumentalized by entities that are studied by sociology on a micro level, such as social roles and norms and 'feeling rules' the everyday social interactions and situations are shaped by, and, on a macro level, by social institutions, discourses, ideologies etc. For instance, (post-)modern marriage is, on one hand, based on the emotion of love and, on the other hand, the very emotion is to be worked on and regulated by it. Likewise, modern science could not exist without the emotion of curiosity, but it does narrow it leading sometimes to over-specialization of science. Many forms of cultural stratification could not exist without disgust and contempt, and there are politics that could not exist without fear, as many civil and ethnic wars could not take place without hate. (requires citation)

We try to regulate our feelings to fit in with the norms of the situation, based on many - sometimes conflicting - demands upon us. Systematic observations of group interaction found that a substantial portion of group activity is devoted to the socio-emotional issues of expressing affect and dealing with tension. [1] Simultaneously, field studies of social attraction in groups revealed that feelings of individuals about each other collate into social networks, [2] a discovery that still is being explored in the field of social network analysis.

Ethnomethodology revealed emotional commitments to everyday norms through purposeful breaching of the norms. For example, students acting as boarders in their own homes reported others' astonishment, bewilderment, shock, anxiety, embarrassment, and anger; family members accused the students of being mean, inconsiderate, selfish, nasty, or impolite. Actors who breach a norm themselves feel waves of emotion, including apprehension, panic, and despair. [3] However, habitual rule breaking leads to declining stress, and may eventually end in enjoyment.

T. David Kemper [4] proposed that people in social interaction have positions on two relational dimensions: status and power. Emotions emerge as interpersonal events change or maintain individuals' status and power. For example, affirming someone else's exalted status produces love-related emotions. Increases or decreases in one's own and other's status or power generate specific emotions whose quality depends on the patterns of change.

Arlie Hochschild [5] proposed that individuals manage their feelings to produce acceptable displays according to ideological and cultural standards. Hochschild showed that jobs often require such emotional labor. Her classic study of emotional labor among flight attendants found that an industry speed-up, reducing contact between flight attendants and passengers, made it impossible for flight attendants to deliver authentic emotional labor, so they ended up surface-acting superficial smiles. Peggy Thoits [6] divided emotion management techniques into implementation of new events and reinterpretation of past events. Thoits noted that emotions also can be managed with drugs, by performing faux gestures and facial expressions, or by cognitive reclassifications of one's feelings.

Sociologist Chris Lucerne states in her article titled “Emotions! Good or Bad”, that there are neither good nor bad emotions. However, you can judge emotions as such. According to Lucerne's theory emotion is believed to help humans express their feelings. Therefore, emotions are a part of human nature to help us communicate. In addition to Chris Lucerne’s theory, when humans experience a situation, good or bad, an emotion is triggered. As a result of emotion, an action is followed. For example, here are a few emotions listed in Lucerne’s article in which people experience daily. The first is the emotion of happiness, which can ignite the sensation to dance. A second emotion is anger, in which the person begins to feel hot causing him or her to perspire. Finally is the emotion of sadness, which creates a sensation of feeling closed in. As a consequence of feeling closed in, the person may react irrationally to make them comfortable. Chris Lucerne also states in her article "that no matter what, you cannot control your reactions to emotion." In conclusion to Lucerne's theory, reaction is random in expressing your feelings. [7]

David Straker states that "we should watch our own emotions", likewise in Arlie Hochschild's theory of emotions. Straker talks about how emotions are signals that tell you something about what is happening in the inner you. Sometimes bad emotions can be misleading because of the reaction often causing conflict. To conclude based on Straker's theory, you can use emotions for good or bad. An example Straker talked about was the use of emotion to motivate others. [8]

Thomas J. Scheff [9] established that many cases of social conflict are based on a destructive and often escalating, but stoppable and reversible shame-rage cycle: when someone results or feels shamed by another, their social bond comes under stress. This can be cooperatively acknowledged, talked about and – most effectively when possible - laughed at so their social bond may be restored. Yet, when shame is not acknowledged, but instead negated and repressed, it becomes rage, and rage may drive to aggressive and shaming actions that feed-back negatively on this self-destructive situation. The social management of emotions might be the fundamental dynamics of social cooperation and conflict around resources, complexity, conflict, and moral life. It is a well-established sociological fact that expression and feeling of the emotion of anger, for example, is strongly discouraged (repressed) in girls and women in many cultures, while fear is discouraged in boys and men. Some cultures and sub-cultures encourage or discourage happiness, sadness, jealousy, excitedness, and many other emotions. The free expression of the emotion of disgust is considered socially unacceptable in many countries.

