Sociology of Emotions

Newly prominent in sociology, the study of the sociology of emotions defines emotions as socially constructed and culturally variable labels attached to physiological responses to stimuli. Studies have questioned the universality of emotions, their variation across cultures, rules about feelings and emotional displays, and the necessity of emotions to maintaining the social bond. As children develop selves, they also learn how to identify and express emotions according to their culture's rules. New advances in neuroscience are allowing sociologists to use an understanding of the brain to further comprehend the nature of emotions.

Keywords: Affect Control Theory; Collective Effervescence; Deference-emotion System; Emotion; Emotion Scripts; Emotional Socialization; Feeling Rules; Looking-glass Self; Primary Emotions

Overview

The sociology of emotions is a relatively new subfield of sociology, which first gained prominence in the 1970's. Prior to this time, the field of sociology concentrated more on cognition than emotions, although emotions have often remained a subtext in important works. Emotions were seen as the turf of psychologists and biologists. However, sociologists began to systematically study emotions because they realized first, that emotions are fundamentally social, and second, that emotions have always figured as causal mechanisms in sociological theory. They are necessary to the theories of some of the most influential figures in sociology, such as Emile Durkheim and Erving Goffman. Emotions are of sociological interest because they are a primary human motivation, they help in rational decision making, and they link the biology of the body with classic sociological questions about social construction and social control.

Emotions in Classic Sociological Theory

Even though the subfield of the sociology of emotions is relatively new, many of the classic theorists in sociology have made emotions important in their theories. For example, Emile Durkheim (1912/1965), [CCL1]one of the founding figures of sociology, discussed the importance of the emotions that arise during group rituals in his influential book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. In his theory, when people come together to perform collective rituals, they generate intense emotions, which they believe to be a sign of the power of their rituals and their "totems" (gods or symbols of the tribe). Group rituals served to connect this intense group emotion, which Durkheim called collective effervescence, to the group's symbols. Participants in the rituals thought that their intense feelings arose because their totems were powerful. Durkheim explained that such intense emotions were a sign of the emotional power of the group ritual itself (Shilling, 2002; Summers-Effler, 2006). In Durkheim's theories, emotions are the glue holding society together.

Emotion also figured prominently in the theories of two founding figures in microsociology, Charles Horton Cooley and Erving Goffman. Cooley created a theory for understanding the development of the self through interaction with others — the "looking-glass" self. In his theory, when people interact with others, they imagine how their actions look to others, imagine how others judge their actions, and then experience feelings of pride or shame. While this does not imply that people will conform to the expectations of others, it does stipulate that emotions are crucial for self-understanding. Goffman, like Cooley, also described society as a place where individuals create selves to present to others. Goffman studied how people craft self-presentations to evoke desired reactions in others. Success means saving face; if performances go awry, people lose face. Losing face — being embarrassed — dominates Goffman's work; however, he did not spend time considering its opposite, pride (Scheff, 1990; Summers-Effler, 2006).

While emotions appear in the works of these and many other theorists, they were usually "black boxed" — there was little attempt to specify exactly what emotions were, or how they arose, and how their biological, psychological, and socially constructed aspects were related.

What are Emotions?

Sociologists understand emotions as operating on two levels. First, emotions have a biological or physiological aspect. When people experience emotions, they generally experience some sort of physiological arousal; for example, the heart rate increases or chemicals such as dopamine or adrenaline are released into the body's autonomic systems at a faster or slower rate. Second (and more important to sociology), emotions are socially constructed. People are taught to interpret these states of arousal in culturally specific ways, to label them as emotions, and to follow specific rules about how to interpret and act on these feelings. Emotions are shaped by society, by cultural definitions, expectations, and rules and norms that regulate their acceptable experience and expression.

Thoits (1989) says that emotion consists of four components,

(a) Appraisals of a situational stimulus or context,

(b) Changes in physiological or bodily sensation,

(c) The free or inhibited display of expressive gestures, and

(d) A cultural label applied to specific constellations of one or more of the first three components (p. 318).

It is not necessary for all four components to be apparent for an emotion to exist.

Affect, Sentiment & Mood

Some sociologists use the terms emotion, sentiment, mood, and affect interchangeably. Others (especially those who use affect control theory in their analysis) use them more specifically. For these sociologists, affect means "any evaluative (positive or negative) orientation toward an object" (Robinson, Smith-Lovin & Wisecup, 2006, p. 181). These evaluations can fall into three areas: objects are judged as good or bad, strong or weak, and active or quiet. Sentiments are culturally shaped affective reactions to symbols, while emotions are "the labels…that are applied to the ways we feel after an event has occurred" (Robinson, Smith-Lovin & Wisecup, 2006, p. 183). Moods are longer-lasting emotional states.

