Emotional Norms Research Articles

Perceiving societal pressure to be happy is linked to poor well-being, especially in happy nations

Happiness is a valuable experience, and societies want their citizens to be happy. Although this societal commitment seems laudable, overly emphasizing positivity (versus negativity) may create an unattainable emotion norm that ironically compromises individual well-being. In this multi-national study (40 countries; 7443 participants), we investigate how societal pressure to be happy and not sad predicts emotional, cognitive and clinical indicators of well-being around the world, and examine how these relations differ as a function of countries’ national happiness levels (collected from the World Happiness Report). Although detrimental well-being associations manifest for an average country, the strength of these relations varies across countries. People’s felt societal pressure to be happy and not sad is particularly linked to poor well-being in countries with a higher World Happiness Index. Although the cross-sectional nature of our work prohibits causal conclusions, our findings highlight the correlational link between social emotion valuation and individual well-being, and suggest that high national happiness levels may have downsides for some.

"СЕРДЕЧНОСТЬ ВСТРЕЧ": ЭМОЦИОНАЛЬНЫЙ РЕЖИМ ОТТЕПЕЛИ В КОММЕНТАРИЯХ К ПРАВИТЕЛЬСТВЕННЫМ ФОТОГРАФИЯМ

The article considers an emotional regime of the ottepel’ (‘thaw’) period, which found its expression both in magazine photographs of the time and in the comments to them. The era was oriented at sincerity that realized itself in photographs through the affection of a gesture, through an emphasis on the immediacy of emotional reactions. The accompanying text clarified and strengthened a visual part of a publication, often duplicating a meaning of an image, but at the same time added new connotations to a photograph. On the one hand the emotional statements were descriptive, but on the other hand they were prescriptive, offering the Soviet citizens a model to follow. Magazine publications established emotional norms and indicated necessary ways of responding to certain political events. The paper identifies three modes for the desired interpretation of images – ‘subjective’, ‘mimetic’ and ‘regulatory’. The research is based on comments and other text messages that accompanied government photographs in such popular Soviet magazines as Ogonyok, Soviet Photo, Soviet Union, etc. It focuses on the format of publications, comparing texts and images.

“Making My Prayer with Joy”

Abstract Drawing on recent literature in the history of emotions, this article describes Paul’s epistolary prayers as emotional practices that aim to harmonize and amplify the emotions of Paul and his addressees, particularly shared joy and longing. In Philippians and 1 Thessalonians, philophronetic topoi and the emotional norms they encode provide the basic cultural logic undergirding these prayers’ affective work. Compensating more or less successfully for the somatic signals otherwise constitutive of collective emotions, Paul’s explicit evocation of presumptively shared emotion nourishes the fantasy of presence and thus the rewards of common feeling, which include emotional sustenance for Paul himself and, if his letter is successful, a renewed feeling of solidarity among his addressees that reinforces their shared loyalty to Paul and his Lord.

Emotion norms for 6000 Polish word meanings with a direct mapping to the Polish wordnet

Emotion lexicons are useful in research across various disciplines, but the availability of such resources remains limited for most languages. While existing emotion lexicons typically comprise words, it is a particular meaning of a word (rather than the word itself) that conveys emotion. To mitigate this issue, we present the Emotion Meanings dataset, a novel dataset of 6000 Polish word meanings. The word meanings are derived from the Polish wordnet (plWordNet), a large semantic network interlinking words by means of lexical and conceptual relations. The word meanings were manually rated for valence and arousal, along with a variety of basic emotion categories (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, anticipation, happiness, surprise, and trust). The annotations were found to be highly reliable, as demonstrated by the similarity between data collected in two independent samples: unsupervised (n = 21,317) and supervised (n = 561). Although we found the annotations to be relatively stable for female, male, younger, and older participants, we share both summary data and individual data to enable emotion research on different demographically specific subgroups. The word meanings are further accompanied by the relevant metadata, derived from open-source linguistic resources. Direct mapping to Princeton WordNet makes the dataset suitable for research on multiple languages. Altogether, this dataset provides a versatile resource that can be employed for emotion research in psychology, cognitive science, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and natural language processing.

