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?”     

Predicting Emotions in Everyday Social Interactions

Abstract

Social workers appreciate that emotions are an important component of the human experience. Advances in sociology offer improvements in measuring, explaining, and predicting emotions. However, empirical appraisals of theories are limited, based on researcher fabricated events, and have yet to compare theories. The purpose of this study was to test and evaluate the predictive abilities of two theories that have potential to inform social work practice and research: Affect Control Theory (ACT) and Social Interactional Theory (SIT). From subject- provided social interactions, findings demonstrate the ability of both theories to predict ordinary emotion. Whereas SIT predictions were generally more precise, this accuracy would have been lost without the precise emotion measurement capabilities of ACT.     

Space and place in an Urban Landscape: Learning from children's views of their social worlds

In this paper, I examine photos made by children as one part of a three‐year, ethnographic study of childhoods in different communities in California. Within this study, the children's photographs—and their talk about these and other images—illuminate distinctions between the urban spaces that outsiders might notice from particular urban places meaningful to children themselves. These images and commentaries reveal some of the ways in which the children's urban experiences are shaped by social class, gender, ethnicity, immigration, and racialization. They also confirm the importance of social relationships for the meanings that children attach to the urban landscapes in which they live.     

Contextualizing Gender and Migration: Galician Immigration to Switzerland

Focusing on two main aspects of the Spanish‐Galician migration experience, this article attempts to analyze how migrants' actions and discourses are shaped by notions of gender. First, the discourse of returning will question notions of family and how differently men and women define their positions as members of a family. While men seem to link their social identity to immovable goods of prestige back in Galicia, women are able to redefine their social identity as they base it on social relations. The second aspect deals with the fact that cleaning is defined as women's work, but at the same time it is — under certain conditions — performed by men.     

Normative Accountability: How the Medical Model Influences Transgender Identities and Experiences

The medicalization of gender variance is a key force in transgender people's experiences of embodiment, identity, and community. While most directly dictating experiences of diagnosis and medical classification, it is important to acknowledge that the effects of medicalization are widespread across social contexts and institutions. I explore the medical model of transgender identity, with special attention to its current diagnostic classification, in order to highlight how transgender people's interactional experiences of gender are shaped by medical authority. I review literature that highlights the operation of the medical model as a normative accountability structure in its influence across multiple institutions of social life including health and healthcare, transgender community groups, and legal classification.     

Empathic Accuracy and Aggression in Couples: Individual and Dyadic Links

The authors examined links between intimate partner aggression and empathic accuracy—how accurately partners can read one another's emotions—during highly affective moments from couples' (N = 109) video recall of laboratory‐based discussions of upsetting events. Less empathic accuracy between partners was generally related to higher levels of aggression by both partners. More specific patterns emerged based on the type of aggression and emotion being expressed. Women's poorer ability to read their partners' vulnerable and positive emotions was linked to both men's and women's greater physical and psychological aggression. Moreover, women's inaccuracy in reading their partner's hostility was linked to women's greater psychological aggression toward the men. Men's inaccuracy in reading their partner's hostility was linked to women's (not men's) greater physical and psychological aggression. The results suggest important nuances in the links between empathic inaccuracy and aggression, and implications for prevention and treatment of partner aggression are discussed.     

Symbolic Interaction with Consumer Products: An Affect Control Theory Approach

Symbolic interactionism is one of the few social psychology perspectives that recognizes the important role of physical artifacts, including consumer products, in social life. Consumer products are artifacts people can use to maintain the expressive order within social life – the order that is embedded within the shared meanings of a culture. As a formal theory of symbolic interactionism, affect control theory emphasizes culturally shared affective meaning, the impressions produced within social events, and identity processes that rely on those cultural meanings and social events. We contend that affect control theory provides a framework for understanding and researching how consumer products influence people's social experience and interaction. First, we specifically explore how affect control theory's concepts of affective meaning, identity modification, and impression management can be applied to understanding consumer products. Building on this foundation, we then consider how affect control theory might also contribute to three new research directions: social interaction with consumer products, affective design of consumer products, and the prosumer identity created from consumer products. Our conclusion is that affect control theory provides sociologists with a means of exploring the important and fascinating questions that emerge when we consider people's symbolic interaction with consumer products.     

Migrant Children,Social Capital and Access to Services Post‐Migration: Transitions,Negotiations and Complex Agencies

For migrant children, moving to a new country is marked by excitement, anxiety and practical challenges in managing this significant transition. This paper draws upon the concepts of social capital and social networks to examine migrant children's access to services post‐migration. Using data from a qualitative study with Eastern European families in Scotland, we identify a range of cumulative barriers that limit children's access to services and illustrate how their experiences are shaped by ethnicity, social class and place. The study shows that migrant children are often disadvantaged post‐migration and develop their own mechanisms to mitigate the impact of migration on their lives. We argue that migrant children's own social networks are relevant and they need to be analysed through a more individualised approach.     