Many sociologists believe that emotions can be divided into primary emotions, those that are universal (appearing in all cultures), and secondary emotions, those that are more culturally specific (and do not appear in all cultures). Most theorists believe that three negative emotions — fear, anger, and sadness — and one positive emotion — happiness — are universal (Kemper 1987, Turner & Stets, 2005). The idea that some emotions are universal goes all the way back to Charles Darwin, who believed that emotions had evolutionary significance and were therefore common to all humans (Turner & Stets, 2005).

How do Emotions Develop? Emotional Socialization

Work on emotional socialization and emotional development examines the processes by which actors learn emotion and display rules. Johnson (1992) developed a theory describing stages of emotional development. She proposed seven stages of emotional development, tied to experience rather than age, and argued that the emotional self could not develop without interaction with others.

• Stage 1 of development is a pre-emotional stage, the feeling of sensations and response to tactile, visual, and auditory contact in which children feel stimuli and respond.
• Stage 2, mutual affective reciprocity, is where emotions first begin to develop. The basic emotions of joy, fear, anger, and surprise emerge as children understand that others will react to their actions. This means that cognition and affect are linked in the individual development of emotion, as children cognitively understand the cause and effect behind evoking motions in others.
• Stage 3, the mutual sharing of affect, the child and caregiver become conscious of the other sharing the same emotion. This is the stage in which the child first self-identifies as an actor (a human who can act upon the world), but still lacks a completely developed self.
• Stage 4, identification of others' and one's own emotions, children learn their society's labels for emotions and what specific emotions mean. In this stage, the child not only develops emotions but experiences emotional socialization, usually being taught by caregivers how to name emotions, describe their causes, and consider appropriate reactions.
• Stage 5, emotional role-taking, as the child learns cognitive role-taking, he or she also learns to role-take emotionally and to direct emotions back at himself or herself.
• Stage 6, the emergence of consciousness of relationships and the generalized other in which emotional role-taking expands so that the child is "capable of taking the emotional attitude of the generalized other" (p. 195).
• Stage 7 is the management of emotions, in which the deliberate evocation and control of emotion is learned.

Emotions continue to develop into adulthood, as people refine the rules they have learned as children and adapt them into new situations. Failure to become socialized into a society's rules about emotion can have severe consequences. In Western culture, people who display inappropriate emotions are labeled as neurotic, delinquent, or inept (Averill, 1986).

Applications

Importance of Emotions in Society

Kemper (1978) said emotions analytically connect the social structure with individuals, because inequalities in structure evoke particular emotions. In his model of emotions, social interaction between people always involves inequalities in power and status, because people are always interacting with others who are more or less powerful (or higher or lower status) than they are. He argued that people have physiological reactions when they experience these power and status inequalities, and said that these reactions correspond to specific emotions: shame, guilt, anxiety, and depression are possible, depending on whether one is the less powerful party or the party with the excess of power and status (Kemper 1978; Barbalet 2002). In this way, emotions are built into all social encounters.

Scheff (1990) argues that the primary motivation for action is the maintenance of the social bond, that humans need to belong. Threats to the bonds between people evoke shame; a sense that the bonds are strong evokes pride. Scheff believes that contemporary society denies the importance of the social bond, and for this reason, it has a hard time dealing with the subject of shame. Building on the work of Helen Lewis, a research psychoanalyst, he argues that people are biologically hardwired to be social creatures that bond and cooperate with others. Because this imperative is so strong, shame (which represents threats to the social bond) is the primary human emotion. Building on Cooley's idea of the looking-glass self, Scheff points out that humans constantly assess how they appear to others; this means that they should constantly be experiencing pride or shame. But because people deny the importance of the bond, they deny feeling shame instead of acknowledging and discharging the feeling. Pride and shame are the roots of what he calls the deference-emotion system: people conform to norms to protect the social bond and to feel pride.

Cross-Cultural Studies of Emotion

There is widespread agreement (although a few theorists do disagree) that some emotions are found in all cultures. The emotions generally seen as universal — called primary emotions — are fear, anger, sadness, and happiness. It is not clear why more of the universals are negative feelings; it has been suggested that a variety of negative emotions are necessary for evolutionary purposes. These emotions can vary in their level of intensity. Sociologists such as Kemper, Plutchik, and Turner believe that secondary emotions are combinations of primary emotions (Turner & Stets 2005).

