Working with emotion: Issues for the researcher in fieldwork and teamwork

This paper addresses the role of emotion in the qualitative research process and in particular, the effects of emotional experiences on the researcher. Drawing briefly on the literature, we show the importance of emotion for understanding the research process. Whilst this literature acknowledges the emotional risk for research respondents, there is little evidence providing in-depth understanding of the emotions of the researcher. We consider theoretically and empirically, the significance of emotion throughout the duration of a research project. Using our own personal experiences in the field, we present a range of emotional encounters that qualitative researchers may face. We offer suggestions for research teams who wish to develop strategies for 'managing' emotion and effectively utilizing 'emotionally-sensed knowledge'. We conclude that unless emotion in research is acknowledged, not only will researchers be left vulnerable, but also our understandings of the social world will remain impoverished. The challenge therefore is how to construct meaning and develop understanding and knowledge in an academic environment that, on the whole, trains researchers to be rational and objective, and 'extract out' emotion.     

Sociological Introspection and Emotional Experience

Although social constructionists now study emotions, they neglect what emotion feels like and how it is experienced. This paper argues that social constructionists can and should study how private and social experience are fused in felt emotions. Resurrecting introspection (conscious awareness of awareness or self-examination) as a systematic sociological technique will allow social constructionists to examine emotion as a product of the individual processing of meaning as well as socially shared cognitions. Examining introspection as a sociological process, this paper argues that introspection can generate interpretive materials from self and others useful for understanding the lived experience of emotions. Findings from four studies–one, self-introspective, and the other three, interactive introspective examinations with co-investigators–provide information about the subjective part of emotion. They demonstrate the advantages of introspection in dealing with the complex, ambiguous, and processual nature of emotional experience.     

White-Knuckle Research: Emotional Dynamics in Fieldwork with Racist Activists

Current understandings of emotions as relational expressions rather than individual states have made it possible to reconsider the role of emotion in the research process. This article proposes two ways that qualitative research on social movements can benefit from greater attention to the emotional dynamics of fieldwork. First, by examining the strategic use of various emotions by informants as well as by researchers, scholars are in a better position to explore how informants and researchers jointly shape knowledge and interpretation in qualitative research. Second, exploration of emotional dynamics in interviewing relationships can be used as data to deepen understanding of both the interpretative process and of the emotional content of social movements. I examine these issues in the context of a life history project with activists in contemporary U.S. racist movements.     

Learning to “Deal” and “De‐escalate”: How Men in Nursing Manage Self and Patient Emotions

While prior research has explored how gender frames emotion management processes, little work has specifically examined the links between men's emotion management in a caring profession and theory on masculine emotionality. Stereotyped as less sensitive to their own and others' emotions, male nurses confront unique challenges in navigating the profession's emotional demands. Drawing on men's diaries and interviews, I examine emergent emotion‐based processes that characterize men's emotional labor—the strategies men use to manage their own and patient emotions on the job. In managing their own emotion, men's narratives reveal three distinct strategies: reframing the nurse role, distancing, and relinquishing situational control. In managing patient emotions, they frame control over their own emotions as a means for managing others and emphasize knowledge/education as a strategy for managing patient stress and anxiety. While both male and female nurses may engage these strategies, men's emotion management implicates the simultaneous reproduction and disruption of hegemonic masculinity and the reason/emotion dualisms that undergird the current gender system. Implications for masculinity and emotion management theory, as well as recruiting, training, and retaining male nurses are explored.     