“And then AIDS came along”: A life course turning point and sub-cohorts of older gay men

Research on life course turning points focuses on heterosexuals. Scholars acknowledge that the early AIDS epidemic was a period of crisis for current older gay men, and that this period has shaped and will likely continue to impact their lives. However, few studies have considered the range of early AIDS-related experiences within this group. In this article, I use a life course perspective and in-depth interviews with 40 gay men (60+) in Atlanta to address the following questions: (1) How did current older gay men's experiences vary during the AIDS years? (2) What social factors shaped this variation? I identified three AIDS-related sub-cohorts, which were defined by how participants' social and spatial relationships to urban gay communities influenced their experiences of personal loss, community loss, personal support, and community support between 1981 and 1996. The results suggest that scholars and service providers interested in how early life experiences impact later life should consider the divergent early AIDS-related experiences within the group “older gay men.”     

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     

Gender,Foreignness and Academia: An Intersectional Analysis of the Experiences of Foreign Women Academics in UK Business Schools

This article explores the experiences of a growing but hitherto under‐researched category of academics employed within UK higher education: women of non‐UK origin. Drawing on an intersectional approach, we examine how gender and foreignness act as dynamic, interrelating categories in producing particular subjectivities in the context of UK business schools. We employ a qualitative methodology based on narrative interviews with 31 foreign women academics. In the analysis, we outline the broader global forces that have shaped their trajectories in choosing the UK as their destination, and the place of gender and foreignness in the participants' narratives of their experience. Our findings point to how the discourse of internationalization conceals intra‐categorical differences among non‐national staff, further supported by a merit‐based system that promotes an individualized view. However, participants' narratives provide examples of how gender and foreignness are mobilized in different ways by different actors — including themselves — in the production of social locations. As such, the paper contributes to critical debates regarding the academic workplace and the changing conditions of UK academia.     

Experiencing parenthood,care and spaces of hospitality

Drawing on research conducted in Australia and the United Kingdom, this paper explores how parenting and care provision is entangled with, and thus produced through, consumption in hospitality venues. We examine how the socio‐material practices of hospitality provision shape the enactment of parenting, alongside the way child‐parent/consumer‐provider interactions impact upon experiences of hospitality spaces. We argue that venues provide contexts for care provision, acting as spaces of sociality, informing children's socialization and offering temporary relief from the work of parenting. However, the data also highlight various practices of exclusion and multiple forms of emotional and physical labour required from care‐providers. The data illustrate children's ability to exercise power and the ways in which parents’/carers’ experiences of hospitality spaces are shaped by their enactment of discourses of ‘good parenting’. Finally, we consider parents’/carers’ coping behaviours as they manage social and psychological risks associated with consumption in such public spaces of leisure.     

Vital Lines Drawn From Books: Difficult Feelings in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Are You My Mother?

This article examines the representation of a transnational archive of queer books in Alison Bechdel's graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? for the insights it provides into the role of reading in making sense of the often difficult “felt experiences” of lesbian life. In both memoirs, books serve an important narrative function in the portrayal of Alison's lesbian identification and its complex emotional entanglements with the lives of parents who are trapped—killed even, in the case of the father—in the wastelands of patriarchy and heterosexual expectation. The article argues that in this complex family dynamic in which “sexual identity” itself is a problem and emotions remain largely unspoken, books act as fragile conduits of feelings, shaping familial relationships even as they allow Alison to contextualize her life in relation to historical events and social norms. Reading books allows her to understand the apparently U.S.-specific history of her family in relation to a wider queer history in the West.     

Emotions in context: Revolutionary accelerators,hope, moral outrage,and other emotions in the making of Nicaragua's revolution

Building on the social movement/revolutions and recent social movement emotions literature and using interviews and oral history from revolutionary Nicaragua, I make a case for recognizing the significance of emotions when studying revolutions. The essay aims for a contextual understanding of the role of emotions in the making of revolution during the insurrectionary period in Nicaragua. These are examined from the vantage point of revolutionary accelerators the conflictual event-contexts from which revolutionary actors emerge. Through the historical analysis of testimonies associated with a number of politically significant events that changed the course of political dynamics in 1970s Nicaragua, the piece illustrates: (1) how events function as generators of revolutionary action and (2) how event-related emotions such as anger and fear, but primarily moral outrage and hope, contribute to a transformation in consciousness that leads potential participants to define their circumstances as needing their revolutionary involvement. It also attempts to demonstrate how the latter two emotions—moral outrage and hope—are dominant under different event-contexts. Lastly, the relationships between these emotions and how these are connected to revolutionary accelerators are similarly explored.     

