Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure Flashcards

These vocabulary flashcards cover the key sociological concepts introduced by Arlie Russell Hochschild regarding how individuals manage their emotions in accordance with social rules and class structures.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

The author of the essay proposing the emotion-management perspective to inspect the self, interaction, and social structure.

Emotion Management (Emotion Work)

The act of inducing or inhibiting feelings so as to render them appropriate to a specific social situation; also referred to as deep acting.

Feeling Rules

Socially shared, often latent guidelines that direct how individuals want to try to feel in a given situation, functioning as the underside of ideology.

Organismic Account of Emotion

A theoretical perspective, associated with Darwin and early Freud, that views emotion as a biological reflex characterized by fixity and universality, similar to a sneeze or knee-jerk reaction.

Interactive Account of Emotion

A perspective where social factors permeate emotion through the microactions of labeling, interpreting, and managing, viewing emotion as a psychobiological means of adaptation.

Surface Acting

A type of acting, often associated with Erving Goffman, that involves the direct management of outward behavioral expressions rather than internal feelings.

Deep Acting

A technique where an individual guides their internal thoughts and feelings to elicit a corresponding outward expression, rather than just managing the behavioral facade.

Cognitive Emotion Work

An emotion-management technique involving the attempt to change images, ideas, or thoughts to alter the feelings associated with them.

Bodily Emotion Work

The attempt to manage feelings by changing somatic or physical symptoms, such as deliberately slowing down one's breathing or trying not to shake.

Expressive Emotion Work

The attempt to change inner feeling by altering public channels of expression, such as trying to smile or cry to shift one's internal state.

Framing Rules

The social rules according to which individuals ascribe specific definitions or meanings to situations, such as assigning blame or credit.

Commoditization of Feeling

When deep gestures of emotion work enter the marketplace and are bought and sold as a component of labor power.

Middle-Class Child Rearing (Emotion Focus)

A socialization pattern where parents tend to control children via appeals to feeling and intentions, preparing them for meaning-making jobs that require emotion management.

Working-Class Child Rearing (Behavior Focus)

A socialization pattern where parents tend to control children via appeals to outward behavior and its consequences, mirroring the requirements of physical labor.

Authenticity

A moral virtue described by Lionel Trilling that refers to unworked-over, spontaneous feeling that is not subject to a deliberate act of self upon feeling.

Emotive Dissonance

The periodic 'pinch' or sense of discrepancy between what an individual actually feels and what they think they ought to feel according to social rules.