A Social Relational Account of Affect

Sociology usually conceives of emotions as individual, episodic, and categorical phenomena, while at the same time emphasizing their social and cultural construction. In this article, I argue that this view neglects some essential elements of emotions, in particular affects, and how these are vital to our understanding of sociality. Although affect is an established notion in sociology, it has remained conceptually underdeveloped. The article therefore discusses different perspectives on affect from the vibrant field of affect studies that emphasize their relational and bodily character. In a second step, I contrast and reconcile these views with existing theories of affect in sociology and social psychology and consider a number of essential characteristics that can be used to circumscribe affect. Finally, I introduce concepts from relational sociology and concrete examples to specify the relational character of affect and to develop an understanding of affect that is both theoretically and empirically fruitful

Emotion regulation and emotion work: two sides of the same coin?

This contribution links psychological models of emotion regulation to sociological accounts of emotion work to demonstrate the extent to which emotion regulation is systematically shaped by culture and society. I first discuss a well-established two-factor process model of emotion regulation and argue that a substantial proportion of emotion regulatory goals are derived from emotion norms. In contrast to universal emotion values and hedonic preferences, emotion norms are highly specific to social situations and institutional contexts. This specificity is determined by social cognitive processes of categorization and guided by framing rules. Second, I argue that the possibilities for antecedent-focused regulation, in particular situation selection and modification, are not arbitrarily available to individuals. Instead, they depend on economic, cultural, and social resources. I suggest that the systematic and unequal distribution of these resources in society leads to discernible patterns of emotion and emotion regulation across groups of individuals

Affective Societies: Key Concepts

Affect and emotion have come to dominate discourse on social and political life in the mobile and networked societies of the early 21st century. This volume introduces a unique collection of essential concepts for theorizing and empirically investigating societies as Affective Societies. The concepts engender insights into the affective foundations of social coexistence and are indispensable to comprehend the many areas of conflict linked to emotion such as migration, political populism, or local and global inequalities. Each chapters provides historical orientation; detailed explication of the concept in question, clear-cut research examples, and an outlook toward future research

Fear of Islam as a Mobilizing Force of the European New Right

Recent research has investigated the emotional underpinnings of support for populist New Right parties and movements. Some of these works focus on the supply-side of New Right support, emphasizing specific political styles and discourses, whereas others emphasize the demand-side, highlighting cultural, economic, and emotional factors. Lacking from this research, in particular for the European context, is an understanding of how supporters of the New Right experience and make sense of pertinent cleavages with regards to emotions. The present study sets out to acquire a more detailed understanding of the emotional narratives and experiences of supporters of New Right parties and movements, in particular with regard to fear and religious cleavages. Using group interviews with supporters of New Right parties and movements in Germany, we show that narratives involving fear pertain to the idea of a valued collective “We” that consists of political and cultural elements and serves as a reference point to collective identity and an antidote to existential insecurities. Further, this collective “We” is perceived to be threatened by cultural differences and changing majority-minority relations with respect to five domains of social life: demography, the liberal democratic order, public majority culture, security, and welfare

Risk entanglement and the social relationality of risk

Relational accounts of risk explain variation in risk perception through situated cognitions defining risk as a relationship between “risk objects” and “objects at risk”. We extend this approach to include not only the relational constitution of cognitive risk objects, but also of the different actors assessing risk. Risk in this perspective is relational because it establishes a link between two different cognitive objects and between two (or more) actors. We argue that this is the case when at least two actors refer to a common risk object while retaining distinct objects at risk. We call this a constellation of risk entanglement across actors. We illustrate our theoretical arguments using data from 68 qualitative interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in the German finance-state nexus. Our analyses indicate how risk entanglement affects and transforms the fundamental logics according to which both of these fields operate

Affective meanings and social relations: identities and positions in the social space

Ever since Georg Simmel’s seminal works, social relations have been a central building block of sociological theory. In relational sociology, social identities are an essential concept and supposed to emerge in close interaction with other identities, discourses and objects. To assess this kind of relationality, existing research capitalises on patterns of meaning making that are constitutive for identities. These patterns are often understood as forms of declarative knowledge and are reconstructed, using qualitative methods, from denotative meanings as they surface: for example, in stories and narratives. We argue that this approach to some extent privileges explicit and conceptual knowledge over tacit and non-conceptual forms of knowledge. We suggest that affect is a concept that can adequately account for such implicit and bodily meanings, even when measured on the level of linguistic concepts. We draw on affect control theory (ACT) and related methods to investigate the affective meanings of concepts (lexemes) denoting identities in a large survey. We demonstrate that even though these meanings are widely shared across respondents, they nevertheless show systematic variation reflecting respondents’ positions within the social space and the typical interaction experiences associated with their identities. In line with ACT, we show, first, that the affective relations between exemplary identities mirror their prototypical, culturally circumscribed and institutionalised relations (for example, between role identities). Second, we show that there are systematic differences in these affective relations across gender, occupational status and regional culture, which we interpret as reflecting respondents’ subjective positioning and experience vis-à-vis a shared cultural reality