Interdependency in immigrant mother–daughter relationships

Intergenerational interdependency involves coinvolvement in each other's life, including the care and concern that one generation expresses for the other, the root of the care and concern, and how each generation embodies the care and concern. Three factors may influence interdependency between immigrant mothers and their adult daughters: social geography, interdependency expectations, and life events. Twenty-two immigrant mothers and adult daughters participated in an in-depth individual interview about social geography, interdependency expectations, and life events in their mother–daughter relationship. Eight mothers and daughters participated in a second in-depth individual interview about the same topics, a year later. Analyses of the data from the two data collection periods showed that social geography promoted interdependency, interdependency expectations shaped actual interdependency patterns, and life events, such as motherhood for daughters and spousal separation, altered interdependency patterns. The participants in this study expressed general satisfaction with the degree of involvement in each other's life.     

Agency as Interspecies,Collective and Embedded Endeavour: Ponies and People in Northern England 1916–1950

Animals are increasingly acknowledged as historical agents. There are calls for more critical approaches that explore how this agency—often shared with humans—is embedded within wider relations of power. This paper responds by employing Critical Theory, particularly the ideas of Jurgen Habermas, to explore how interspecies agency is shaped and constrained by its broader socioeconomic context. Empirical illustrations are drawn from the experiences of Dales ponies and people in the early twentieth century, who found themselves navigating the growing commodification of their shared lifeworld. The findings suggest the outcome of this process of “colonisation” was not inevitable. Rather, just as the demise of the ponies seemed unstoppable, their shared communicative relations re-emerged powerfully during the harsh winter of 1947. The paper asks what this means for our understanding of the apparently irrevocable decline of horsepower and how we might better understand horses’ own experiences of such events and processes.     

Unequal foodwork: Situating the sociology of feeding within diet and nutrition disparities

Widespread inequities in diet and nutrition present a pressing public health problem. Sociologists working to illuminate the causes and contours of these inequities often center the role of family foodwork, or the multifaceted domestic labor that supports eating, including planning and preparing meals. Mounting sociological scholarship on foodwork considers how food's meanings are socially patterned to reflect broader social structures, ideologies and institutions that influence their manifestation and families' resources to enact them. Here, we present three core contributions from the sociology of foodwork that can advance essential transdisciplinary conversations around nutrition disparities as well as efforts to tackle these disparities. We lay out how (1) family foodwork is historically rooted in broader structures of capitalist exploitation and women's subordination, and today remains gendered through normative discourses equating “good” feeding with “good” mothering; (2) the moralization of foodwork is buttressed by an ideological context idealizing homecooked meals and lamenting foodwork's decline, and; (3) foodwork—and societal evaluations of it—are shaped and stratified by intersecting gendered, classed, and racial inequalities. After reviewing each contribution and its importance for addressing nutrition inequities, we conclude by advocating for a closer conversation across disciplines and highlighting important future directions for sociologists.     

Economic Well‐Being in Salvadoran Transnational Families: How Gender Affects Remittance Practices

This article examines how migrant parents' gender affects transnational families' economic well‐being. Drawing on 130 in‐depth interviews with Salvadoran immigrants in the United States and adolescent and young adult children of migrants in El Salvador, I demonstrate that the gender of migrant parents centrally affects how well their families are faring. Gender structurally differentiates immigrant parents' experiences through labor market opportunities in the United States. Simultaneously, gendered social expectations inform immigrants' approaches to parental responsibilities and remitting behaviors. Remittances—the monies parents send—directly shape children's economic well‐being in El Salvador. I find that even though immigrant mothers are structurally more disadvantaged than immigrant fathers, mother‐away families are often thriving economically because of mothers' extreme sacrifices.     

SIMMEL'S FORMS OF EXPERIENCING: THE ADVENTURE AS SYMBOLIC WORK

Simmel says the content of experience does not make the adventure, the form does! To help clarify this remark, the Simmelian adventurer here is recast, following leads from Mead, Burke, and the pragmatists, as an ephemeral role incumbent engaged in symbolic work. The adventure is presented in terms of symbolic conversions of the content of life's experiences—physical things, social things, events, and persons—into objects of adventure. The form of experiencing engages the adventurer in symbolic work in which she or he symbolically synthesizes, antagonizes, and compromises Simmel's fundamental categories of life: certainty-uncertainty, chance-necessity, and passivity-activity.