Emotions

Category: Fields of research

Emotion is a psychological disposition that influences the mental state of a person. Daniel Goleman, in his book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (1995), defines emotion as “feeling and its distinctive thoughts, psychological and biological states, and range of propensities to act”. As basic emotions, he lists: anger, sadness, fear, enjoyment, love, disgust, shame, and surprise. Another list of basic emotions, in order of how they appear as a baby grows up, is: distress, disgust, pain, interest, happiness, anger, fear, embarrassment, shame, pride, guilt, and empathy. The total number of distinct emotions is almost impossible to give, but the number of recognized and named emotions, in all cultures and languages, is in the hundreds.

The evolutionary approach argues that emotions emerge through the evolutionary process because they are adaptive, i.e., they have a positive function in the survival of animals and humans. Charles Darwin was the first evolutionist to pay special attention to emotions in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). In his book On the Origin of Human Emotions (2000), Jonathan Turner argues that the increase in the emotional capacity of early human ancestors enabled the creation of more stable and orderly social structures. Increased emotional capacities enabled that change as it led to an increase in the range and nature of interpersonal relationships and created the basis for the emergence of a moral system.

The cognitive theory of emotional development promotes different approach to emotions, as it argues that the development of cognitive skills in children is crucial for the emergence and differentiation of emotions. The early emotional development shapes the expression, understanding, and regulation of our emotions.

The sociological importance of emotions is evident in the theories of Durkheim and Goffman. Based on their work Randall Collins and Jonathan Turner developed their micro-sociological approaches. In Turner's theory micro level of sociological analysis focuses on what Erving Goffman calls encounters. Encounters are focused or unfocused personal interactions. Encounters are determined through six key forces: emotions, transactional needs, symbols, roles, status, and demographic/ecological properties. Turner states that four primary emotions are key to encounters: assertion-anger, aversion-fear, disappointment-sadness, and satisfaction-happiness. If the encounter goes as expected, people feel happiness, otherwise, they feel a combination of the other three emotions. The basic needs that shape encounters are: self-affirmation, profit, security and trust, knowledge of facts, as well as acceptance by the group. The key to any communication is that the person assumes a certain role and the status associated with it. Normalizing a role involves expectations in five dimensions: 1) categorizing the situation with content and level of intimacy, 2) establishing frames for things that should be included and excluded from the encounter, 3) forms of verbal and nonverbal communication, 4) rituals related to opening, duration, and closing of interaction, and 5) emotional tone.

Collins also starts from Goffman's concept of "encounter", Collins argues that “situations” should be the basic unit of sociological analysis of micro-interactions. He believes that in different situations, in which people enter into direct personal contacts and go through the same emotional states together, "interaction rituals" are created. These interaction rituals create a sense of belonging to a group, and that leads to individual experiences that achieve a higher level of "emotional energy." Higher levels of emotional energy are manifested in a sense of satisfaction and trust in the members of the group. The more intense the interaction rituals, and the stronger the shared emotional connection between the participants, the more emotional energy an individual will feel. The emotional energy that an individual experiences during an interaction ritual is instilled in the individual's mind on a subconscious level in the form of symbols.

In her book The Managed Heart (1983), Arlie Hochschild observes how social structure, symbolic interaction, and ideology shape human emotions and their expression. She believes that there is an essential gender difference (strategy) between the expression of emotions in women and men. Public ideologies of emotions shape private emotional experiences. Class position and ethnicity also influence the shaping and expression of emotions. Emotions have a signal communicative function because they define the position of an individual within a situation, as well as social expectations related to a situation.

Hochschild views the expression of emotions as a human activity (emotion-management) that is culturally determined, in order to express the anticipated emotions in each situation, but also the right amount of emotions. It divides emotional activity into „emotional work“, which manifests itself in a private context, and „emotional labor“, which manifests itself in a public social context. Emotional labor is most pronounced in the formal workplace, where it represents an extension of the capitalist desire to regulate interpersonal relationships in the workplace, which is especially evident in service activities. She also studies how the market influences the transformation of private emotional life in love and kinship relationships and concludes that human relationships are being commercialized. Social movements that act anti-systemically refuse to express emotions in accordance with the dominant social code, so emotions themselves become part of the social struggle.

References:

Bauman. Liquid Love (2003);

Beauvoir. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis (1999);

Blau. Exchange and Power in Social Life (1964);

Collins R. Interaction Ritual Chains (2004);

Cooley. Human Nature and the Social Order (1902);

Delphy. The Main Enemy, A Materialist Analysis of Women's Oppression (1977);

Denzin. Interpretive Ethnography (1996);

- Interpretive Interactionism (2001);

- Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials (2003);

- Studies in Symbolic Interaction (2004);

Douglas. Introduction to the Sociologies of Everyday Life (1980);