However, beliefs about emotions and feeling rules are not universal. Individualistic cultures (like the US) see emotions as expressive of the true self. Collectivistic cultures see emotions as signaling social ranks. The same emotions are not found in all cultures. Evidence of this is found in language. There are many examples of words for emotions that do not exist in all cultures. For example, in Japanese, oime means "the unpleasant sense of being indebted to another person" (Parkinson, Fischer & Manstead, 2005, p. 35), and in German, Schadenfreude means a happiness caused by the misfortunes of another. Sometimes, as in the latter case, the emotion described is acknowledged by other cultures, but in other cases (oime, for example), there does not seem to be an emotional equivalent in other cultures.

Languages have different quantities of emotion words; English has more than twice the number of Taiwanese Chinese, which in turn has three times as many as Malaysian. Cultures also have different emotional scripts. Western cultures tend to conceptualize emotions as separable from context; non-Western cultures often link emotions to the specific and limited contexts in which they arise (Parkinson, Fischer & Manstead, 2005).

Feeling Rules & Display Rules

Beginning with a study of female airline attendants, Arlie Hochschild (1979) created the study of feeling and display rules. While sociologists wondered about social rules and informal constraint dealing with cognitive behavior, not much was done previous to Hochschild's work on the rules of emotion. Hochschild linked social structure and emotion in studies that suggest that people cognitively work on their emotions to bring them into line with cultural feeling rules. Putting together Erving Goffman's work on the social presentation of self with Freud's work on internal states of actors, Hochschild studied what happens when people realize they are experiencing emotions that they do not want to experience — or conversely, not feeling what they want to feel — and how they consciously work to bring their emotions into line with the "correct" emotions called for by the definition of the situation. People engaged in emotion work will try to change their physiological state of arousal, while also trying to cognitively talk themselves into feeling and expressing the proper emotions. Feeling rules dictate how strong an emotion should be and how long it should last. Linked to feeling rules are display rules, which similarly dictate how emotions should be revealed to others. Hochschild found that while sometimes people merely act as if they are following feeling rules, often they work on their emotions on a deep level to try to actually evoke the proper emotion for the situation. This is called deep acting, and it requires a certain amount of cognitive effort.

Situations carry rules about feeling states that are implicit in their definitions. For example, a funeral is a sad occasion; a sad or at least somber expression of emotion is called for. Because of this, Hochschild suggests that feeling rules vary by social class and status. Middle-class and service jobs require more emotion management because they are more involved with feeling and meaning-making (the commodification of feeling) while working-class jobs value physical labor, not emotional labor. Some jobs, such as service industry jobs with few rewards and high emotion work demands, lead to people seeing emotions arising from deep acting as a quality of the job, not as a quality of the self. This class difference in emotion work shows up in socialization. Middle-class parents are more likely to emphasize control of feeling and to control their children using feelings. Working-class children are taught to control their behavior and are controlled through behavior.

Affect Control Theory

Affect control theory, developed by David Heise in the 1970's, connects people's social roles with structure and emotions. It states that people define situations based on their knowledge of the roles and statuses involved and their understandings of what situations entail (their definition of the situation). People try to suit their actions to the situations as they understand them so that their emotions will be appropriate to the context. If they cannot match their emotions with their understanding of the situation, often they will change their definition of the situation. According to Heise (2009), affect control theory proposes that:

• Individuals conduct themselves so as to generate feelings appropriate to the situation.
• Individuals who can't maintain appropriate feelings through actions change their views of the situation.
• Individuals' emotions signal the relationship between their experiences and their definitions of situations (Heise, 2009).

An interesting prediction that arises from this theory is that when faced with a choice between acting to confirm their identities (their roles within the definition of the situation) or acting in a manner that will benefit their self-esteem, people tend to choose the former. Various studies have confirmed this prediction. For example, in experiments, people generally feel pleasure when they are evaluated on tasks positively and feel badly when they are evaluated negatively. In either case, they tend to believe the evaluations that confirm their own assessments of their performance and rate the evaluators who agree with them more highly — even if this means agreeing with the negative assessment (Turner & Stets, 2005).

Viewpoints

New Directions: Biology, Emotions & Rationality

Sociologists who study emotions debate about the relative importance of biology versus social construction. Many sociologists avoid integrating biology into their analyses because of fears of becoming biological reductionists, but studies of emotion have begun to integrate neurological findings with sociology. For example, new studies of the brain show that cognitive and emotional centers of the brain are both involved in decision making; without the emotional component, decision-making is irrational or impossible (Turner & Stets, 2005). This is one reason why computers, which can process information much faster than humans, still cannot replicate human thought or even correctly decipher the meaning of ambiguous sentences (Scheff, 1990). In this research, neurological findings are supporting sociological findings that have gone against the grain of the Western idea that emotions and rational thought are opposites.