Sociologist Randall Collins has stated that emotional energy is the main motivating force in social life, for love and hatred, investing, working or consuming, rendering cult or waging war. [10] Emotional energy ranges from the highest heights of enthusiasm, self-confidence and initiative to the deepest depths of apathy, depression and retreat. Emotional energy comes from variously successful or failed chains of interaction rituals, that is, patterned social encounters –from conversation or sexual flirtation through Christmas family dinners or office work to mass demonstrations, organizations or revolutions. In the latter, the coupling of participants' behavior synchronizes their nervous systems to the point of generating a collective effervescence, one observable in their mutual focus and emotional entraining (incorrect use of word, "entraining"), as well as in their loading of emotional and symbolic meaning to entities which subsequently become emblems of the ritual and of the membership group endorsing, preserving, promoting and defending them. Thus social life would be most importantly for generating and distributing emotional energy.

Affect Control Theory, originated by David R. Heise, proposes that social actions are designed by their agents to create impressions that befit sentiments reigning in a situation. Emotions are transient physical and subjective states depending on the current impression of the emoting person, and on the comparison of that impression with the sentiment attached to the person's identity. As such, emotions are visceral signals to self and observable signals to others about the individual's identity in the situation, and about the individual's understanding of events in the situation. Heise developed a simulation program for analyzing affect-control processes in social interaction, and for predicting moment-to-moment emotions of interactants. The program specifies emotions in terms of numerical profiles, emotion words, and cartoon-like drawings of interactants' facial expressions. A complete review of affect control theory is provided in Heise's 2007 book, Expressive Order. [11]

Empirical applications

Workplaces

Following Hochschild's lead, the sociology of emotions has been applied extensively to a variety of workplace interactions. Jennifer Pierce, a student of Hochschild's, has examined law firms, for instance, and Robin Leidner the emotion work in fast food outlets.

Social Movements

Inspired by James M. Jasper's cultural work in the late 1990s, especially The Art of Moral Protest, a number of scholars of protest and social movements have begun to examine the emotions involved. They include Erika Summers Effler, a student of Randall Collins who examines how emotions inform a sense of time in Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes; Lynn Owens, who documents the emotions of a declining social movement, Amsterdam's squatters, in Cracking under Pressure; and Verta Taylor, whose book, Rock-a-Bye Baby documents struggles over the feelings new mothers are supposed to feel. Deborah Gould traces a number of emotional processes throughout the rise and fall of ACT UP in a series of articles and a book, Moving Politics. A 1999 conference, organized by James M. Jasper, Jeff Goodwin, and Francesca Polletta, helped spur this new development in social movement theory and research. Scholars worldwide have taken up the challenge to study the emotions of social movements, including a cluster of French researchers such as Olivier Fillieule, Isabelle Sommier, and Christophe Traini.

As a measure of religiosity

According to the sociologist Mervin Verbit, emotion may be understood as one of the key components of religiosity. Furthermore, religious emotion may be broken down into four dimensions:

The content of one's religious emotions may vary from situation to situation, as will the degree to which it may occupy the person (frequency), the intensity of the emotion, and the centrality of the emotional feeling (in that religious tradition, or person's life). [12] [13] [14]

In this sense, emotion is somewhat similar to Charles Glock's "experience" dimension of religiosity (Glock, 1972: 39). [15]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emotion</span> Conscious subjective experience of humans

Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, or creativity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sociology of religion</span> Branch of sociology

Sociology of religion is the study of the beliefs, practices and organizational forms of religion using the tools and methods of the discipline of sociology. This objective investigation may include the use both of quantitative methods and of qualitative approaches.

