Beyond the cool pose: Black men and emotion management strategies

This review presents an overview of research on qualitative work that has documented emotion management strategies among Black men. I emphasize qualitative work here as it gives us insight into the processes that account for particular strategies. Research on Black men and emotions has focused on their class‐based experiences, as either lower SES working‐class or poor Black men in settings concentrated by people of color or higher SES middle‐class Black men in White‐dominated spaces. Within these two class positions, Black men adopt emotion management strategies for both the frontstage and backstage meant to best navigate their surroundings. This research emphasizes that Black men's emotional strategies are often a reaction to larger systems that oppress and discriminate against their race and gender status.     

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.     

Predicting Indonesian Journalists' Use of Public Relations-Generated News Material

Abstract

The news media are the main channel for public relations practitioners to get messages across to their publics. In recent years, little research was conducted on predicting journalists' use of public relations news material. As the largest Southeast Asian and the world's most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia presents a complex media and public relations environment. This study found fundamental tenets in journalism, however, which remain the most important factors in predicting the use and acceptance of public relations-generated news materials. At the same time, however, business interests have highly significant effect on journalists. Informal relations can also influence their use.     

WikiLeaks: Between disclosure and whistle‐blowing in digital times

The 2010 WikiLeaks' disclosures of U.S. war logs were the first megaleaks to shake the world of international diplomacy and political elites. Since then, more leaks followed, from the Snowden to the Panama Papers. As this phenomenon continues to evolve, a significant body of scholarly work has analysed the emergence, the struggle, and the history of WikiLeaks .This article aims to provide a cross disciplinary overview of the research that has explored the rise and the legacy of the disclosure platform and whistle‐blowing website WikiLeaks. It identifies four scholarship approaches to research focusing on Julian Assange's platform in order to understand its impact on various aspects of the media and of public life. The approaches considered range from the effect WikiLeaks has had on traditional journalism to the platform's challenge to power in the realm of the balance between openness and secrecy in domestic and international politics; further scholarships use WikiLeaks as a case study to understand the relationship between media and social movements and to study the platform's ethics and the legal consequences of its operations. The impact of WikiLeaks's revelations still poses relevant questions the media, politics, and regulators must address in such a pivotal time that sees a change in news consumption and an increasingly bitter debate between online privacy and transparency. The conclusion reflects upon current development of what the author calls “new digital culture of disclosure.” Future research should explore questions about the opportunities, challenges, and obstacles for this emerging culture of disclosure. What are the socio‐political‐economic conditions that have enabled this new culture? Are these leaks becoming a renewed example of democratic accountability? Is this culture of disclosure replacing public interest journalism in times of crisis?     

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 Generality—Specificity Issue in Infants' Emotion Responses: A Comment on Bennett,Bendersky, and Lewis (2002)

Bennett, Bendersky, and Lewis (2002) highlighted a need for revision, or at least clarification, of aspects of differential emotions theory (DET) that relate to the development of facial expressions of discrete emotions. Their article reveals a need for a better theoretical integration of propositions about the emergence of discrete emotions, the generality and flexibility of emotion responding, and issue of specificity in event‐emotion relations. Bennett et al. tested and partly disconfirmed a hard version of an event‐emotion hypothesis that predicts a specific discrete emotion expression for a specific stimulus at a particular age (4 months). They noted that some statements of DET supported their hypothesis, whereas others did not. I clarify the relevant theoretical issues and formulate a soft hypothesis of event‐emotion relations. I suggest methodological changes that may prove necessary to verify or disconfirm hypotheses relating to infants' capacity to encode a specific discrete emotion expression at a given age.     

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.     

Positive Effects of Talking About the Negative: Family Narratives of Negative Experiences and Preadolescents' Perceived Competence

Family narratives about the past are an important context for the socialization of emotion, but relations between expression of negative emotion and children's emerging competence are conflicting. In this study, 24 middle‐class two‐parent families narrated a shared negative experience together and we examined the process (initiations and collaborations) and function (the expression and explanation of emotions) of co‐constructed narratives in relation to preadolescents' perceived competencies and self‐esteem. Family narratives in which specific emotions were expressed and explained in a collaborative fashion, especially negative emotion, were positively related to preadolescents' reported competencies and self‐esteem, whereas family narratives that expressed general positive emotion were negatively related to preadolescents' perceived competencies. Implications of family narratives about emotional events, specifically the ways in which families discuss emotion, in relation to preadolescents' self‐development are discussed.     