ACHIEVING EMOTIONS IN COLLECTIVE ACTION: EMOTIONAL PROCESSES AND MOVEMENT MOBILIZATION IN THE 1989 CHINESE STUDENT MOVEMENT

This article outlines an emotional achievement perspective for the study of emotions in social movements. Following Denzin's work on emotions, I consider emotions as self-feelings that are situated, interactional, and temporal in nature. The concept of emotions as achievement complements Hochschild's emotion management perspective. While management focuses on control, achievement emphasizes articulation and creativity. I argue that, although individuals may be compelled to suppress feelings in the organizational context, different social contexts and practices make it possible for individuals to pursue emotional fulfillment and self-realization. In social movements, the process of emotional achievement among participants unfolds as a process of mobilization. An analysis of the emotional dynamics of the 1989 Chinese student movement shows that emotions were inextricably intertwined with identities and action and that the emotional dynamics generated in this process significantly contributed to movement mobilization. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical contributions of the emotional achievement perspective.     

The Contribution of Older Siblings' Reactions to Emotions to Preschoolers' Emotional and Social Competence

SUMMARY

According to Tompkins' (1991) theory on the socialization of emotion, young children's emotional and social competence are influenced by others' reactions to the children's emotions. Patterns of parental reactions to emotions have been shown to account for significant variance in preschoolers' emotion and social competence. However, the impact of others significant in the preschooler's life has been largely ignored. To help fill this gap, associations were examined between older siblings' reactions to 41 preschoolers' emotions and the preschoolers' social-emotional competence (i.e., affective balance, emotion knowledge, positive, prosocial, and provocative responding to peers' emotions, sociometric likability, and teacher-rated social competence). Using a multiple regression strategy, the contributions of sibling reactions and moderating demographic variables to preschooler emotional and social competence were evaluated. Certain sibling reactions, especially positive emotional responsiveness, were shown to play important roles. Many predictions were moderated by age of child, sex of one dyad member     

“Don't Cry,You're Not a Baby!”: Emotion,Role and Hierarchy in Korean Language Socialisation Practice

I examine how South Korean children learn culturally specific emotional knowledge, especially affective hierarchy and the association between emotional displays and social roles, through participation in peer talk. An analysis of children's and teachers’ everyday emotional discourses shows that children, rather than passively adopting adult emotional discourses, creatively employ a range of linguistic and communicative features regarding emotions to construct their own culture‐laden emotional world. Findings articulate the role children's peer talk has in cultural reproduction and dynamic aspects of the language socialisation processes.     

Emotion,Rationality, and Everyday Life in the Sociology of Emile Durkheim

Durkheim's emphasis on the role of emotion in social life has been influential in the development of the sociology of emotions. Others have analyzed Durkheim's distinctly social conception of reason and rationality. However, the interconnections between “emotion” and “reason” in his thinking have seldom been directly and systematically addressed. These interconnections deserve further explication and development, particularly as they apply to the level of language and action—i.e., “practical reason”—in everyday life. Seeing the collective emotional basis of “social facts,” in general, and “logic,” “reason,” and the basic “categories of the understanding,” in particular, opens up new applications for Durkheim's broader theoretical framework.     

“I Don't Have to be Afraid of You”: Rape Survivors' Emotion Management in Court

This analysis of 32 semi-structured interviews with rape survivors explores why and how emotions are managed during court events. I examine rape survivors' accounts to identify the factors that contribute to intense feelings in the courtroom, incentives/motivations survivors have to manage their feelings and expressions of specific emotions, survivors' individualized strategies for deflecting, suppressing, and cultivating emotion, and interpersonal strategies for achieving emotional control that involve others in the courtroom. This investigation shows that survivors are not passive victims and that emotions are a fundamental feature of interaction in courtrooms. This investigation builds on Mills and Kleinman's (1988) cognitive/emotional framework and other studies of interpersonal emotion management in and out of formal organizations.     

Evil as Indexical: The Implicit Objective Status of Guns and Illegal Drugs

We use C.H. Mead's perspective on the meaning of social objects and his theory of the past and Harold Garfinkel's application of indexicality to describe how people respond to social objects as evil. Mead's notion of an implied objective past illuminates how social actors not only connect objects to past evils but also invoke an objective past to index evil in the future. Focusing on guns and illegal drugs, we maintain that responses to each draw on conceptions of the past in ways that attempt to make their connection to evil in the past and future justifiable. Such responses create meaningful categories that actors then use to anticipate future responses to objects. We note that while people appear to be comfortable using pasts and indexical expressions to define Schedule I drugs as evil in themselves, the attempt to make guns into evil objects has met with strong resistance and requires elaborate contextualization.     