Anger among Chinese migrants amid COVID-19 discrimination: The role of host news coverage, cultural distance, and national identity.

As the early COVID-19 outbreak sparked xenophobia against people of Asian and Chinese background, we collected data from Chinese migrants worldwide to test how discrimination at a macro-level was perceived by the Chinese during COVID-19 globally. Specifically, we examined (1) whether/how the Chinese migrants were aware of discrimination against their co-nationals during COVID; (2) if so, whether anger was a predominant reaction of these Chinese towards certain exposure to relevant information; (3) how responses of anger transcend across the group of Chinese migrants. Integrating the ecological approach to media and cultural psychology, as well as the intergroup perspective of social psychology, we conducted a study that explored the impact of traditional media exposure to discrimination on collective anger—a process mediated by national identity among the Chinese migrants. Findings provide some evidence that geographically dispersed mono-cultural groups may share or identify with collective emotions when facing xenophobic threats in a macro context. Further examination of cultural distance (between China and the host country) among the Chinese migrants also revealed a particular interaction between host newspaper coverage and cultural distance on national identity. These findings suggest further research to examine the emotional norms of similar cultures bonded via strong collective identities in times of intergroup threat and the theoretical possibility for diasporic identity processes.

Latent Profiles of Internal and External Consent During a Recent Sexual Encounter.

Understanding how individuals conceptualize and communicate sexual consent is critical to sexual health and has important implications for the prevention of sexual assault. This study used a data-driven (vs. a theoretical) approach to understand how students' internal feelings of willingness (i.e., internal consent) and behavioral communication of consent (i.e., external consent) cluster together within sexual encounters. Using data from 610 college students (72% female) who reported on their most recent sexual encounter, latent profile analysis revealed five distinct consent profiles. Most students reported willing encounters that involved the use of several external consent cues (68.9%), a small group reported low levels of both internal and external consent (3.8%), and three groups (27.3% altogether) reported encounters with complex patterns of internal and external consent. Demographic and encounter-level differences were observed across profiles. Programming that trains students to attend to their own internal desires in addition to external consent behaviors could improve emotional health and shift social norms about sexual communication.

Outsourcing mothering for schooling: Why Taiwanese middle-class mothers hire tutors

Using interview data collected from mothers and tutors, this research demonstrates that academic improvement and parental involvement combine to justify outsourcing mothers' educational work, which requires mothers to supervise their children and leads to role strain. Therefore, middle-class families hire tutors providing after-school educational help to maintain a coherent image of intensive mothering. This outsourcing could ease parent–child conflict, maintain the mother's caregiver role (following engendered emotional norms and patriarchal order), and provide another adult role model for the child. Lower-middle-class mothers value tutors' cultural capacity to educate their children both academically and behaviourally. Upper-middle-class mothers outsource teaching aspects, which could risk their carer role, and use educational professionalism to justify the hire. By focusing on Taiwanese mothers' tutor-hiring phenomenon in relation to outsourcing mothering for schooling, this article contributes to sociological perspectives on shadow education and demonstrates how tutoring complements mothering and schooling in Taiwan.

Queerness Is a Particular Liability: Feeling Rules in College and University LGBTQ Centers

ABSTRACT Organizational sociologists argue that informal and formal rules within workplaces function to increase employee productivity and effectiveness, but can also have negative emotional consequences. Feeling rules, which are the emotional norms that regulate interpersonal interactions within the workplace are not applied equally; white women and professionals of color are expected to display deference in the face of emotionally-charged experiences at work, while their counterparts are given more flexibility in how they could display anger or annoyance. Scholars note that feeling rules work to reproduce extant gendered and racial hierarchies when expectations regarding worker productivity, effectiveness and outcomes are restricted on the basis of social identities. Analyzing sixteen semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ Center staff, we demonstrate the feeling rules are organized around employees’ ability to (1) (re)produce trauma in themselves during training sessions and (2) minimize students’ and their own anger throughout the workday.

