How a sociology of emotions helps us understand society

Welcome to the Transforming Society Clubcast. Today we're talking to Mary Holmes from the University of Edinburgh and also Westergrin from Gothenburg University. Mary and Orser are along with Nathan Manning from the University of Adelaide, the editors of the new Emotions and Society Journal published by Bristol University Press. The first issue of the Journal was published in May this year, associated with the European Sociological Association's Research Network on Sociology of Emotions. It aims to bring a theoretical and empirical understanding of emotions in social life, taking a uniquely sociological perspective. We're also engaging in interdisciplinary exchanges. So hi Mary, hi Orser. Hello. You just cut. Hello. Great to meet you. I wondered if we could start by you telling us a bit about how the idea of the journal came about. What's the history of the journal? I'm sure. I'm also can correct me, but I think it was about 10 years ago at an ESA conference. And really we've had the idea for quite a long time. We kept discussing at the ESA Emotions Network meetings how there was no dedicated sociology of Emotions Journal, so that we really wanted to have somewhere to publish all the wonderful research that we were hearing about at the conferences, but didn't really have a home of their own. So that was what I remember. Also, what about you? Yeah, I think I remember something similar. We might have started even before 10 years ago. I mean, I don't even remember. It's been with us for such a long time. I remember Jochen and I sitting, well, that must have been 10 years ago and working on something that you and Nathan started. So that was like long after you had started it and we sort of were working on that. So you must have done that before. I mean, it's been ages. I was still in college that when we started and that's more than 10 years ago. Absolutely, absolutely. So it's been a long time coming. It's been with us for a long time already. And so it must be, it must feel great then to have seen that first issue come out in May and it looks so beautiful as well, doesn't it? The print version. It's beautiful. We were really pleased with it. It was a great moment for us. It was a reward for our perseverance. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It feels like something like, oh, we did this before we died. That's great. It's like, yeah, we also want to add to what Mary was saying that there are so many, there are like loads of psychology of emotions journals out there and they are so totally different and doesn't really fit with the sociological perspective. So I think this is a marvelous outlet for everything that has to do with the sociological perspective and social science and qualitative methods in association with studying emotions. So that's, yeah. So how is the sociology of emotions different from social psychology then? I would say, I mean, I just came from the conference on the psychology of emotions yesterday. That's why I'm up here in the Northern Sweden. Okay. And I was invited. It's a program, a master program about these psychology of emotions. And I was invited as a talker because I had some sort of alternative perspective, they thought. And I was the last speaker of five and all four of the five, or not three of the four speakers before me were all about quantitative methods and experimental design. And they were all investigating more or less discrete emotions like anger, fear, disgust, whatever. And they do that with statistical methods. I mean, their experimental designs feeds into quantitative instruments. And then they're all extremely excited about the method and the measuring instruments, but they tend to discover the wheel over and over again. And they tend to also not contextualize emotions at all. I mean, they try to contextualize emotions, but their experiments really don't allow them to contextualize because it's all very unnatural situations. And and they seem to consider that they actually do investigate the brain rather than rather than anything else. I think how the emotion works in the brain eventually and comes out in very social action and so on. But they can't really study the social activities in the natural situations. So they can't really tell how much the social really interacts with them, the way the person experiences emotions and so on. So I think, I mean, our perspective is hugely different in that way that we usually do this by qualitative methods, not necessarily, but even the quantitative methods are more geared towards looking at social situations and the way people actually behave with their emotions and interacting with emotions and emotional exchange in social situations, not so much focused on the individual. So it's the social situations that kind of shape how we emotionally react to them as well. It's more of a circle, isn't it, rather than just us having emotions and putting them out there? Yeah, and I think that the sociologists of emotions are interested in that social construction of how we feel, of how our feelings are shaped and produced by the way that society is organised by the kinds of social rules and norms that we have around emotions. And we're interested in how people manage and make sense of their own and other people's feelings in relation to their social context and their social circumstances. Exactly. Yeah, there's a much more holistic way of looking at holistic and realistic, maybe, way of looking at things. One of the topics the journal looks at is the history of emotions, so just following on a little bit from what we were saying. How have our emotions changed over time when I was reading some articles in the journal, I think parenting and anxious, anxious parenting may be an example, a real life example of this. Yeah, well I think that Peter Stearns' article is in the first issue as a great example of how our history of emotions is really important to sociologists, to come to understand how emotions might be constructed differently now to how they were in the past. And as you say, anxious parenting is one example that he uses to try and understand that, that we have a very different way of dealing with children. You can hear that in everyday conversations sometimes when people talk about, "Oh, you know, when I was a kid, we used to just run