The Temporality of Emotion: Constructing Past Emotions

Symbolic interactionists have developed a rich literature on emotion that has advanced our understanding of the socially constructed nature of emotions and has provided a wealth of understanding about emotions and emotional life. Left unexplored, however, has been the temporal nature of emotion. Similarly, interactionists' renewed interest in time and temporality has not focused on emotion. In this article I describe the implicit leads in these two literatures that need to be pulled together to make the linkage clear. Drawing on the work defining emotions as social objects and on George Herbert Mead's theory of the past, I describe how emotional pasts are used as foundations for situated actions. I also explain how we use the emotional pasts in four areas: the individual level, individuals in interaction, collective behavior, and the social structural level. This linkage provides insights for understanding how we use emotional pasts when we construct and enact behavior. I argue that emotional pasts are important tools used in the interpretation and construction of present emotions, to situate selves and others, and to construct the social order.     

When Emotion Work is Doomed to Fail: Ideological and Structural Constraints on Emotion Management

This paper explores how workers try to manage their emotions under conditions that doom them to fail. The workers in question—floor instructors at a sheltered workshop for people with developmental disabilities—were expected to infuse clients with positive feelings about work and to help transform them into committed workers. But structural conditions—boring, poorly paid assembly work and long gaps between contract jobs—forced them to obtain clients' compliance through coercive and confrontational emotion management techniques that contradicted their ideological beliefs. The floor instructors sought to peacefully increase their control over clients through “preventive emotion management” but most often they experienced a loss of control, leading some of them to experience “burnout.” This paper defines burnout as “occupational emotional deviance” that workers experience when they cannot manage their own and other's emotions according to organizational expectations.     

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.     

‘Anger is Why We're All Here’: Mobilizing and Managing Emotions in a Professional Activist Organization

The emotions involved in social activism are central factors in the recruitment to, motivation for, and sustainability of social movements. But this perspective on the role of emotions within social movements contrasts with studies of emotions within mainstream organizations where employees are called on to manage their own emotions and those of others. Thus, while much social movement research focuses on how activists actively cultivate emotional expression, these ideas rarely intersect with the organizational research that examines how a diminished quality of working life may result from the need for employees to modify, suppress or emphasize emotions. Using in-depth interviews with activists at Amnesty International, this article bridges this theoretical divide by examining emotional labour and emotional regulation among paid activists in a professional social movement organization. I explore the ways in which employees struggle with the emotional component of their work and the implications of these emotions for the quality of their working life, the stability of such organizations and the maintenance of social movements.     

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.     

Emotional labor in social workers' practice

The meeting between service users and social workers is emotional, since it is centered on significant challenges and changes in the service users' lives. Emotions are thus always at play in social work, but are managed in various ways by the professional. In an explorative qualitative case study at two Danish social services departments, we identified three types of emotional labor: (1) when the social worker shuts off emotions both during and after the meeting; (2) when the social worker defers emotions and processes them at a later time; and (3) when emotions dominate, and a case gets ‘under the skin’ of the social worker. Emotional labor can have both positive and negative effect on the work, and knowledge about different kinds of emotional labor can aid professional discussion about emotions at the work place as well as the psychosocial working environment for the social workers, factors which help improve practice. The study showed that emotional labor is a multidimensional concept, hence it is not just managed in different ways by social workers; it is always related to the specific emotion culture and the community of practice at the work place.     

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 the Hands of Time: Intersections of Time and Emotion

While the fields of the sociology of time and the sociology of emotion have grown exponentially, missing from the literature is explicit theorizing on the intersections of emotion and time. In this review article, we begin by examining literature that explores both how time (e.g. temporal control, perceived amount) influences emotional responses and how emotions (e.g. emotional intensity, valence) impact perceptions of time. Although such research occurs in a variety of disciplines, much of it fails to look at individuals' active manipulation of time and emotion to produce desired experiences. After discussing the established concepts of emotion work (Hochschild 1979) and time work (Flaherty 2003), we illustrate how two newer concepts – “temporal emotion work” (Lois 2010, 2012) and “emoting time” (Mullaney and Shope 2012) – serve as starting points for thinking about how individuals actively use time in emotion work and emotions in time work. Although much of the thinking to date occurs within the scholarly literature on work and family, we call for more intentional and systematic theorizing about the relationship between time and emotion.     