The elephant in the newsroom: Current research on journalism and emotion

The article seeks to review current work on the obvious but complex entanglement of journalism and emotion. The field has been under‐theorized and under‐researched; however, in recent years, the body of studies that attempt to grasp the relationship between journalism, journalists, media content, and emotion is growing. The paper roughly systematizes the literature on journalism and emotion based on the Goffmanian distinction between front region and back region; that is, I consider both research on emotionality of the public outcomes of journalists' work marked by journalists' professional ideology and less visible journalists' emotional labour that is behind media content. Based on the review of the body of research and on a sociological conceptualization of emotions, I identify several blind spots. Most importantly, what is still largely missing from the emergent work is research that complies with the social character of journalists' emotions: acknowledges emotions as a force central to the contemporary networked, dynamic and increasingly precarious journalism work, and conceptualizes emotions in journalism as a sociologically relevant phenomenon articulated by the context including newswork, technologies, and media organizations.     

EXAMINING EMOTION AS DISCOURSE: Emotion Codes and Presidential Speeches Justifying War

Observers commonly argue that emotional appeal is critical for persuasive communication in mass media, science and social policy hearings, social problem advocacy, and politics. This raises a practical question: How can appeals to emotion be accomplished in mass audiences characterized by heterogeneity? I explore this question by theorizing emotional persuasion to be encouraged by the artful use of “emotion codes,” which are sets of socially circulating ideas about which emotions are appropriate to feel when, where, and toward whom or what, as well as how emotions should be outwardly expressed. As an illustration, I examine an instance of presidential communication surrounding war, the “Story of September 11” crafted by President George W. Bush in his first four nationally televised speeches after the events of that day. I explore how this melodramatic tale contains multiple and interlocking reflections of emotion codes which encourage audience members to feel in particular ways about the Good American victim and hero and the evil terrorist villain who are the primary story characters. In the conclusion I speculate about ways in which deploying elements of socially circulating ideas about emotion might encourage persuasion in large heterogeneous audiences as well as the necessities for examining emotion as discourse in other arenas of social life. My goal is to develop a model for empirically examining emotional meaning as social phenomena.     

Managing the Emotions of Others

Although research has focused on how individuals manage their own emotions, little attention has been paid to how individuals manage the emotions of other people. Here, I describe several techniques of interpersonal emotion-management, drawing from observations of a psychodrama-based encounter group which deliberately manipulated its members' feelings. Analysis reveals a number of strategies (e.g., group enactments, provocations, comforting) which, when used sequentially, produced first emotional loss of control in the individual and then positive emotion. Group solidarity was sometimes affected by these interpersonal emotion-management techniques as well. Some techniques may be similar to those used in military training and cult group recruitment, although further research attention is needed in these arenas. Other settings in which members play upon the emotions of others should be examined to identify other interpersonal techniques and the sequencing of strategies which produce desired individual and group outcomes.     

Learning to feel: the neglected sociology of social movements

This paper discusses the experience and ideology of emotions among animal rights activists, and more broadly, the applicability of the sociology of emotions to the field of social movements. I examine the case of a social movement which relies heavily on empathy in its initial recruitment, and which has been derisively labeled by outsiders as ‘emotional’. I explain recruitment to animal rights activism by showing how activists develop a ‘vocabulary of emotions’ to rationalize their participation to others and themselves, along with managing the emotional tone of the movement by limiting the kinds of people who can take part in debates about animal cruelty. The interactive nature in which emotions develop in social movements is stressed over previous approaches to emotions in the social movement literature, which treat emotions as impulsive or irrational.     

