This essay proposes an emotion-management perspective as a lens through which to inspect the self, interaction, and structure. Emotion, it is argued, can be and ofter is subject to acts of management. The individual often works on inducing or inhibiting feelings so as to render them "appropriate" to a situation. The emotion-management perspective draws on an interactive account of emotion. It differs from the dramaturgical perspective on the one hand and the psychoanalytic perspective on the other. It allows us to inspect at closer range than either of those perspectives the relation among emotive experience, emotion management, feeling rules, and ideology. Feeling rules are seen as the side of ideology that deals with emotion and feeling. Emotion management is the type of work it takes to cope with feeling rules. Meaning-making jobs, more common in the middle class, put more premium on the individual's capacity to do emotion work. A reexamination of class differences in child rearing suggest that middle-...

Emotions and Choice

Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure

Hermeneutic inquiry in the study of human conduct.

In an earlier paper (Elster, I989 a), I discussed the relation between rationality and social norms. Although I did mention the role of the emotions in sustaining social norms, I did not focus explicitly on the relation between rationality and the emotions. That relation is the main topic of the present paper, with social norms in a subsidiary part. Emotions are a neglected topic, and the neglect of economists is second to none. I find this surprising. I take it that economics is concerned with the best ways of promoting human satisfaction in a world of scarce resources. With one exception, all human satisfaction comes in the form of emotional experiences. The exception is the hedonic satisfaction produced by the senses, such as the taste of sweetness on the tongue or the feeling of wind on your face after a long climb. Such sensations differ from emotions in that no prior cognition is necessary to produce them. I do not have to recognise the wind as wind to enjoy the sensation. By contrast, to get angry when my Albanian host offers me a cup of tea by passing it under his left arm I have to know that in Albania this is considered an insult. For infants, sensations may be the most important source of satisfaction. For most adults, I believe, they definitely take second place to emotional experiences. If one grants the truth of that claim, or even of the weaker claim that emotional experiences are important sources of human satisfaction, we would expect economists to have thought about them a great deal. We would expect them to have studied the ways in which people organise their life to maximise emotional satisfaction, to have identified sources of suboptimal emotion-seeking behaviour, and to have suggested ways of improving this behaviour. Economists, as we know, have done nothing of the kind. Recent economic work on the emotions (Hirshleifer, I987; Frank, I988) focuses exclusively on the role of the emotions in sustaining (or preventing) cooperative interactions. No economist to my knowledge has considered the emotions in their main role as providers of pleasure, happiness, satisfaction, or utility. To put it crudely, economists have totally neglected the most important aspect of their subject matter. No doubt there are reasons for this neglect. One is the lack of a metric. If you asked someone whether he prefers shame or griefwhether he would rather be caught cheating at an exam or have his girl friend leave him he would probably be at a loss for an answer. The emotions themselves, in fact, interfere with our ability to observe them. (Montaigne cites Petrarch to the effect that 'He who can describe how his heart is ablaze is burning on a small pyre'.) Another reason which ought, however, to be a challenge rather than an excuse may be the lack of good theories of how emotions are triggered and transformed in encounters with the world. A further reason may be that

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Rationality and the Emotions

The evidence for a genetic contribution to schizophrenia is compelling. However, the pattern of inheritance is complex and it is usually assumed that environmental factors also have a role that will eventually be identified. We argue that this is not necessarily the case. While a hypothesis combining genetic diathesis with environmental stress cannot be disproved, it is also possible that 'non-genetic' factors consist entirely of stochastic events affecting gene expression or structure.

The strength of the genetic effect. Is there room for an environmental influence in the aetiology of schizophrenia

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the origins of social understanding. Drawing upon philosophical writings, I highlight those features of affectively patterned interpersonal relations that are especially important for a very young child's growing awareness and knowledge of itself and other people as people with their own minds. If we were without our biologically based capacities for co‐ordinated emotional relatedness with others, we should lack something essential for acquiring the concept of ‘persons’ who have subjective experiences and psychological attitudes towards the world. I illustrate some implications of this thesis by reviewing the phenomena of early childhood autism.

Emotions and Choice

Citations

Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure

Hermeneutic inquiry in the study of human conduct.

Rationality and the Emotions

The strength of the genetic effect. Is there room for an environmental influence in the aetiology of schizophrenia

The emotional origins of social understanding

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