TOWARD A SOCIOLOGY OF EMOTIONS: SOME PROBLEMS AND SOME SOLUTIONS

Abstract

Psychologists and physiologists have pre-empted the study of emotions because emotions are organismic and psychological phenomena. Nonetheless sociologists have a contribution to make because emotions very frequently result from real, imagined, anticipated, or recollected outcomes of social relationships. In order to study emotions sociologically we require a systematic model of relationship. I propose that empirical results warrant the adoption of a model based on two dimensions: power and the accord of status. / propose that felt excess and lor felt deficit of power and status give rise to a number of distressful emotions: guilt, shame, anxiety, depression, and anger. I propose further that the sociological approach to emotions by way of the power-status relational model helps to clarify a significant controversy in the psychophysiology of emotions, namely whether emotions have specific neurochemical bases, or whether all emotions have a common physiological substrate. A sociological analysis clearly supports the specificity theory. In complementary fashion, the specificity results in psychophysiology also support the power-status model of relationship. The two approaches comprise a basis for a new sociophysiology of emotions. Durkheim's Suicide was a tour de force that showed how sociology could explain phenomena seemingly far distant from it. What could be more private than the inner turmoil, personal despair, or impassioned madness that leads a person to take his or her own life? Surely sociology could have nothing to contribute here. Yet, by his analysis of the social forms of suicide, Durkheim illuminated conditions external to the individual that determine the pas sion for self-extinction. The study of the emotions is a similar case. Here again the phenomena are pri vate, buried even more deeply in the or ganism than the reasons for suicide, since the emotions are by general agreement phenomena of the autonomie nervous sys tem, beyond the conscious control of the actor. Thus, emotions appear doubly re moved from the social realm. Whereas the actor himself must participate in his own suicide, he has no control at all in the earliest stages of emotional arousal. What, then, is sociology's role in the study of emotions? My purpose here is to discuss some problems and solutions in developing a sociological theory of emotions. First, I shall sketch briefly some of the current approaches to the study of emotions in psychology. Second, I shall propose a general model of social relations that can be used to gain insight into the problem of emotions. Next I shall apply the model to the systematic analysis of five distressful emotions: guilt, shame, anxiety, depres sion, and anger. Finally, I shall discuss the empirical grounds for a theoretical link be tween sociology and psychophysiology.1

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