Emotional Experience as a Function of Social Context: The Role of the Other

Inconsistencies in previous findings concerning the relationship between emotion and social context are likely to reflect the multi-dimensionality of the sociality construct. In the present study we focused on the role of the other person by manipulating two aspects of this role: co-experience of the event and expression of emotion. We predicted that another's co-experience and expression would affect emotional responses and that the direction of these effects would depend upon the manipulated emotion and how the role of the other person is appraised. Participants read vignettes eliciting four different emotions: happiness, sadness, anxiety, and anger. As well as an alone condition, there were four conditions in which a friend was present, either co-experiencing the event or merely observing it, and either expressing emotions consistent with the event or not showing any emotion. There were significant effects of co-experience in the case of anger situations, and of expression in the case of happiness and sadness situations. Social appraisal also appeared to influence emotional response. We discuss different processes that might be responsible for these results.     

The Effect of Social Presence on the Facial and Verbal Expression of Emotion and the Interrelationships Among Emotion Components

Women were videotaped while they spoke about a positive and a negative experience either in the presence of an experimenter or alone. They gave self-reports of their emotional experience, and the videotapes were rated for facial and verbal expression of emotion. Participants spoke less about their emotions when the experimenter (E) was present. When E was present, during positive disclosures they smiled more, but in negative disclosures they showed less negative and more positive expression. Facial behavior was only related to experienced emotion during positive disclosure when alone. Verbal behavior was related to experienced emotion for positive and negative disclosures when alone. These results show that verbal and nonverbal behaviors, and their relationship with emotional experience, depend on the type of emotion, the nature of the emotional event, and the social context.     

The Emergence of the Emotional Self: A Developmental Theory

G.H. Mead (1934) offers a set of stages of development which describes how infants transform into mindful and self-reflexive social beings through social interaction. He does not, however, provide any parallel set of stages in the development of emotionality. This paper attempts to extend Mead's model by specifying seven stages in emotional development which are interdependent with Mead's stages of development of mind and self. These stages specify how individuals learn to share emotions with others, and learn to identify and interpret their own and others' emotional selves. Fundamental to this analysis is that self development and emotional development are inextricably linked. A framework is offered for the analysis of emotions that (1) recognizes emotions as processual; (2) notes the hierarchial relations among emotions; and (3) presumes that cognition and emotion are not mutually exclusive. The framework illustrates its utility by answering the question, “How does an infant transform from a being who experiences sensations into a being who experiences emotions?”     

Emotional labour: skill and work in the social regulation of feelings

I define emotional labour as the labour involved in dealing with other peoples’feelings, a core component of which is the regulation of emotions. The aims of the paper are firstly to suggest that the expression of feelings is a central problem of capital and paid work and secondly to highlight the contradictions of emotions at work. To begin with I argue that ‘emotion’is a subject area fitting for inclusion in academic discussion, and that the expression of emotions is regulated by a form of labour. In the section ‘Emotion at home’I suggest that emotional labour is used to lay the foundations of a social expression of emotion in the privacy of the domestic domain. However the forms emotional labour takes and the skills it involves leave women subordinated as unskilled and stigmatised as emotional. In the section ‘Emotion at work’I argue that emotional labour is also a commodity. Though it may remain invisible or poorly paid, emotional labour facilitates and regulates the expression of emotion in the public domain. Studies of home and the workplace are used to begin the process of recording the work carried out in managing emotions and drawing attention to its significance in the social reproduction of labour power and social relations of production.     

Feeling Social Movements: Theoretical Contributions to Social Movement Research on Emotions

Recent literature provides evidence that emotions are intrinsic to the constitution of social movements. The present review examines how scholars theorize emotions in their empirical studies and focuses on the following topics: emotion work, emotional framing, emotional cultures and emotional opportunity structures. The combination of several constructs in the analysis of emotions signals a shift toward integration of preexisting perspectives common in the field of social movements.