around, feral outdoors all day, and did what we liked, and now children can't step to feet outside their own door without their parents getting worried about what's happened to them." And so you get that kind of common sense, and I guess what sociologists try and do is understand, well, how much evidence is there that that is actually that anxiety is warranted, and why might it have come about? What is it about the world we live in that might make parents more anxious? Actually, a different kind of world, or is it just a different expectations around what parenting involves and what childhood is and so on? Yeah, I think speaking as a parent, I think guilt, as well, must be an emotion that's felt a lot more nowadays than it used to be. I've been thinking a lot recently in these podcasts actually about ideas about the good mother and all things like that. So I think the journal is probably going to bring a lot to this kind of conversation as well. Absolutely. I'm also thinking that when it comes to the history of emotions, that what they're really good at showing is also how perceptions of emotions and language about emotion changes over time, and then how it seems to be at different times in history, and in different societies, different types of emotions have been sort of more emphasized, or more freshly that have existed emotions that we don't really use today at all. I mean, we don't really talk about, I don't know, melancholia or hysteria in the same way that we used to do, and I think Sterns has also been investigating quite a lot the role of anger since the 19th century, which is quite interesting because anger seems to be extremely sort of, I mean, it's really, people are really suspicious. There is sort of cultural suspicion against anger because that's supposed to be violent and threatening in one way. or the other, but actually violence is a very. Sorry, anger is a very potent political emotions, and so it somehow fits our very deep political size times to say that anger should not be expressed, you know. Because anger is associated with violence, we kind of not really even looking at how it plays out in other spheres. Yeah, and the actually positive social change effects of anger, which of course then would threaten the system as it is, or the status quo of the system today. So, that's where anger is bound somehow or maybe we need a little bit more of it. So this is clearly a diverse multidisciplinary field. Obviously, people talk about a lot about interdisciplinarity at the moment, and so what role does interdisciplinarity play, and does the sociology of emotions create a space for this kind of work? Yeah, I mean, I think that the sociology of emotion developed out of a kind of boundary between social psychology and sociology, and that boundary is a little bit more fluid in the United States where Hoshild and some of the other pioneers of the sociology of emotion started thinking about it. But so we've always had, although we do differentiate ourselves from social psychology, where there is also a connection there, and that can be quite productive to think about how what the sociology of emotions offers is different. And I think a really good example of that is a book, an American book that I liked from a few years ago called The Loss of Sadness, and it's about how our society has come to the author's argue over medicate depression. So they are totally of the opinion that clinical depression is an illness, it's something that needs to be treated, but they take through the way in which the definition of depression has expanded to leave very little room for what they call normal sadness. And as sociologists, they're really interested in that, you know, why is there less and less space for people to be just sad, why is our society not allow people to do that in one of the dangers of losing that space for the normal sadness, and that becoming something that's pathologised and medicated. So, you know, that I think is a really interesting way in which interdisciplinarity, they clearly, they're not rubberishing the psychiatric approaches to depression, they're trying to understand them and their importance and how they've changed, but they're also saying, hang on a minute, as sociologists, he's a critical approach to thinking about something like depression and thinking about its social context, and why it might have come to be, the definition may have come to be expanded in the way that it has, and that's about an analysis of the social context again and the kind of world that we live in. So yeah, I think that that interdisciplinarity, but yeah, we use history a lot, and we also use anthropology, so we use, within the sociology of emotions, there's a lot of debates around to what extent emotions are universal, or to what extent there's a large degree of cultural difference. Could you give an example of that? Cultural differences in emotion. Yeah, well, I mean, there's questions about, for example, anger, and whether anger is expressed in doubt with in the same way in different cultures, or whether some cultures have emotions that there isn't really, don't translate very easily. So, but yeah, I'm thinking about anger. There are some cultures where it is really not acceptable to express anger, and that is something that has to be repressed culturally in order to operate as an acceptable human being, and other cultures that might be, it might be expected that you show anger and can be angry. And then that also goes back to what we were saying about anger before, about even within a culture, and people express it in different ways, and actually it's not necessarily about positive and negative either. I think it's also the way changes over time is hugely important, so it's like different over time, it's also different in the present time compared to different cultures. I also think that you could probably, I mean, we talk about feeling rules and expression rules, pertinent specific situations or groups or collectives, and I think we can definitely speak about emotional regimes of some kind that are dominant in particular societies, or I mean, it's very hard to, of course, obviously to connect these to nations, but I do think that as well as nations shape personalities and views on the world through their media and so on, and so on, schools, socialization of their existence and so on, they