Terms & Concepts

Affect Control Theory: That people define situations based on their knowledge of the roles and statuses involved and their definition of the situation, thus planning their actions so that their emotions will be appropriate to the context. If they cannot match their emotions with their understanding of the situation, often they will change their definition of the situation.

Collective Effervescence: Durkheim's term for the emotional impact of the power of the group over the individual.

Deference-Emotion System: Scheff's term for the system of social control in which people conform to norms to protect the social bond and generate feelings of pride and avoid nonconformity to avoid shame and threats to the social bond.

Emotion: A physiological response to a stimulus, given meaning by a cultural label.

Emotion Scripts: Cultural rules specifying when an emotion should be invoked, the proper responses to emotions, and the meaning of emotions.

Emotional Socialization: The processes by which actors learn emotion and display rules.

Feeling Rules: Societies have rules that specify which emotions are appropriate in which situations. Feeling rules vary by class and status.

Looking-Glass Self: Developed by Cooley, the idea that people understand themselves by imaging how their actions appear to others, imagining how these others will judge them, and experiencing self-feelings about these appraisals.

Primary Emotions: Emotions considered universal; generally happiness, anger, fear, and sadness.

Bibliography

Averill, J. (1986). The acquisition of emotions during adulthood. In R. Harre (Ed.), The social construction of emotions (pp. 98–118). New York, NY: Basil Blackwell.

Barbalet, J. (2002). Introduction: Why emotion are crucial. In J. Barbalet (Ed.), Emotions and Sociology (pp. 1–9). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Demorest, A., Popovska, A., & Dabova, M. (2012). The role of scripts in personal consistency and individual differences. Journal of Personality, 80, 187–218.Retrieved October 29, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=70469376

Doan, L. (2012). A social model of persistent mood states. Social Psychology Quarterly, 75, 198–218.Retrieved October 29, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=89464406

Heise, D. (2009). Affect Control Theory. Retrieved January 26, 2010 from Indiana University http://www.indiana.edu/~socpsy/ACT/.

Hochschild, A. R. (1979). Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. American Journal of Sociology 85 , 551–575.

Johnson, C. (1992). The emergence of the emotional self: A developmental theory. Symbolic Interaction 15, 183–202.

Kemper, T. (1987). How many emotions are there? Wedding the social and the autonomic components. American Journal of Sociology 93, 263-289.

Kemper, T. (1978). Toward a sociology of emotions: Some problems and some solutions. American Sociologist, 13, 30–41. Retrieved January 26, 2010 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=4945372&site=ehost-live

Parkinson, B., Fischer, A. H. & Manstead, A. S. R. (2005). Emotion in social relations. New York, NY: Psychology Press.

Robinson, D. T., Smith-Lovin, L. & Wisecup, A. K. (2006) Affect control theory. In J. E. Stets and J.H. Turner (Eds.), Handbook of the sociology of emotions (pp. 179–202). New York, NY: Springer.

Scheff, T. J. (1990). Microsociology: Discourse, emotion, and social structure. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Shilling, C. (2002). The two traditions in the sociology of emotions. In J. Barbalet (Ed.), Emotions and Sociology (pp. 10–32). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Summers-Effler, E. (2006). Ritual theory. In J. E. Stets and J. H. Turner (Eds.), Handbook of the sociology of emotions (pp. 135–154). New York, NY: Springer.

Thoits, P. A. (1989). The sociology of emotions. Annual Review of Sociology 15 , 317–342. Retrieved January 26, 2010 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=10461556&site=ehost-live

Turner, J. H & Stets, J. E. (2005). The sociology of emotions. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Van Kleef, G. A., Van Doorn, E. A., Heerdink, M. W., & Koning, L. F. (2011). Emotion is for influence. European Review of Social Psychology, 22114–163. Retrieved October 29, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=72034907

Suggested Reading

Clark, C. (1987). Sympathy biography and sympathy margin. American Journal of Sociology 93, 290–321.

Clark, C. (1997). Misery and company. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Durkheim, E. (1925/1965). The elementary forms of the religious life. New York, NY: Free Press.

Kemper, T. D., ed. (1990). Research agendas in the sociology of emotions. New York, NY: State University of New York Press.

Osbeck, L., & Nersessian, N. (2011). Affective problem solving: emotion in research practice. Mind & Society, 10, 57–78. Retrieved October 28, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=60590280

Stearns, P. N. (1994). American cool: Constructing a twentieth-century emotional style. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Tavris, C. (1989). Anger: The misunderstood emotion. New York, NY: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster.