Abstract
In recounting some of the key sociological insights offered by over 30 years of research on emotion management, or emotion regulation, we orient our discussion around sociological answers to the following questions: What is emotion management? How does emotion management occur? Why does it occur? And what are its consequences or benefits? In this review, we argue that emotion and its management are profoundly social. Through daily interactions with others, individuals learn to differentiate which emotions are appropriate when, as well as the most effective ways to bring their feelings in line with culturally agreed-upon emotion norms. Emotion management is also functional, not only for the individuals who perform it, but also for the dyads, groups, institutions, and societies in which they are embedded. The social processes through which individuals learn to display culturally appropriate emotions have important implications on many levels, from interpersonal interactions to the development of social movements.
More than three decades have passed since sociologists first turned their attention to emotion management (Hochschild, 1979, 1983). In this article, we highlight what we consider to be the key sociological contributions to the study of emotion management or, as some scholars prefer, emotion regulation (Grandey, Diefendorff, & Rupp, 2013). We do this by orienting our discussion around sociological answers to the following questions: What is emotion management? How does emotion management occur? Why does it occur? And what are its consequences or benefits?
Given space constraints, this is not designed to be a complete review of the sociological literature on emotion management. Indeed, such a task would be impossible given the rich body of scholarship in this area. 1 Therefore, the discussion is framed around these four basic questions, and will draw primarily on the qualitative literature dealing with identity processes, work, gender, and mental health. 2
One of the things that distinguishes sociological thought on emotion management from that of other disciplines is the degree to which emotions are viewed as profoundly social. Consequently, sociological accounts of emotion management stress that it is typically performed for the purpose of bringing nonnormative feelings and expressions back in line withculturally agreed-upon emotion norms. Individuals are taught to follow cultural norms for experiencing and displaying appropriate emotions through the course of their daily interactions, or else face the risk of both formal and informal sanctioning.
Sociologists offer knowledge of what those norms are, why individuals are motivated to conform, how they bring their emotions in line, and what the social consequences of normative compliance and deviance are. This knowledge is relevant to understanding many everyday occurrences, from why and how parents carefully socialize their children to regulate their feelings (as studied extensively in psychology), as well as how emotion cultures change over time (as studied by historians and humanists).
What is Emotion Management?
Emotion management was originally defined as one’s attempt to bring one’s experience or expression of feeling in line with existing feeling and display rules (Hochschild, 1983). In her now seminal work, The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling, Hochschild distinguished between emotion management—which could also be referred to as emotion work—and emotional labor. According to Hochschild, emotion management has a “use” value andis enacted as a part of one’s private life. Emotional labor,however, has a “paid” value and occurs as part of one’s public, or work, life. For the purposes of this review, we use the term “emotion management” to refer to all acts of emotional regulation, regardless of the setting in which they occur.
When first introducing the concept of emotion management, Hochschild distinguished between surface acting and deep acting. Surface acting refers to simply managing one’s expression of affect, while deep acting requires individuals to actually experience socially—or corporately—desired feelings. Although Hochschild focused primarily on cognitive strategies that individuals use to alter their feelings, other scholars have broadened their analyses to include other strategies as well (Simon & Nath, 2004; Thoits, 1990).
Interpersonal Emotion Management
Sociologists, perhaps more so than any other group of scholars, have focused their collective attention on the more social aspects of emotion management. By the mid-1990s, many had begun documenting the existence of interpersonal management. Interpersonal emotion management is an attempt to bring not one’s own emotions but others’ emotions in line with existing feeling or display rules.
Early studies of interpersonal emotion management tended to focus on therapeutic contexts, in which therapists attempted to move clients from one feeling state to another (Francis, 1997; Irvine, 1999; Thoits, 1995). In the case of support groups forthe recently widowed, for example, group leaders often use identity-based interpersonal emotion management to lead participants out of negative and disempowering feelings of distress, sadness, and guilt to more positive and/or empowering feelings, such as anger, pride, and, eventually, well-being (Francis, 1997). These therapeutic efforts often involve directing participants through a variety of feeling states, and this discovery has contributed to the conception that it may be easier to make multiple shifts between similar emotions—that is, to move from distress to fear, from fear to anger, from anger to pride, and from pride to tranquility—than it is to make one large shift from distress to tranquility (Lively & Heise, 2004).
Additionally, scholars have found that peers play an important role in the collective shaping of emotion. Building on Hochschild’s oft-overlooked observation that emotion management frequently occurs within the context of a supportive cast of friends, Staske’s (1996) analysis revealed that friendship pairs and intimate partners routinely engage in “collaborative emotion management,” during which friends or partners confirm, deny, or assist in reframing others’ narratives regarding emotion (also see Lively, 2000; R. T. Smith, 2008).