also shape their emotional sort of character or emotional styles, rather in terms of how people express, what is culturally accepted in terms of how to express emotions, and that goes for all types of emotions. I mean, Sweden, Sweden is reputed for its very sort of subtle emotional expressions, and it's really hard for people except for Japanese people who are virtually the same, I think, so to understand in the beginning what a Sweden, an average Sweden feels, especially when it comes to anger, because anger is very sort of held back and very, very softly expressed, yeah. And in fact, there's a good, another good example around Sweden coming up in the next issue of the journal, which is about empathy and about online far-right discourse, and in Sweden, and this talks about the way in which the far-right kind of present the Swedish, as empathetic people and present migrants as deliberately manipulating that empathy that Swedes feels, supposedly, for others, so that there's a quite, that's a good example of picking up on a cultural expression of emotion as Swedish empathy and trying to understand what does that mean and how might it be made into a political kind of tool by the far-right in this case. Yeah, I think speaking about the far-right that also brings us to anger, I mean somehow what we see now, we see lots of so-called anger management and anger entrepreneurs, if you wish, in the far-right political sides, all over Europe and the world, and I suppose you could see that as the kind of return of the repressed in terms of political anger, because there has been such consensus around the type of deliberative liberal sort of deliberative democracy, and it's consensus-oriented ways of approaching crucial sort of ways of building society, which is economy and its institutions, and yeah, so I mean, it's really quite interesting this anger thing. I wanted to ask you about politics. Arlee Ostschild focuses on politics in her introductory essay to the first issue, and I think power is quite an interesting thing to explore, because it underpins so many of us, so much of our social relations. What can the sociology of emotions tell us about power in relationships? Because I was just thinking about in connection to what I was just talking to, and those who connect to your question now is Deborah Gold's paper in the first issue, where she actually shows how the sort of deliberative democratic consensus pushes down on any kind of political challenge by ridiculizing it, in various ways, you know, showing that, you know, it's actually just a childy and sort of unrealistic and, you know, wild fantasies to even imagine a different system. And this is done in very sort of in every kind of debate or interaction between sort of established politicians and young, in this case, leftist politicians and also how people are sort of the Wall Street protests and all those similar types of recent protests, how they are being met by like, yeah, can you present an alternative, can you actually show us what the different society would be like, no, you can't. So that's not realistic, you know, just get back to school again or whatever. And that is somehow the most sort of repressive. I mean, I think power in history probably also always presented itself as a rational, whereas the, whereas the, the sort of challenges to power were always presented as potential dangers because they presented dangerous emotions, collective, sort of collective, hysteria, so collective of them. That's exactly what I was going to say as well, that the powerful label the powerless as over-emotional as a way of undermining resistance to power and that's the classic form of that. But also, I think that it goes deeper in reproducing inequalities because it's about a kind of a lack of recognition of oppressed groups that kind of contributes to the continuation of inequalities. You're sort of failing to recognise people as, you know, fully rational human beings and by saying, well, they're not really, you know, that's why women weren't allowed to vote. They were supposedly too emotional and not reasonable enough. And again, often minority groups and indigenous peoples have been labelled as, you know, not capable of the rational thoughts supposedly needed to make decisions and have a share in power or even to be considered as proper human beings. And that's been a way to maintain inequalities. Exactly. Now, if I should just add something to the interdisciplinary thing, I think that we also do, in fact, draw from, to some extent, at least from research done in neuropsychiatry, even if we're not exactly working with neuropsychiatry or the brain or anything, it's quite fascinating. Starting point for the sociology of emotions, what damasio and people like him, Antonio or damasio have sort of been able to show how the brain actually cannot, you know, separate cognition and emotion, but it actually works together. So it's not so much more complicated than our cultural view and emotion that they would be separate from cognition or rational action. So I think that is quite interesting as well. And of course, apart from history, there's also managerial studies, critical management studies, and, you know, organization, organization studies or sociology of organization are also usually interested in emotions and care work, care studies or social work studies and so on. It's, I mean, it all, we're quite interdisciplinary in that sense, but I think what our focus is really is on, well, not experimental methods and not the brain and individuals, but rather the interaction around emotion. So that's like how we welcome articles to the journal from that perspective. I think really that collective identity, though, is a really interesting article, not sure it's in the first issue on FastTrack at the moment, by Barnwell on Family Secrets. Yeah, could you talk a little bit about that, that kind of collective identity and families? Well, I guess I think one of the things about emotions that we're interested in in sociologists is not just emotions as experienced by individuals, but as something that is produced in interaction with other people and so that they can have a collective aspect to them and they can be, they're not necessarily the property of individuals of that makes any sense. And I think the idea of family secrets and the way in which people try to make sense of their own and other people's emotions is something that's kind of done in interaction with others and the interaction with others might include people who are no longer living, so there might be a an attempt to try and have respect for the past shame or guilt of family members, for example, with the family secrets. So, although now we might not think it's terribly shameful or even unusual to have children outside of marriage, that would have been something that past ancestors would have felt shame and guilt about. And so what do you do with those stories if they crop up when you're finding out about family history and how do you care for that? How should you feel about how they felt if you see what I mean? So it's not just about what's going on in your own brain and how you manage that might depend on your connection and links to the family who are still living and what they think about how it should be dealt with and so on. So it's not just all about individual sensations. I thought that was a great example of how sociology of emotions does allow us to kind of relate and connect and understand. It's interesting. So what other, I think we talked a bit about social inequality, history of emotions, lots of other things. What other specific areas of social emotion will the journal address? Well, we're interested in sometimes putting a focus on particular emotions. So I mentioned empathy. There's a couple of articles coming out on empathy, the one about far right online discourse, but also about empathy, I think, in relation to microfinance of one group. Yeah, that's right. And there's also, yeah, we're looking towards having an interview with Eva Illuse as well. So of course, who deals with love as an emotion. So there, we do look sometimes at specific emotions, but also the relationship between different kinds of politics and emotions is a major theme as we've suggested. Intimate relationships, and again, the Barnwell was one example of that, but we're interested in having more about that, more about how our emotions might change in a digital society, I think that's very important. And I was thinking when I was looking at some, there's another article we have in our pile at the moment that is about artificial intelligence and robots in the future of work. And so how does technology and some of the technological changes, both in terms of the digital and in terms of things like work and the rise of robotics and so on? How are those going to alter the way of which emotional labour operates within society, and it's important. Yeah, yeah. I'm also thinking that, you know, things that we'd really would like to or encourage to express that or take into the journal, it would be also various cultural perspectives as we were talking about earlier. Yeah. And from scholars who are active in different parts of the world, except the Western world where we get most of our contributions from, so that would be really interesting in terms of, you know, having different perspectives, because I think the Western perspective is quite dominant in the sociology of emotions and it would be really interesting to to find other ones. And then of course, mentioning [BLANK_AUDIO] Before, I think it's important to mention also that her work is broadly, I mean, she's been doing a lot of bad love, but her work is also broadly critique of emotions in capitalist society and trying to dissect what emotions mean and how, how society is our emotional in capitalism and how, how emotions become commodities, which is quite interesting and other work in connection to that that would be really interesting to explore is how people sort of shift the emotional. Regions or emotional styles in order to adapt to different society in transition from, I mean, under the rain or the, under the actual circumstances that we're living today, which is climate, climate change and the end of resources globally is going to force us to shift quite dramatically into different kind of non-growth society. And how, you know, what types of, we are so much brought up to sort of satisfy our desires through consumption and to also confirm and shape our relationships to other people through consumption and consumer products and so, so, so, you know, how, how can you conceive of society, which is not working that way and that does not allow us to work that way and we have to sort of, yeah, change. I mean, there is also in the, in the environmental moment now, there is a whole story emerging or narrative about post apocalyptic societies and, and how that, what that will mean both in terms of identity, yeah, that's, I mean, it's quite interesting, I think. And that what that will mean also in terms of shifting, shifting emotional orientations and, and, you know, relationships. So that's, that's really interesting, I think. It says that there's a huge potential for this is energy evermations kind of allow us to rethink the way we look at the world and transform society potentially. And I think it would be, I was, I think that whole new political economy of emotions is something that we, we are wanting to, to think about in future issues and as, as also suggests, but. It would be interesting to get other sociologists from other areas like actor network theory and so on who think about the way in which non human actors are part of our, our social world, whether they be, you know, that be human animal relations or relations. Between technological objects and, and humans and I think that as we enter into these, these new. Worlds whether we do are heading towards a post capitalist world or at least into some different kind of social formation. It's also suggests that then what, how might we, how might we understand that from a range of different perspectives using some of the tools we already have in the within sociology more widely. We, we're, we're very open to sociologists who might not normally write about emotions thinking about how emotions might be a part of their, their framework for understanding the world and being explicit about that because often emotions are sort of implicit in some of these frameworks but haven't been explicitly discussed or talked through. Thank you. Mary, thank you also. There's plenty more information about the motions and society journal on the Bristol University Press website. That's BristolUniversityPress.co.uk.