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?”     

Effects of Social Anxiety on Emotional Mimicry and Contagion: Feeling Negative,but Smiling Politely

Socially anxiety may be related to a different pattern of facial mimicry and contagion of others’ emotions. We report two studies in which participants with different levels of social anxiety reacted to others’ emotional displays, either shown on a computer screen (Study 1) or in an actual social interaction (Study 2). Study 1 examined facial mimicry and emotional contagion in response to displays of happiness, anger, fear, and contempt. Participants mimicked negative and positive emotions to some extent, but we found no relation between mimicry and the social anxiety level of the participants. Furthermore, socially anxious individuals were more prone to experience negative emotions and felt more irritated in response to negative emotion displays. In Study 2, we found that social anxiety was related to enhanced mimicry of smiling, but this was only the case for polite smiles and not for enjoyment smiles. These results suggest that socially anxious individuals tend to catch negative emotions from others, but suppress their expression by mimicking positive displays. This may be explained by the tendency of socially anxious individuals to avoid conflict or rejection.     

Reli(e)ving the Past: Emotion Work in the Holocaust's Second Generation

Although most studies of the Second Generation typically account for their social psychological orientations by relying on psychiatric and psychological models, I propose an alternative “listening” to this cohort. I analyze in‐depth interviews by adopting Hochschild's insights on emotion work as a sensitizing framework and suggest that (1) four interrelated types of “deep acting” they continuously feel compelled to perform can account for the psychological “symptoms” commonly attributed to them and (2) these types of deep acting constitute adjustments and reactions to problematic emotional dynamics characterizing their survivor families. I conclude with a discussion of the reciprocal effects of this emotion work.     

'Du hast jar keene Ahnung': African American English dubbed into German

This paper explores the translation of sociolinguistic variation by examining the ways that African American English (AAE) is dubbed into German. In discussing this ubiquitous yet poorly studied area of language use, I show that ideas about language as an index to social groupings are transferable to the degree that the ideas overlap in the cultures in question. In the case of German, if the character being dubbed is young, male and tied to the street cultures of the urban inner city, then AAE is dubbed using a form of German that has links to the urban youth cultures of north‐central Germany. The transferability of sociolinguistic variation is important to issues related to cross‐cultural communication and the ideologies that may play a role in the outcomes of that communication as well as to linguistic creativity and language style more generally.     

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.     

Students Who Strip: The Benefits of Alternate Identities for Managing Stigma

We apply interactionist theories that highlight the contextual nature of stigma and the relational quality of stigmatization to the case of college students who work as topless dancers. We explore how the “toll of stripping” might be mediated by having an alternate, positive identity like “student.” Our analysis demonstrates that students who strip are distinctive from other strippers in important ways that stem from their salient, positive identity as students. Although they often feel as if they live a “double life” because they hide their occupation from family and friends, they benefit from sharing their student goals and ambitions with club customers. “Student” is a socially acceptable identity to share in routine social interactions and helps student strippers frame dancing as a transient occupation, offering them an opportunity to maintain a positive sense of self while buffering them from some of the negative effects of stripping.     

“People Want to Protect Themselves a Little Bit”: Emotions,Denial, and Social Movement Nonparticipation*

Emotions can be a source of information and an impetus for social action, but the desire to avoid unpleasant emotions and the need for emotion management can also prevent social movement participation. Ethnographic and interview data from a rural Norwegian community describes how people avoided thinking about climate change in part because doing so raised fears of ontological security, emotions of helplessness and guilt, and was a threat to individual and collective senses of identity. In contrast to existing studies that focus on the public's lack of information or concern about global warming as the basis for the lack of public response, my work describes the way in which holding information at a distance was an active strategy performed by individuals as part of emotion management. Following Evitar Zerubavel, I describe this process of collective avoiding as the social organization of denial. Emotions played a key role in denial, providing much of the reason why people preferred to avoid information. Emotion management was also a central aspect of the process of denial, which in this community was carried out through the use of a cultural stock of social narratives that were invoked to achieve “perspectival selectivity” and “selective interpretation.”     