Journalism and Globalization

Like every other social practice, journalism cannot now fully be understood apart from globalization. As part of a larger platform of communication media, journalism contributes to this experience of the world-as-a-single-place and thus represents a key component in these social transformations, both as cause and outcome. These issues at the intersection of journalism and globalization define an important and growing field of research, particularly concerning the public sphere and spaces for political discourse. In this essay, I review this intersection of journalism and globalization by considering the communication field’s approach to ‘media globalization’ within a broader interdisciplinary perspective that mixes the sociology of globalization with aspects of geography and social anthropology. By placing the emphasis on social practices, elites, and specific geographical spaces, I introduce a less media-centric approach to media globalization and how journalism fits into the process. Beyond ‘global village journalism,’ this perspective captures the changes globalization has brought to journalism.     

Social Feedback and Self‐Appraisals: Current Status of the Mead‐Cooley Hypothesis

Mead and Cooley propose that feedback from significant others provides the basis for individuals' self‐appraisals. I review research regarding (a) associations between others' judgments and individuals' self‐appraisals; (b) when others express or withhold feedback; and (c) when individuals accept or reject feedback. Research shows that others' judgments and self‐appraisals are moderately associated, though self‐ratings correspond more to perceived than to actual views by others and influences are multidirectional. Others' expressions of feedback vary across situations, depending in part on closeness of relationships and the sender's emotions. Peoples' tendencies to accept or reject feedback also vary by closeness, emotional reactions, and feedback valence. I conclude by evaluating the current status of the Mead‐Cooley perspective.     

Stand By Your Man: Wives' Emotion Work During Men's Unemployment

Recent research on unemployment has not sufficiently acknowledged how unemployment reverberates within families, particularly emotionally. This article uses data from more than 50 in‐depth interviews to illuminate the emotional demands that men's unemployment makes beyond the unemployed individual. It shows that wives of unemployed men do two types of emotion work—self‐focused and other‐focused—and both are aimed toward facilitating husbands' success in the emotionally arduous white‐collar job‐search process. This article extends research on emotion work by suggesting that participants perceive wives' emotion work as a resource with potential economic benefits in the form of unemployed men's reemployment. The findings furthermore suggest that as a resource, wives' emotion work is shaped by the demands of the labor market that their husbands encounter.     

Maternal Regulation of Daughters' Emotion During Conflicts From Early to Mid‐Adolescence

Primary caregivers play an important role in emotion socialization. Real‐time mother–daughter emotion socialization was examined in 45 mother–daughter dyads with early‐adolescent daughters (age M = 11.80, SD = .27) at the first observation point. Maternal supportive emotion regulation and daughters' emotions were coded during two conflict discussions, 2 years apart. With multilevel survival analysis, the likelihood of maternal supportiveness was predicted both over time, between early and mid‐adolescence, and by daughters' pubertal status. Mothers were more likely to respond to daughters' negative and positive emotions with supportiveness for daughters whose pubertal maturation occurred relatively early. Results suggest that mothers adjust their socialization of daughters' emotions according to their daughters' pubertal development.     

Fame,Social Media Use,and Ethics

This essay addresses two journalists' very public criticism of a blog that chronicles a woman's fight with cancer. I examine the role of fame in this controversy. Are the expectations for maintaining “privacy” actually stricter for people who are not famous? How do shifting boundaries between private and public (exacerbated by social media, which allow anybody to have a “public” persona) and shifting understandings of what constitutes “fame” affect the traditional understandings of what is appropriate to share?     

