Emotional streaming and transconnectivity: Skype and emotion practices in transnational families in Ireland

In this article I explore how transnational families, living in Ireland, use Skype to stay in touch with their loved ones. From 2010 to 2012, data were collected from a purposive, but broad sample of 36 qualitative ethnographic interviews with mixed couples (one partner identifies as Irish and one does not), throughout various parts of the Republic of Ireland. I outline how the use of Skype allows transnational families to create spaces of transconnectivity as they practise simultaneous and ongoing belonging across significant temporal and geographic distances. This affects how people ‘do’ emotions. These emotion practices often consist not only of ‘affect storage’ but also of what I call emotional streaming, promoting ongoing interaction over distance, which includes keeping Skype turned on for long periods of time. Through these attempts to try to recreate everyday practices via continuous use of Skype, transnational emotions of love and longing are deintensified.     

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.     

Emotions in economic action and interaction

How do emotions influence economic action? Current literature recognizes the importance of emotions for economy because they either help individuals perform economic roles through emotion management or enhancement of emotional intelligence, or because they aid rationality through their influence on preference formation. All these strands of research investigate the link between emotions and economy from an atomistic/individualistic perspective. I argue for a different approach, one that adopts a relational perspective, focuses on emotional embeddedness and examines how emotions matter in economic interactions. Emotional embeddedness research starts with a premise that emotions result from and are influenced by interactions between economic actors during the economic process where emotional currents and their visceral and physical manifestations come to the fore. This increases the uncertainty in economic transactions and complicates the given means-ends logic of rational economic decision making, yielding economic action principles different from utility maximization. I propose two types of such creative economic action in this paper: improvisation and situational adaptation. Improvisation characterizes situations where ends (goals) and means are unclear at the beginning of a transaction process and get articulated as a consequence of emotional embeddedness experienced during a process. Situational adaptation characterizes situations in which means or ends of action change because of interaction-induced emotions that prompt actors to choose new means/ends. The article concludes with a call for empirical research that explicates further the influence of emotions not merely for rational economic action but also creative economic interactions.     

“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.     

MANAGING GUILT:

In this article I illustrate the connections between talk, emotion management, and identity. In much of the recent work on collective, discursive strategies such as narrative and rhetoric, this link is left implicit. Through the study of a support group for parents of "troubled" teenagers, I highlight how parents' rhetorical talk created an emotional pathway that enabled them to maintain their good-parent identities despite their teenagers' rebellion. Parents used a personal responsibility rhetoric to make sense of their teenagers' misbehavior. For the most part as parents applied the personal responsibility rhetoric, they followed meeting protocol. Occasionally, however, parents violated the rhetoric's expression rule that parents were to avoid talking about guilt. I address how parents collectively constructed meeting discourse and conclude that their use of the personal responsibility rhetoric was how they collectively managed their own and each others' emotions. As a result they set the stage for becoming strict disciplinarians, which made it possible to see themselves as good parents, regardless of their teenagers' rebellion.     

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.     

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.     

From Transgression to Suppression: Implications of Moral Values and Societal Norms on Emotional Labour

This article endeavours to develop a conceptual perspective of moral values and societal norms, and how they impact on emotion regulation within employment contexts. The article draws on social psychology and emotional labour literature to explore the concept of contextual emotional labour. I argue that the conflicting requirements of one's societal and employment contexts may require one to transgress one's moral values to fulfil job requirements. I also argue that it is important to examine the aversive state(s) that may follow one's transgression and how this is managed in the workplace.     

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.     

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.     

Old Paths and New Directions: Studying Emotions in the Workplace

The study of emotions in the workplace is a vibrant area of research that has grown considerably over the last 25 years. This research has traveled far, but it has not run its course. This article maps the different paths that have been explored, beginning with Hochschild's classic work on emotional labor in the form of surface and deep acting, and charts new directions for future research. We start by reviewing the literature on emotional labor and emotion management in the workplace. Next, we discuss new theoretical developments in the sociology of emotions – interaction ritual chain theory, theories of identity and affect control, and theories about power, status, and exchange – and their potential utility for understanding emotions at work. Finally, we discuss new methodological directions that can be pursued in future research on emotions in work and organizational settings.     