Feelings are subjective self-contained phenomenal experiences. According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, a feeling is "a self-contained phenomenal experience"; and feelings are "subjective, evaluative, and independent of the sensations, thoughts, or images evoking them". The term feeling is closely related to, but not the same as, emotion. Feeling may for instance refer to the conscious subjective experience of emotions. The study of subjective experiences is called phenomenology. Psychotherapy generally involves a therapist helping a client understand, articulate, and learn to effectively regulate the client's own feelings, and ultimately to take responsibility for the client's experience of the world. Feelings are sometimes held to be characteristic of embodied consciousness.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines religiosity as: "Religiousness; religious feeling or belief. [...] Affected or excessive religiousness". Different scholars have seen this concept as broadly about religious orientations and degrees of involvement or commitment. Religiosity is measured at the levels of individuals or groups and there is a lack of agreement on what criteria would constitute religiosity among scholars. Sociologists of religion have observed that an individual's experience, beliefs, sense of belonging, and behavior often are not congruent with their actual religious behavior, since there is much diversity in how one can be religious or not. Multiple problems exist in measuring religiosity. For instance, measures of variables such as church attendance produce different results when different methods are used - such as traditional surveys vs time-use surveys.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arlie Russell Hochschild</span> American professor of sociology

Arlie Russell Hochschild is an American professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and writer. Hochschild has long focused on the human emotions that underlie moral beliefs, practices, and social life generally. She is the author of nine books including, most recently, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, a finalist for the National Book Award. In The Managed Heart (1983), The Second Shift (1989), The Time Bind (1997) and many of her other books, she continues the sociological tradition of C. Wright Mills by drawing links between private troubles and public issues. Her impact worldwide is recognized, as her books have been translated into 16 different languages.

Emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. More specifically, workers are expected to regulate their personas during interactions with customers, co-workers, clients, and managers. This includes analysis and decision-making in terms of the expression of emotion, whether actually felt or not, as well as its opposite: the suppression of emotions that are felt but not expressed. This is done so as to produce a certain feeling in the customer or client that will allow the company or organization to succeed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social exchange theory</span> Generalization theory explaining social behaviour regarding society and economics

Social exchange theory is a sociological and psychological theory that studies the social behavior in the interaction of two parties that implement a cost-benefit analysis to determine risks and benefits. The theory also involves economic relationships—the cost-benefit analysis occurs when each party has goods that the other parties value. Social exchange theory suggests that these calculations occur in romantic relationships, friendships, professional relationships, and ephemeral relationships as simple as exchanging words with a customer at the cash register. Social exchange theory says that if the costs of the relationship are higher than the rewards, such as if a lot of effort or money were put into a relationship and not reciprocated, then the relationship may be terminated or abandoned.

In sociology, social action, also known as Weberian social action, is an act which takes into account the actions and reactions of individuals. According to Max Weber, "Action is 'social' insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course."

An affectional action is one of four major types of social action, as defined by Max Weber. Unlike the other social actions, an affectional action is an action that occurs as a result of a person's state of feeling, sometimes regardless of the consequences that follow it. Because the action is a result of our state of feeling, an affectional action may sometimes be described as irrational and reactive. An example of an affectional action can be the act of a father striking their daughter because of an action that she carried out that the father saw as frustrating.

Emotion work is understood as the art of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling.

Feeling rules are socially shared norms that influence how people want to try to feel emotions in given social relations. This concept was introduced by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in 1979. Hochschild's 1983 book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, discusses feeling rules in greater depth, especially in the occupational worlds of flight attendants and bill collectors. Hochschild draws on the work of sociologist Erving Goffman as well as labor scholar Harry Braverman to discuss the dramaturgical demands and emotional labor entailed by jobs in the service sector, in which workers must "perform" certain roles that entail abiding by certain feeling rules. She notes that women are more likely to have such jobs than men, and that analysis of feeling rules may therefore be especially relevant to understanding the gendered dimensions of labor. This work foreshadows themes from her later analyses of women's work, both paid and unpaid, e.g. in The Commercialization of Intimate Life (2003).