RememberingŎmŏni: Using Chinese Memoirs to Understand Sino-North Korean Interactions during the Korean War

AbstractThis article assesses the memoirs of Chinese volunteers as a source for better understanding social interactions between the Chinese and North Koreans during the Korean War. The hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers serving in Korea were an almost ubiquitous presence in wartime North Korea. Yet the relationship between the volunteers and North Korean civilians has not been the subject of many studies. Memoirs written by the volunteers are one of the few sources that document these interactions. Among the subjects the volunteers wrote about, their encounters with older North Koreans whom they called “mothers” or ŏmŏni were among the most prominent. While acknowledging the propagandistic intent behind some of these memoirs, the article argues that they do shed light on some of the emotional norms that shaped relations between North Korean women and the volunteers even if they cannot always be treated as completely reliable descriptions of events.

Drizzling sympathy: Ideal victims and flows of sympathy in Swedish courts

By connecting sociological perspectives on sympathy with the concept of ‘ideal victims’, this article examines how sympathy forms and informs legal thought and practices in relation to victim status in Swedish courts. In its broadest sense, sympathy can be understood as an understanding and care for someone else’s suffering and in many contexts victimization and sympathy are densely entangled. However, since ideals of objectivity and neutrality prevail in court, emotional norms are narrow and sympathy is met with suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Swedish courts, I argue that while sympathetic feelings are mostly backgrounded, they are still a central part of court proceedings and deliberations. The main findings suggest that prosecutors and victims’ counsel use ‘sympathy cues’ to evoke the judges’ concern for the complainants and to facilitate their empathic imagination of the complainant’s situation. In relation to this finding, judges engage in emotion work in order to not be affected by these sympathy cues. The study also shows that in encounters with ‘ideal victims’ who perform a playful resistance to their victimization, legal actors show sympathy more freely and accept moments of temporary relief from the normal interaction order in court.

Transforming Gender and Emotion: The Butterfly Lovers Story in China and Korea

Transforming Gender and Emotion: The Butterfly Lovers Story in China and Korea

The “Joker” laugh: Social judgments towards affective deviants in a sample of young offenders with callous unemotional traits

We assessed negative bias in Colombian young offenders towards affective deviants (those who violate emotional norms). Postulating that affective deviants elicit an “uncanny/creepy” feeling resembling that produced by psychopaths, we explored social judgments of affective deviants in individuals with callous-unemotional (CU) traits. 188 young offenders evaluated a target displaying congruent or incongruent affective displays in response to pictures eliciting positive/negative affect, depending on the condition. Affective deviants were rated as creepier and less trustworthy, and more likely to have bad moral character, than targets who displayed normative affect. Further, affective deviants who displayed positive affect in response to negative stimuli were rated as having worse moral character than those who displayed negative affect in response to positive stimuli. CU traits predicted lower trustworthiness judgments of targets in congruent conditions, but higher trustworthiness judgments of targets in incongruent conditions. CU traits also predicted higher desired social distance and creepiness judgments in congruent conditions. Creepiness ratings correlated with judgments of bad moral character, suggesting that this emotional response may be involved in moral evaluations of strangers. These findings indicate that deviant affective displays produce a variety of negative social judgments, with CU traits playing a role in these social cognitive heuristics.

PARSELYASİYA CÜMLƏ ÜZVLƏRİNİN EMOSİONAL VƏ OBRAZLAŞDIRICILIQ NORMASI KİMİ

The emotional and figurative norms of sentence members have different features, which also have a special place among the syntactic norms. Means of expression such as members, repetitions, parallels, parse, inversion, rhetoric are considered to be the emotional and figurative norms of sentence members. Among these units, which create emotional and figurative, parcel is distinguished by a number of features. Parselation is the transmission of the main idea in laconic parts. Parcels, which are considered to be one of the most important issues of modern syntax, are found in literary, scientific and journalistic works as a linguistic-stylistic phenomenon. The term parcel, translated as parcel, comes from French literary criticism. By means of parallelization, the text is divided into short thought units, so that the writer can draw the reader's attention to an important issue. Parallels are distinguished by punctuation in writing and intonation and pause in speech. Key words: parselation, parcel, informative, construction, norm, speech culture, speech act

Navigating Emotion Work by Using Community Cultural Wealth: Student Teaching Experiences of Teacher Candidates of Color

ABSTRACT When teacher candidates learn to teach for equity and social justice during their practicum, they must learn to deal with the emotional conflict and tension that arise from fraught racial dynamics. Because limited research has focused on teacher candidates of Color during their practicum, little is known about how they agentively navigate conflicting emotions vis-à-vis the racial power dynamics at their field placement. Informed by critical race theory and its conceptualization of emotion work and capital, in this study, I examined what types of emotional tensions one Latinx and two African American teacher candidates experienced during their practicum. I drew on counter-narrative methodology and used written reflection, interview, and field note data for the analysis. The participants often drew on their community cultural wealth—the knowledge, skills, abilities, and contacts possessed and utilized by communities of Color to survive and resist macroscale and microscale forms of oppression—to navigate conflicting and contradictory emotional norms that governed how participants ought to behave and feel at their field placement. In this article, I argue for explicit attention to the power-laden emotion work of teacher candidates of Color in their access to and embodiment of community cultural wealth during teacher education.

La emoción como fundamento de la clase: movimiento obrero y socialismo en la Vizcaya finisecular

The aim of this work is to study in a new way the making of class consciousness in the miner and industrial Biscay at the end of nineteenth century. We will focus on socialist movement, due to its predominance in this process, and we will use the theoretical and methodological tools provided by the history of emotions. Our proposal is to analyze class consciousness paying attention to the emotional expressions, practices and rituals, all of them constitutive elements of what we call Red socialist emotional regime , which underpins the socialist political program in this area. This regime was defined by the peaceable behavior during the demonstrations; by a new emotional norm, the solidarity; and by the defense of the idea of worker as a human being with dignity. The attack to that notion produced indignation and rage, which were expressed through some practices, as striking. This regime was also characterized by favoring the tavern as an emotional refugee .

Emotional Imperatives of Late Modern Society and their Possible Social Consequences

The purpose of this article is to examine the main “imperatives” of contemporary emotional culture, which may provide special research optics for a deeper understanding of late modern society. The author begins with a definition of emotional culture — based on the body of works in sociology of emotions — and identifies dominant emotional norms and their corresponding perceptions, which bear the nature of imperatives in people’s everyday experience and serve as an extension of social values. These emotional imperatives include rational control over emotions, a compulsive desire to be and look happy, avoiding negative feelings, individual guilt from any sort of failure in social life, grievance that takes the form of righteous indignation, and others. These “imperatives” are in some respect contradictory, reflecting different aspects of life, but generally subject to the logic of late modern society, and can have important implicit social consequences such as broken social ties, “chronic” feelings of depression and frustration, fatigue, bad moods, increased anxiety and fears and many other implicit consequences, such as the emergence of new forms of solidarity. As a result of global events and the resulting social crises, these imperatives may change, thereby allowing us to trace how people’s lived experiences are changing. The list of emotional imperatives is not by any means full, and the same goes for their description, but through the outlined emotional imperatives the author attempts to describe theoretically contemporary cultural configurations of lived experience through leading emotional norms.

Are byline biases an issue of the past? The effect of author’s gender and emotion norm prescriptions on the evaluation of news articles on gender equality

When female journalists write about issues of gender equality, they often become the target of incivility and their work is devaluated. Research has investigated such devaluations based on journalists’ gender under the scope of byline biases, analysing if it matters to readers whether a news piece is authored by a male or female journalist. In this paper, we set out to study if gender byline biases occur when journalists write about gender equality. As gender attributions become particularly salient through the presentation of gendered emotion norms, we also inquire in how it matters for readers’ interest in reading such an article and the attributed credibility of the author when an article prescribes gender-specific emotions. We report findings from two consecutive experimental studies, manipulating gender bylines and emotion norm prescriptions and include reader gender as a quasi-experimental factor. Our findings show that gender byline biases against female authors are depending on content and context characteristics and only become activated when gender cues are clearly visible. At the same time, we found a tendency to judge female authors as more credible for topics on gender equality, which (partly) mitigated negative effects on reading intention for female authors. The prescription of emotion norms did not further strengthen biases against female authors. Our study opens the path for further investigations into the question when gender bylines are activated and underlines the challenges for female journalists’ visibility when they address controversial issues such as gender equality.

Taking leadership fashions seriously as a vehicle for leadership learning

Popularized and commercialized leadership ideas are often criticized as mere fashions that dumb down leadership discourse, research, and learning. By contrast, we take leadership fashions seriously as an important vehicle for individual and collective leadership learning. We extend the neo-institutional theory of management fashions to define leadership fashions as a process that constantly reconfigures the rational norms and expectations attached to leadership, and that elevates certain approaches as the best way to fulfill those norms and expectations. Combining Weber’s broad understanding of rationality with our own concept of affective rationality, we account for the many different instrumental, practical, moral, and sometimes deeply personal and emotional norms and expectations that drive the leadership fashion setting process. This approach contributes a theoretical foundation for understanding the sociological significance of leadership fashions, for exploring the leadership industries that produce and promote them, and for researching further the ways that leadership fashions and the leadership industries influence leadership research, learning, and practice.

The bad environmentalism of ‘nature is healing’ memes

What can memes teach us about shifting popular-cultural understandings of nature? While a certain form of environmentalism with proclivities for dour, self-righteous, sentimental, or apocalyptic tones is often taken to be hegemonic, Nicole Seymour argues that a more irreverent ‘low environmental culture’ should not be occluded. Humor and irony can serve as emotional registers for environmental media that provide openings for the emergence of playful environmentalisms perhaps more amenable to a diverse audience. Such ‘bad environmentalism’ mobilizes humor by transgressing the emotional norms of piety within environmentalism. This article deepens the concept of bad environmentalism through an examination of the emergence of ‘nature is healing’ memes during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Implicitly critical of nefarious arguments that the death-dealing pandemic would provide a ‘pause for nature’ and thus that ‘humans were the real virus’, the formal and easily reproduced ‘nature is healing’ genre subverts conventional understandings of ‘the natural’ as well as the naturalization of social order and political economy. In particular, I extend Seymour’s argument – and pop cultural studies of the environment – by parsing five modes through which the ‘nature is healing’ genre plays ironically on differing understandings of the natural. These are the out-of-place in nature; nature out-of-place; drawing attention to a naturalized social order; naturalizing social transformation; and absurdity in the natural world. Close attention to different modes of humor provides insight into the ambivalence of affect within ecological and political movements; ‘bad affect’ can, after all, produce careful and critical aesthetics. Such research demonstrates the utility of a widened and potentially counterhegemonic repertoire of affective responses to environmental and political crisis.

Environmental Beliefs and Pro-Environmental Behavioral Intention of an Environmentally Themed Exhibition Audience: The Mediation Role of Exhibition Attachment

Many scholars have focused on the role of exhibitions in business promotion, and numerous studies have been conducted. The exhibition may influence the audience’s behaviors through the dissemination of information and ideas, but few researchers have looked into this further. There is a distinct lack of research on the process of exhibition influencing people’s behavioral intentions. Based on the belief–emotion–norm theoretical model, this study integrates environmental beliefs, exhibition attachment, and an audience’s environmental behavior intentions into a research model to explain how the exhibition affects the audience. The Macau International Environmental Cooperation Forum & Exhibition attendees served as the research object in the current empirical study. The study’s findings suggest that audiences’ environmental beliefs may have a significant and positive impact on their attachment to environmentally themed exhibitions as well as their environmental behavioral intentions. This study also confirmed that attachment to exhibitions, a temporary space, can play an important mediating role between environmental beliefs and intentions to engage in pro-environmental behavior. The exhibition dependency, in particular, acts as a mediator between environmental beliefs and pro-environmental behavior intentions. Although the mediating effect of exhibition identity is insignificant, exhibition dependence–exhibition identity as a whole has a partial mediating effect in the process of influencing exhibition audiences’ environmental behavior. This research helps to improve our understanding of how environmentally themed exhibitions influence audience behavior. It also has implications for exhibition organizers in terms of better exhibition planning, more effective information transmission, and influencing audience behavior.