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

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

Emotional roots of right-wing political populism

The rise of the radical populist right has been linked to fundamental socioeconomic changes fueled by globalization and economic deregulation. Yet, socioeconomic factors can hardly fully explain the rise of new right. We suggest that emotional processes that affect people’s identities provide an additional explanation for the current popularity of the new radical right, not only among low- and medium-skilled workers, but also among the middle classes whose insecurities manifest as fears of not being able to live up to salient social identities and their constitutive values, and as shame about this actual or anticipated inability. This link between fear and shame is particularly salient in competitive market societies where responsibility for success and failure is increasingly individualized, and failure is stigmatized through unemployment, being on welfare benefits, or labor migration. In these conditions, we identify two psychological mechanisms behind the rise of the new populist right. The first mechanism of ressentiment explains how negative emotions -- fear and insecurity, in particular -- transform through repressed shame into anger, resentment, and hatred towards perceived “enemies” of the self and associated social groups, such as the refugees, the immigrants, the long-term unemployed, the political and cultural elites, and the “mainstream” media. The second mechanism is emotional distancing from social identities that inflict shame and other negative emotions, and instead seeking meaning and self-esteem from those aspects of identity that are perceived to be stable and to some extent exclusive, such as nationality, ethnicity, religion, language, and traditional gender roles.Peer reviewe

a multidimensional Scale Based on a Three-Country Study

We develop and test a multidimensional scale measuring national identification. Drawing on the extant literature on nations and national identity, we propose national identification as an understanding of how individuals subjectively and dynamically relate to different characteristics of nations that we operationalize as the dimensions of symbolic, civic, and solidary identification. We discuss the development of a number of questionnaire items representing each of these dimensions and report results of various validity and reliability tests using data from three surveys we conducted in England, Germany, and Poland. Results in general confirm the three-dimensional structure of the overall construct while at the same time suggesting country-specific adaptations to the scale

The emotional timeline of unemployment: Anticipation, reaction, and adaption

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 on emotional well-being but not in life satisfaction in anticipation of unemployment

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

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

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