Bathrooms,Boundaries, and Emotional Burdens: Cisgendering Interactions Through the Interpretation of Transgender Experience

Building on findings demonstrating that social institutions may cisgender realities by creating and enforcing binary notions of gender rooted in cisgender experience, this study examines the ways cisgender people reinforce cisnormative gender binaries in their ongoing interactions. Utilizing interviews with 99 cisgender people, I show how respondents react to a vignette about a gender nonconforming person seeking to use a public bathroom by “cisgendering interactions,” which I define as the process whereby people reassert binary understandings of gender to make sense of transgender experience while placing an unequal emotional burden on transgender and gender nonconforming people to mend the interactional disruption of the gender panic. Additionally, my analysis extends transgender scholarship by demonstrating some ways cisgender people make sense of transgender people in public spaces. In conclusion, I draw out insights for understanding (1) the ways people cisgender their realities in the face of conflicting stimuli, (2) the ways in which emotions are a mechanism of inequality reproduction, and (3) the consequences these actions have for the perpetuation of gender inequality.     

Exploring emotional aspects of care and control in social work with children and families - a single case analysis of conversation

ABSTRACT

In this article, I explore how emotions are displayed and dealt with on a communicative level in face-to-face encounters between social workers and parents in a child welfare setting. The analysis draws upon detailed analysis of a whole encounter between a social worker and a parental couple who have recently had their new-born daughter placed in foster care. By examining the way emotional stances are expressed and responded to I discuss how orientations toward institutional tasks and goals create constraints for the display, recognition and validation of clients’ emotion displays. I consider the communicative challenges this poses for the parents and the social worker and the implications these may have for the client–worker relationship.     

Mining the mind: emotional extraction,productivity, and predictability in the twenty-first century

Surveying recent developments in management and work culture, computing and social media, and science and psychology, this article speculates on the concept of emotional extraction. Emotional extraction is defined in two ways. One iteration involves the transfer of emotional resources from one individual or group to another, such as that which occurs in the work of caring for others, but which also increasingly occurs in the work of producing new technology, such as emotionally aware computers. A second instance of emotional extraction entails the use of emotion knowledge – or theories about emotions, such as emotional intelligence – to generate conclusions or predictions about human behaviour. Emotional extraction in service work, management, marketing, social media, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience are discussed. ‘Mining the mind’ focuses in particular on emotional extraction that enhances both productivity and predictability, in turn tracing how emotionally extractive sites are implicated within the production and hierarchical valuation of difference – especially racial and gendered, but also neural difference – in everyday life. The article aims to offer scholars in cultural studies, as well as critical race theory, feminist theory, and critical disability studies, ways to think about this newly intensifying resource extraction and the intersections of culture, capital, and human experience that such extraction indexes and makes possible.     

The Art of Pacifying an Aggressive Client: ‘Feminine’ Skills and Preventing Violence in Caring Work

This article explores the complex interconnection between gender and emotion in the context of client‐perpetrated violence at work, focusing on interviews with and writings by Finnish nurses and social workers to discuss the ‘feminine’ emotional skills that are supposed to prevent violence. The social formation of these skills is analysed with the concept ‘emotional habitus’: emotional skills derive from the socially acquired disposition to manage emotions according to the gendered values of caring work. Emotional habitus, based on the internalized, second‐nature sense of emotional management, is shown to both persuade and enable employees to use emotional skills as assets for negotiating violence. This article discusses the potentiality for active agency enabled by skilful emotional management in violence prevention, bearing in mind the gender inequalities and internal contradictions connected to the social formation and practice of those skills.     

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.