Introduction to the special issue: ‘Doing things with emotions’ / ‘L’agir des émotions’

Studying the functions of emotions in everyday settings

Since at least the 1980s the topic of emotions has been the target of increasing scholarly attention across the social sciences, starting of course with psychology but spanning across other disciplines such as sociology, economics, linguistics, or anthropology. The bulk of this work has approached emotions largely, if not exclusively, as a complex but temporally short response to an immediately antecedent stimulus situation. This is a methodological simplification to some extent justified by the constraints of experimental research on the immediate causation of emotion. Unfortunately, however, this methodological simplification has misled many to endorse the implicit ontological claim that the be-all of emotion is a punctual response to a punctual stimulus.

Approaching emotions as short events caused by punctual stimuli severs them from the environment, and therefore from the adaptive process in which they can be assumed to play an active role. Action is controlled not by internal states alone, but also by the successive states of the environment that action itself contributes to transform. This is why no understanding of the functions of emotional action in everyday life can be achieved without taking the structure and dynamics of the environment into account.

In order to fill the gap, this special issue promotes a broadly naturalistic approach. It is therefore surprising that some students of action-in-context from sociology, political science, or anthropology have uncritically appropriated the conceptual frame of reference of intrapersonal psychology when seeking to integrate emotions into the treatment of their specific subject-matter. Instead of developing the conceptual and methodological tools necessary for an adequate understanding of emotional action, they have preferred to stick to a conception of emotions in which the environment, and a fortiori action, are left out of the picture altogether.

Emotions as states of the whole organism

This, of course, resonates with the folk theory of emotions as essentially ‘inner’ experiences that may or may not transpire in objective bodily changes, including expressive behavior and fully-fledged courses of action. If emotions are private feelings only contingently linked to objective manifestations, why bother to integrate the latter systematically into the analysis?

Drawing on phenomenology and evolution theory, contemporary approaches to emotion view the latter as total states of the organism relying on the evaluation (or appraisal) of an object or situation. Private ‘inner’ feeling, far from being the core of emotion, appears as only a particular component of a larger organic state alongside motor and physiological changes.

Assuming that emotions are first and foremost organic states, and only as such ‘inner’ feelings, does not amount to asserting that emotions are always communicated. Emotional communication depends not only on the display of emotion cues on the part of the sender but also on the motivation and ability to decode these cues on the part of the receiver. When the sender has some leeway to conceal his or her emotional displays, and the receiver is neither highly motivated nor particularly able to notice the attempted concealment, the emotion may not be communicated. But this is no proof that ‘feelings’ are disconnected from total states of the organism.

Looking at expressions of emotions in everyday settings

This special issue comprises a series of studies on emotions from linguistics, media studies, psychology, and sociology. Methodologically, these studies look at the everyday functions of emotions from the standpoint of their publicly available expressions. It is important to note that the set of motor changes we commonly designate as ‘expressions of emotions’ does not exhaust the field of objective manifestations of emotions as total organic states. Nonetheless, expressions of emotions do provide prima facie evidence for identifying emotional actions, which is a logically indispensable step toward the elucidation of the functions of these emotional actions. In other words, under certain conditions agents found to display expressions of emotions can be assumed to be acting emotionally.

Even though an abundant literature exists on the topic, the questions what exactly counts as an expression of emotion, and in particular of which emotion, do not appear to be settled matters. However, some heuristic rules provide useful guidance. While the most studied area of expressive behavior is no doubt the face, the student of emotional action in context need not restrict the analysis to facial movement. More generally, expressions of emotions can be seen as specific departures from a baseline of unemotional conduct. Of particular interest in this regard is the ‘prosody’ of behavior, e.g. its rhythm, duration, or explosiveness. What arises as indispensable is, first, the observer’s ability to identify segments in the agent’s stream of conduct that somehow depart from the ordinary. Second, these segments of prima facie expressive behavior must be interpretable as responding to specific events within a total situation, or to the situation as such. In this respect, the agent’s self-reported experience, either spontaneously in the course of the emotional situation itself or after the fact through an interview, can provide useful hints as to whether the action is emotional in general, and in the affirmative, as to what emotion terms furnish the most adequate descriptors.

So far we have only considered embodied (and therefore situated) expressions, but it is important to note that emotions can also manifest in disembodied symbols that may get ‘detached’ from the local emotional situations of their emergence and acquire as it were an autonomous life of circulation and reception. Of special importance among these is the language of affect, which as much as facial or bodily movement can be studied as a specific field of emotional expression.