In control theory, affect control theory proposes that individuals maintain affective meanings through their actions and interpretations of events. The activity of social institutions occurs through maintenance of culturally based affective meanings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emotional exhaustion</span> Chronic state of physical and emotional depletion

Emotional exhaustion is symptom of burnout, a chronic state of physical and emotional depletion that results from excessive work or personal demands, or continuous stress. It describes a feeling of being emotionally overextended and exhausted by one's work. It is manifested by both physical fatigue and a sense of feeling psychologically and emotionally "drained".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emotion classification</span> Contrast of one emotion from another

Emotion classification, the means by which one may distinguish or contrast one emotion from another, is a contested issue in emotion research and in Affective science. Researchers have approached the classification of emotions from one of two fundamental viewpoints:

  1. that emotions are discrete and fundamentally different constructs
  2. that emotions can be characterized on a dimensional basis in groupings

Self-conscious emotions, such as guilt, shame, embarrassment, and pride, are a variety of social emotions that relate to our sense of self and our consciousness of others' reactions to us.

Interpersonal (Interaction) adaptation theory (IAT) is often referred to as a theory of theories. Several theories have been developed to provide frameworks as explanations of social interactions. After reviewing and examining various communication theories and previous empirical evidence pertaining to interpersonal communication, a need to address ways in which individuals adapt to one another in interactions became apparent. The importance of observing both sides of a dyadic interaction lead to the development of the interpersonal adaptation theory. The theory states, individuals enter interactions with expectations, requirements, and desires, which combined establish an interaction position. Once the interaction begins, the difference between interaction position and the other party's actual behavior determines whether the individual will adapt and continue the communication positively or not.

The self-discrepancy theory states that individuals compare their "actual" self to internalized standards or the "ideal/ought self". Inconsistencies between "actual", "ideal" and "ought" are associated with emotional discomforts. Self-discrepancy is the gap between two of these self-representations that leads to negative emotions.

David Reuben Jerome Heise was a social psychologist who originated the idea that affectual processes control interpersonal behavior. He contributed to both quantitative and qualitative methodology in sociology. He retired from undergraduate teaching in 2002, but continued research and graduate student consulting as Rudy Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Indiana University. He was most well known for his work on affect control theory.

Mervin Feldman Verbit is an American sociologist whose work focuses on sociology of religion, American Jews and the American Jewish community. He is currently the chair of the Sociology Department at Touro College.

Charles Young Glock was an American sociologist whose work focuses on sociology of religion and survey research.

References

  1. ↑ Hare, A. P. (1976). Handbook of small group research (2nd ed.). New York: Free Press, Chapter 3
  2. ↑ Hare, A. P. (1976). Handbook of small group research (2nd ed.). New York: Free Press, Chapter 7
  3. ↑ Milgram, S. (1974). An interview with Carol Tavris. Psychology Today, pp. 70-73
  4. ↑ Kemper, T. D. (1978). A social interactional theory of emotion. New York: Wiley
  5. ↑ Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: The commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press
  6. ↑ Thoits, P. A. (1990). Emotional deviance: research agendas. T. D. Kemper (Ed.), Research agendas in the sociology of emotions (pp. 180–203). Albany: State University of New York Press
  7. ↑ Microso Archived 2009-01-07 at the Wayback Machine
  8. ↑ Purpose of emotions
  9. ↑ Scheff, Thomas J, and Retzinger, Suzanne. (1991) Emotions and violence : shame and rage in destructive conflicts. Lexington, Mass: Lexington Books
  10. ↑ Collins, Randall. (2004) Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton University Press
  11. ↑ Heise, David. (2007) Expressive Order: Confirming Sentiments in Social Actions. New York: Springer
  12. ↑ Verbit, M. F. (1970). The components and dimensions of religious behavior: Toward a reconceptualization of religiosity. American mosaic, 24, 39.
  13. ↑ Küçükcan, T. (2010). Multidimensional Approach to Religion: a way of looking at religious phenomena. Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 4(10), 60-70.
  14. ↑ Talip Küçükcan (2000). "Can Religiosity be Measured? Dimensions of Religious Commitment: Theories Revisited". Uludağ Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi. 9 (1).
  15. ↑ Glock, C. Y. (1972) ‘On the Study of Religious Commitment’ in J. E. Faulkner (ed.) Religion’s Influence in Contemporary Society, Readings in the Sociology of Religion, Ohio: Charles E. Merril: 38-56.
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