Affekteista, emootioista ja tunteista

Tunteen (feeling) käsite on yleisin ja laaja-alaisin subjektiivisen kokemuksen luokka. Tunteita on monenlaisia ja niitä voidaan ryhmitellä eri tavoin. Ne voivat liittyä aistihavaintoihin tai kehollisiin aistimuksiin, kuten nälän tuntemukseen tai kutinaan. Niitä voi liittyä myös asenteisiin, mielialoihin ja mielipiteisiin sekä emootioihin ja affekteihin. Tunteet ovat määritelmän mukaan kokemuksia, jotka edellyttävät tietoisuutta mutta eivät välttämättä intentionaalisuutta. Suomentanut Mikko Salmel

The Emotional Timeline of Unemployment: Anticipation, Reaction, and Adaptation

Unemployment continues to be one of the major challenges in industrialized societies. Aside from its economic dimensions and societal repercussions, questions concerning the individual experience of unemployment have recently attracted increasing attention. Although many studies have documented the detrimental effects of unemployment for subjective well-being, they overwhelmingly focus on life satisfaction as the cognitive dimension of well-being. Little is known about the emotional antecedents and consequences of unemployment. We thus investigate the impact of unemployment on emotional well-being by analyzing the frequency with which specific emotions are experienced in anticipation of and reaction to job loss. Using longitudinal data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and fixed effects regressions, we find that becoming unemployed leads to more frequent experiences of unpleasant emotions only in the short run and that adaptation occurs more rapidly as compared to life satisfaction. Contrary to existing studies, we find decreases in emotional well-being but not in life satisfaction in anticipation of unemployment

Can Personality Explain the Educational Gradient in Divorce? Evidence From a Nationally Representative Panel Survey

The social demographic literature on divorce suggests that the lower educated are more likely to have personality traits that reduce relationship stability. However, few empirical verifications of this proposition exist. To fill this void, we look at the distribution of personality traits across educational groups of married individuals in Britain. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (N = 2,665), we first estimated the effects of the Big Five personality traits agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience on divorce and subsequently examine their distribution across educational groups. We find that in particular women's personality traits differ by education. We also observe that personality traits affecting divorce risk are distributed unevenly over educational groups, but they do not favor the higher educated in general. In sum, the data do not support the hypothesis that the lower educated in Britain have personality traits that reduce relationship stability

The Emotional Structure of Social Interaction: The Expression of Emotion and the Emergence of Social Order

Der Artikel untersucht die Funktion von Emotionen in der sozialen Interaktion sowie ihren Beitrag zur Entstehung strukturierter Sozialität und der Bildung sozialer Ordnung. Er geht von der Annahme aus, dass die Emotionsentstehung einer umfassenden sozialen Prägung unterliegt und mit charakteristischen Handlungstendenzen einhergeht. Darauf aufbauend wird das Argument entwickelt, dass vor allem mimisches emotionales Ausdrucksverhalten dazu beiträgt, strukturwirksame Handlungs- bzw. Interaktionsmuster zu generieren. In einem ersten Schritt wird gezeigt, dass die Enkodierung emotionalen Ausdrucksverhaltens einerseits auf physiologischen Grundmustern beruht, andererseits aber in Abhängigkeit der sozialen Umwelt ausgeprägte „Dialekte“ entwickelt. Analog zu diesen Nuancen, so verdeutlicht der zweite Schritt, entsteht die Fähigkeit, mimisches Ausdrucksverhalten zu dekodieren. Dadurch verlaufen reziproke Attributionen von Emotion, Situationsbewertung und Handlungstendenz umso effektiver, je näher sich Akteure im sozialen Raum sind. Diese Verschränkung führt, so zeigt der dritte Schritt, zu einer präziseren interindividuellen Übertragung von Emotionen innerhalb sozialer Einheiten, die eine entsprechende interindividuelle Angleichung von Emotionen und Handlungstendenzen wahrscheinlicher macht. Auf diese Weise tragen Emotionen zur Genese strukturierter Interaktionen und zur Entstehung sozialer Ordnung bei.This contribution investigates functions of emotion in social interaction and their role in the emergence and reproduction of social structures and social order. It assumes that the elicitation of emotion is fundamentally dependent on the social environment and that emotions go hand in hand with characteristic action tendencies. On this basis, it is argued that the facial expression of emotion is particularly implicated in generating patterns of social action and interaction. First, it is shown that the encoding of facial expression combines hard-wired physiological principles on the one hand and socially learned aspects on the other, leading to more fine-grained and socially differentiated “dialects” of emotional expression. Second, it is argued that the decoding of facial expression is contingent upon this combination, so that reciprocal attributions of emotional states, situational interpretations, and action tendencies are more effective within rather than across social units. Third, this conjunction affects the conditions for emotional contagion, which is shown to be more effective within social units exhibiting similar encoding and decoding characteristics and thus aligns emotions and action tendencies in a coherent, yet socially differentiated fashion. Taken together, these interactional processes show that emotions facilitate the structuring of social interaction and the emergence of social order