Future explorations into interpersonal emotion management are likely to draw on Lois’s (2003) distinction between “loose” and “tight” emotion management in exploring how individuals employ different emotion management techniques in different contexts. First introduced within the context of rescue work, “tight” emotion management refers to interpersonal emotion management that is tightly directed, as is the case when rescue workers tell victims to stop crying, in order to manage their emotions quickly. By contrast, “loose” emotion management, which involves listening and sympathizing, is more often performed on victims’ families and typically occurs over longer periods of time. Consistent with previous studies of police officers (Martin, 1999) and detectives (Stenross & Kleinman, 1989), male rescuers are more frequently employed on dangerous rescues and are thus more likely to employ tight emotion management, whereas female rescuers are generally tasked with caregiving and are more likely to employ loose emotion management. However, loose and tight emotion management are just two examples of the importance of social interactions in shaping emotion.
How Does Emotion Management Occur?
To understand how emotions are managed, it is useful to clarify how sociologists view emotion. Most sociologists view emotion as a signal function; that is, emotion, just like our other senses, tells us how we are faring in a social setting (Heise, 2007; Hochschild, 1983; Kemper, 1978). Unlike most psychological accounts of emotional experience, which focus primarily on physiology and cognition (Schachter & Singer, 1962), sociologists have adopted a model of emotion that is simultaneously more complex and more social.
According to Thoits (1984), emotional experience is comprised of four interdependent components: physiology; cognition; the label that one gives that experience; and how one expresses it to self and others. This interconnectedness is evident in that certain physiological responses are “naturally” associated with certain expressions, words, and cognitions, just as certain cognitions have come to be associated with certain physiological responses, labels, and expressions.
Because all four elements of the emotional experience are interdependent, many sociologists conclude that any change in one will necessarily produce a change in others. Thus there are multiple ways to alter or to manage emotions—by manipulating physiological arousal, situational cues, expressive behaviors, or even labels.
In keeping with this theory, Ritchie and Barker’s (2006) recent study of relationships in a polyamorous community revealed that individuals create new language to label nonnormative emotional experiences. For example, many members of the polyamorous community use the word “frubbles” to describe the joy they find in seeing their partner happy with another partner, an emotion that is not recognized, named, nor commonly experienced by individuals who do not identify as polyamorous (Ritchie & Barker, 2006). By creating a lexicon of their own and giving a label to their feelings, they can more easily experience—physiologically, cognitively, and expressively—an emotion that, while very real to them, is not recognized in mainstream culture.
Why Does Emotion Management Occur?
Affect control theory (Heise, 2007) asserts that all social events (or interactions) can be disaggregated in terms of social roles (e.g., professor or student), behaviors (e.g., lectured or listened), attributes (e.g., earnest or disinterested), and settings (e.g., classroom or an amusement park). According to this theory, each of these aspects of social events has a particular associated affective meaning, and individuals tend to engage in behaviors that create events which allow them to confirm their fundamental sentiments regarding themselves, others, and the settings in which they are embedded, giving rise to particular emotions. 3 So, for instance, it would be likely for a professor to feel comfortable lecturing an earnest student in a classroom, whereas it would be unlikely for a professor to feel at ease lecturing a disinterested student in an amusement park.
Social Settings
Research shows that different settings tend to be governed by different sets of emotional norms, which stem, in part, from the identities of the individuals who are likely to reside there (Heise, 2007; also see Lively & Heise, in press). The most common distinction in the sociological literature is the one between work and home. Since the Industrial Revolution, home has been viewed as an emotional haven where men and women can find comfort and escape the demands of the paid labor force, and where emotions can be expressed more freely or in a more authentic manner (Stearns & Stearns, 1989). Thus, many view the home—and, therefore, families—as being more emotionally open than work. By contrast, workplace environments, especially those likely to be associated with emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983), are generally governed by norms of professionalism, which often require workers to limit their emotional reactions, if not their emotions per se, to pleasantly engaged, if not affectively neutral (but see Hochschild’s [1983] discussion of bill collectors).
In the home, family members are motivated to manage their emotions as part of performing their roles in order to be deemed a “good” father, mother, son, daughter, etcetera (Lois, 2013). However, they may also be compelled by more pecuniary reasons, such as staying in parents’ good graces in order to secure an inheritance (Millman, 1991). In work settings, workers are motivated to act in accordance with the normative emotions and emotional displays of their professional and/or occupational roles. This emotion management allows them to simultaneously avoid formal sanctions, such as verbal or written reprimands, and be seen as professional by self, clients, customers, peers, and so-called superiors (Wingfield, 2010).