The identity curation game: digital inequality,identity work,and emotion management

ABSTRACT

The research examines an understudied facet of digital inequality: how digital inequality impacts identity work and emotion management. The analysis reveals how unequal access to digital resources shapes how well youths are able to play what I call the identity curation game. Digital resources determine youths’ ability to succeed in this game that is governed by three implicit rules: (1) constantly update or be sidelined, (2) engage in constant reciprocated identity-affirming interactions, and (3) maintain a strategy of vigilance to remove traces of failed identity performances. This article draws on Symbolic Interactionism and pays particular attention to Hochschild’s theory of emotion management. Drawing on these frameworks, the findings reveal how under-resourced youths experience connectivity gaps that disrupt their ability to play the identity curation game, as well as the resulting emotional consequences. Under-resourced youths manage distinctive negative emotions arising from connectivity gaps that hinder their digital identity work, as well as engaging in distinct kinds of suppressive work to police their own emotions including longing, envy, shame, frustration, and stigmatization. In making these linkages, the research reveals the cascading effects of digital inequality among youths where constant connectivity is the sine qua non of social inclusion.     

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.     

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 Magic of Multiple Emotions: An Examination of Shifts in Emotional Intensity During the Reclaiming Movement’s Recruiting/Training Events and Event Reattendance1

This article examines whether emotional fluctuations predict the likelihood of future attendance at a movement’s week‐long recruitment and training events. I present a statistical analysis of longitudinal survey data, and then examine qualitative data on multiple emotions and “chains” of emotions over time. Qualitative and quantitative data together generate a multifaceted understanding of emotions’ interactions over time and their independent and combined ability to predict who returns to the events a year later. Previous work on emotions and movement recruitment has confined itself to whether emotional experiences were positive or negative or focused in depth on one particular emotion. This article’s findings show that confusion, courage, fear, and hope have a substantial and sometimes interactive impact on attendance at subsequent events.     

How the Experience of Emotion is Modulated by Facial Feedback

The facial feedback hypothesis states that facial actions modulate subjective experiences of emotion. Using the voluntary facial action technique, in which the participants react with instruction induced smiles and frowns when exposed to positive and negative emotional pictures and then rate the pleasantness of these stimuli, four questions were addressed in the present study. The results in Experiment 1 demonstrated a feedback effect because participants experienced the stimuli as more pleasant during smiling as compared to when frowning. However, this effect was present only during the critical actions of smiling and frowning, with no remaining effects after 5 min or after 1 day. In Experiment 2, feedback effects were found only when the facial action (smile/frown) was incongruent with the presented emotion (positive/negative), demonstrating attenuating but not enhancing modulation. Finally, no difference in the intensity of produced feedback effect was found between smiling and frowning, and no difference in feedback effect was found between positive and negative emotions. In conclusion, facial feedback appears to occur mainly during actual facial actions, and primarily attenuate ongoing emotional states.     

Re-signing: A Cultural-Historical Study of Signs for Supporting Young Children’s Development of Emotion Regulation

Recent cultural-historical literature stresses the need for understanding the role of signs in emotional development. This article examined how the signification of children’s emotions in everyday parent–child interactions creates the conditions for the emergence of intrapersonal emotion regulation. Four families with children ages 3–6 years were studied in Australia. Findings indicated that parents’ re-signing supported the emergence of children’s intrapersonal emotion regulation. We argue that the cultural line of emotional development needs to be foregrounded and the process of development theorized, thus contributing to better understandings of the process, rather than the product of children’s development of emotion regulation.     

The politics of fear and empathy: emotional ambivalence in ‘host’ children and youth discourses about migrants in Cyprus

This article looks at the emotion discourses among 30 Greek-Cypriot children and youth interviewees when they describe their feelings about migrants in Cyprus. It looks at how migrant representations and narratives are highly emotional constructions that children and youth utilize to make sense of their views about how migrants are different or similar to themselves. In particular, the article focuses on the simultaneous contradictory positions and feelings of fear and empathy. Two important implications for intercultural education are discussed. First, it is suggested that it is valuable to acknowledge that the emotion work required from ‘host’ children and youth in their interactions with migrants should not be taken for granted. Second, rather than painting a ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ image of children and youth’s responses to migrants – which categorizes children and youth in simplistic ways – it might be more productive to examine how their emotions are linked to ambivalent discourses and inform actions in negotiating the presence of the other and one’s sense of belonging.     

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.