Emotions in a process of communication

An action-centered approach to the emotions thus paves the way for the study of emotions in situations of communication, and to a renewed understanding of collective emotions. First, by considering emotional interactions between one or several sender(s) and receiver(s), the analysis sees emotions as a relational or transactional phenomenon rather than as an intrapersonal process. Further, they are observed as they unfold in situ, and special attention is paid to the practical activities in which they find expression. The classical approach to collective emotion hinges on the idea of emotional contagion. Instead, an action-centered approach looks at the situated process of emotions in communication, on the one hand, and at how this process transforms the situation in return, on the other. Also, the role of the mass media and other communication technologies could be profitably taken into account. For example, participating in a variety of situations at distance through social networks currently opens up new spaces for emotional interactions. The analysis of these spaces has to take into account different levels of mediation, from face-to-face encounters to interactions in which technical equipment, words, and images play a crucial role.

Far from promoting any particular paradigm for the study of emotions, we have preferred to encourage a dialogue between different analyses of the functions of emotions through their available expressions.

Overview of the contributions

Jocelyne Arquembourg’s opening article takes theoretical inspiration from Peirce’s views on emotion categorization and proposes to apply these ideas to the analysis of an historical episode. The episode covered is the resignation of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and more specifically the emotions Egyptians expressed in Tahrir Square following Mubarak’s resignation. The article compares the dynamics of these emotional expressions as narrated by the media on the one hand, and as they can be reconstructed from the direct witnessing of raw video materials on the other.

The article by José-Antonio García-Higuera, Carlos Crivelli and José-Miguel Fernández-Dols contributes to the growing literature on naturalistic studies of expressive behavior. It deals with a clearly demarcated situation, the bullfight, and examines the expressive behaviors bullfighters use in the course of the encounter. Sequential analysis of the situation provides a context for the self-reported experiences and for the observed expressive behaviors that form the core of the analysis. The results show that the expressions used by toreros in their confrontation with the bull are not predicted by theory. The authors conclude that the behaviors we call facial expressions of emotions should be interpreted not as readouts of internal states but as flexible courses of action.

Georgeta Cislaru’s article deals with the expression of emotions in tweets. The aim is to observe the way in which users formulate their feelings in a technologically constrained yet expressively free communicative environment, in a context of written instantaneity which leaves place for the selection of context-adapted linguistic formulae. Comparison between emotional expressions involved in hashtags and the emotional lexicon used in the body of the messages shows some topical discrepancies and, more particularly, different degrees of denotational power. It also reveals a constructivist dimension of emotional expressions.

Audrey Abitan and Silvia Krauth-Gruber explore the distinction between moral and physical disgust. The originality of the article lies in the authors’ use of freely written narratives and in a two-step content analysis that moves from a more traditional interpretive procedure to a more automated one. The distinction between moral and physical disgust is inferred from the ordinary use that people make of two phrases, namely ‘moral disgust’ and ‘physical disgust’. This article shows how these phrases are associated with a number of quite distinct meanings.

Frédéric Minner examines the relationship between emotions and norm emergence in the context of the Occupy Geneva movement. Through detailed ethnographic analysis, the article shows how collective indignation, contempt, and fear in the face of events categorized as sexual aggressions played a role in the successive amendments made to a charter of good conduct meant to regulate everyday life within the movement’s camp at Geneva’s Parc des Bastions.

The two closing articles are of programmatic intent. Julie Colemans sets the foundation stones of a research program aimed at identifying the role of expressions of emotions in the everyday working of justice, with a special focus on the social organization of audiences. The program’s theoretical framework is in line with ethnomethodology, but the methods envisaged move beyond the techniques traditionally used within this current, incorporating objective descriptions of expressive behaviors and retrospective narratives of perceived emotions in others.

Martin Aranguren’s closing article attempts to demonstrate the theoretical plausibility and the empirical viability of studying emotional mechanisms of social (re)production. The sociology of emotions has undeniably legitimated its specialized subject-matter within the discipline, but most work has been devoted to showing how social structures of various kinds constrain situated emotions. What is still missing is a clear articulation of how situated emotions in turn produce and reproduce social structures. Drawing on structuration theory, interaction ritual theory, Blumer’s classical analysis of race relations and recent comparative work on emotions in public places, this programmatic article argues that face-work and sacred-object establishment (or ‘enshrinement’) constitute two emotional mechanisms of social (re)production.

We believe that the collection of articles making up this special issue will contribute to identifying some of the manifold effects that publicly expressed emotions exert on the situations in which they emerge.