Early studies of secondary emotional socialization illustrate how many postgraduate programs are actually centered on shaping students’ emotions. A. C. Smith and Kleinman (1989), for example, found that medical students learn to manage their emotions, particularly their fear, disgust, embarrassment, and arousal, so that they can feel more like “real” doctors and seem more “professional” to peers and evaluators (also see Cahill, 1999). As individuals move through different contexts vis-à-vis different roles, they are motivated to manage their emotions to adhere to the expectations of each social role.
Social Role Identities and Personal Attributes
Role expectations may be influenced by individuals’ demographic characteristics. According to affect control theory, social characteristics, such as “female” or “Black,” merge with social role identities, such as “juror,” creating amalgamated identities that carry with them different expectations for behaviors, as well as for emotional experience and expression (also see Heise, 2013; Ridgeway, 2006).
In keeping with this perspective, Pierce (1995) found that female paralegals tended to manage their negative feelings (i.e., the anger and frustration that stems primarily from interactions with attorneys) and, at the same time, act as caretakers and cheerleaders for their bosses. Male paralegals, on the other hand, tended to remain affectively neutral and were rewarded for being political “yes men,” a role that requires much less emotional engagement 4 (also see Wharton [2009], for a review of emotional labor in the workplace).
Harlow (2003) and Wingfield’s (2010) recent studies of professors and professionals, respectively, further reveal that Blacks experience different feelings at work and have qualitatively different interactions with students and coworkers than their White counterparts. Harlow found that Black professors were more likely to be subject to challenges about their skills and competency when dealing with White undergraduates. Moreover, given negative cultural stereotypes about “angry Black men” and “angry Black women,” most were unwilling to express anger, or even frustration, in the classroom (also see Wingfield, 2010). While these studies suggest that it is the race of the worker that matters, Kang’s (2010) study of Korean-owned nail salons suggests that the emotion management performed by body workers has more to do with the demographic characteristics of the clients than those providing the service.
Family roles, too, are marked by gender. As modeled by affect control theory, grandmothers, aunts, mothers, sisters, and daughters are all culturally viewed as more pleasant, less powerful, and more active than grandfathers, uncles, fathers, brothers, and sons (Heise, 2007). The culturally shared affective sentiments associated with each of these “female” roles mean that they are also normatively associated with relatively more pleasant, less powerful, and more active behaviors and emotions (see Hochschild & Machung, 1989; Lois, 2013, for empirical examples).
To What End Does Emotion Management Occur?
As illustrated in the previous sections, individuals engage in emotion management in order to comply with emotion norms: that is, emotions they should feel or express in specific situations. However, one of the characteristics that makes the sociological perspective unique is that it also takes into account broader considerations, such as social costs and benefits. Sociological scholarship on emotion management offers insights into the question “To what end?” What are the consequences or benefits of emotion management, be it emotion work that happens in individuals’ personal lives and has use value, or emotional labor performed in public spheres, often for a wage?
Until now, there have been two answers to this question. The first, which can be thought of as “emoting inequality,” and which has received the most attention from sociologists, is how emotion management leads to the reification of status hierarchies. The second, which can be thought of as “emoting change,” has received considerably less attention and details the ways in which interpersonal emotion management is employed by social movement organizations to encourage members to channel their emotions into collective action.
Emoting Inequality
Social role identities and personal characteristics have particular emotional expectations associated with them (Heise, 2007; Lively & Heise, in press). When individuals manage their emotions in order to meet the demands of their role, be it their role as a flight attendant or bill collector (Hochschild, 1983), a medical student (A. C. Smith & Kleinman, 1989), or even a woman (Schrock, Boyd, & Leaf, 2009), they essentially recreate and reaffirm the appropriate expectations for that role through their interactions with others.
For example, in her study of hierarchically ordered work settings, Lively (2000) showed how paralegals turn to one another, reciprocally, to manage the demands for emotional labor embedded in their emotionally charged interactions with attorneys, many of whom the paralegals view as rude. She argued that the seemingly voluntary emotion management that paralegals engage in with one another helps them to meet the demands of their role, and, at the same time, maintain their view of themselves as professional. Although they are successful in managing their emotions at an individual level, their doing so reifies the very status hierarchy that drove them to manage their emotions to begin with (also see Hochschild’s [1983] now classic study of dual-income families and Stacey’s [2011] recent study of home health care aides, both of which illustrate how individuals conspire in their own exploitation, while simultaneously reaping benefits from the experience).