The same everywhere? Exploring structural homologies of national social fields using the case of journalism

Pierre Bourdieu argued for the existence of general properties and even laws of social fields. In contrast to spaces of class relations and patterns of cultural lifestyles, however, almost no systematic comparative research exists on the homologies of national social fields of a more specialised nature. Also, the large majority of research is done on Western countries, raising concerns about the relevance of the concept for less differentiated societies. Using the field of journalism as a case, typical structures of 67 national fields (n = 27,567) are in this article investigated using a reverse approach: First, the subjective spaces of journalists' experienced constraints and imperatives in their jobs are sketched as a proxy for field structure using variants of multiple correspondence analysis, and second, the distribution of the social and professional properties of journalists are used to suggest capital structures. The results suggest great stability in the fundamental organising principles of fields of journalism around the world, although with considerable variation in their autonomy.     

More than a Façade: Somatic and Structural Determinants in Erving Goffman's Theory of the Perduring Self

This paper argues that Erving Goffman endorses the veracity of a perduring self. Culling the corpus of his work, recent findings in neurophysiology and cognitive science surrounding the autonomy and mutual determination of emotion, cognition, and social structure are drawn upon when unpacking his highly composite theory. Isolating Goffman's claims about the psychobiological underpinning of the emotionally sentient body and those pertaining to macro and micro‐structural determinants, the former, it is argued, champion the coherence of the self insofar as they link cathected feelings to individual desires and inclinations. The latter, conversely, complicate the picture by accentuating the social construction of emotions and the relationship between episodic cognitive operations and multifarious interpretive frames. In the end, however, it is shown that Goffman's macro‐structural account, far from being residual, discloses the consistency, and unity of the self occasioned by social proximity and general social norms.     

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.     

Comparative Journalism Research – An Overview

This overview focuses on the most common type of comparative journalism research, which is cross‐national comparative research. The overview presents a typology for different types of comparative journalism research, based on whether the research interest is in journalism as an activity or as a product; and, in the case of journalism as an activity, whether the interest is in the system level, the organizational level, or the individual level of journalism. The overview finds that the analysis of journalism on the individual level and of journalism as a product are the most common types of comparative research, whereas comparative analysis of journalism on the organizational level is much under‐studied.     

Uncompensated emotional labor,racial battle fatigue,and (in)civility in digital spaces

Emotional labor was originally theorized by Arlie Hochschild in the context of domestic labor. Since her early theorization, popular culture and social scientists have adopted the term to refer to emotion work that is exhibited in a manner of financially compensated social settings. Emotional labor refers to the process by which individuals are expected to conform to a set of societal guidelines, ensuring that their emotions conform to that performance. As the use of social media grows, emotional labor plays an increasing role in the lives of people of color—across media platforms. We frame the ever‐present negotiation involved in racialized interactions online as a type of uncompensated emotional labor that results in racial battle fatigue. Next, we position emotional labor as an intrinsic part of the experience for social media users of color because digital media is by default a White, racialized space. Lastly, we argue that current research on civility does not account for the emotional labor of people of color. We offer an original view of uncompensated emotional labor that is inclusive of cross‐platform, racialized emotional labor that can result in racial battle fatigue.     

To Life: Optimism Bias and Technological Ties in the Face of the Worst

This essay addresses a recent media controversy. Two journalists actively questioned the appropriateness of a popular blog that chronicles a young woman's fight with cancer. Elaine Replogle ( 2014 ) unfolds the facts of this case and discusses the role of fame and status in understanding the journalists' response to the blog. Here, I extend that conversation, exploring how our culture's optimism bias, as well as the increasing importance of our technological ties, informs our understanding of both the blog and its critics.     

Emotional traits and recognition of facial expression of emotion

The relationship between an individual's habitual, emotional dispositions or tendencies — an aspect of personality — and his ability to recognize facially expressed emotions was explored. Previous studies have used global scores of recognition accuracy across several emotions, but failed to examine the relationship between emotion traits and recognition of specific emotion expressions. In the present study, these more specific relationships were examined. Results indicated that females with an inhibited-non-assertive personality style tended to have poorer emotion recognition scores than more socially oriented females. In contrast, for males, the relationship between traits and recognition scores was much more emotion specific: Emotion traits were not significantly related to a global measure of recognition accuracy but were related to recognition rates of certain emotion expressions — sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. For most of the emotions, males appeared to be more likely to see what they feel. Possible explanations of the findings in terms of perceptual set and other mechanisms are discussed. Implications for clinical studies and research are noted. The study also highlights the importance of separate analysis of data for specific emotions, as well as for sex.