Emoting Change
Recent scholarship in the area of social movements suggests that emotion management may also be used to create social change. 5 Identity social movements face a unique challenge in motivating potential constituents to participate in collective action (Britt & Heise, 2000). Because identity-based movements often involve stigma, and thus shame, constituents may wish to limit their involvement. As such, inspiring individuals to take action can be challenging. According to Britt and Heise, movement activists use identity-based emotion management strategies that maneuver constituents through fear and anger in order to get them from an affective space largely characterized by shame and into one of pride. When potential constituents feel pride (a relatively positive, powerful, and active emotion), they are more likely to participate in positive, powerful, and active behaviors, such as social protest, marching, chanting, etcetera (also see Taylor, 1996).
Building on the work of social movements scholars such as Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta (2001), Gould’s (2009) recent analysis of the rise, success, and eventual decline of ACT UP organizations during the beginning of the U.S. AIDS epidemic documents the role of emotion and emotion management in creating and sustaining social change. According to Gould, the gay and lesbian community actively encouraged members to feel and express anger towards the federal government following a Supreme Court decision that upheld a state ruling deeming homosexual sodomy in the privacy of one’s own home illegal. The successful transformation of the groups’ collective shock and grief that had arisen during the early years of the AIDS epidemic into anger and rage after the Supreme Court decision resulted in the proliferation of ACT UP organizations across the country, which led to both short-term upheaval and long-term social change (also see Jasper [2014] for a broader view of the role of emotions in social movements).
New Directions in the Sociological Study of Emotion: The Importance of Time
One of the newest directions in the sociological study of emotion management is scholars’ introduction of the importance of time. To date, sociologists have utilized two approaches when thinking about how time influences emotion management. The first approach has to do with the timing of the emotion management itself, in relation to the triggering event. The second focuses on how individuals and organizations change their perceptions of time in order to alter feelings.
In their study of male-to-female transsexuals, Schrock et al. (2009) examined the emotion management that transwomen go through when passing—going out in public while embodying their idealized sex. Schrock et al. found that male-to-female transsexuals engage in “preparatory” emotion management, which involves perfecting their props, dress and demeanor, and conditioning their nerves; “in situ” emotion management, wherein they manage their emotions and, subsequently, their interactions with others; and “retrospective” emotion management, the content of which depends upon the relative successor failure of their gender performance (also see Vaccaro, Schrock, & McCabe, 2011).
In her study of homeschooling mothers, Lois explored what she referred to as “temporal emotion management” (2013). Building on Hochschild’s (1983) notion of emotion management and Flaherty’s (2003) discussion of “time work,” Lois found that some homeschooling mothers manage their emotions by manipulating their perception of time. By invoking regret and nostalgia, homeschooling mothers find it easier to overlook the stress of the present moment and to actually slow down their experience of time. By taking memories of regret from their past and mapping them onto their future, for example, some mothers are better able to imagine the regret they would feel if they stopped homeschooling. Alternatively, others manage their emotions by focusing on the fleeting nature of childhood. 6
Conclusion
It is outside the purview of this review to attempt to recountthe vast variety of literature currently available on the topic of emotion management. Instead, the scholarship cited here has been selected to address four primary concerns: What is emotion management? How does emotion management occur? Why does emotion management occur? And what are the consequences and benefits of emotion management? In addressing these questions, we have discussed emotion management on an individual level, considering interpersonal interactions within the family and the personal experience of emotional change in therapy, and on a societal level, considering the reification of social role stereotypes, status hierarchies, and social movements.
One of the conclusions that can be drawn from sociological scholarship on emotion management is that emotion management is functional at multiple levels of analysis: interpersonal interactions, meso-level structures (such as communities), and macrolevel organizations (such as nations, religions, or cultures). As a result of skillful emotion management, individuals gain interpersonal and material rewards, status hierarchies and existing structural arrangements are sustained, and group cohesion is generated (through norms of sympathy and gratitude exchange, for example). Alternatively, when emotion management is unsuccessful—or unrewarding—new emotion norms may be constructed and social change may result.
In sum, sociological scholarship on emotion management elucidates the social context for, and the social consequences of, emotion management. This work has the ability to complement psychological studies of emotion regulation by highlighting the social milieus in which emotion regulation occurs. It also documents, at the micro level, culturally sanctioned feelings and expression rules that constrain, sustain, and motivate human behavior over time.