AnaMartaGonzale 2013 2EmotionsAsCommentari TheEmotionsAndCultura

Chapter 2
Emotions as Commentaries on
Cultural Norms
Joseph E. Davis
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Loss
It was just after Christmas when Agnes’ fiancé, Ray, announced that he didn’t
want to get married after all and moved out. The couple had been engaged for
three years and had two children, aged two and one. Suddenly, Agnes, 27, who had
been staying at home caring for the children, was a single mother. A month later,
at the time of our interview, Agnes was feeling overwhelmed. The separation,
starting a new life—“like where do I begin?”—and the challenge of raising
children by herself, had brought on a host of “different emotions.” She was also
very anxious to avoid the negative evaluation of others and quickly reassert herself
as a successful person. “I just feel,” she said, “like I have to prove something …
and show everybody, yeah, all right, he left me, but I’m doing better. Fast.”
Though Ray’s departure was sudden, it was “not really surprising.” Agnes
knew he wasn’t happy in the relationship and, she observes indicatively, they had
never set a wedding date. Overall, however, she says very little directly about Ray.
In her reflections on what she might have contributed to the breakup—an exercise
she refers to as her “punishment mode”—she wonders if perhaps he had come to
expect her to be a “50s housewife-type of thing.” She notes a couple of contexts in
which he complained of her social activities. Yet, she conveys little dissatisfaction
of her own in the relationship and gives no indication that there was anything
mutual about the breakup. In fact, she stresses more than once that it was he who
left. At the same time, she expresses no grief at the loss and even seems to deny
any. “I’m not heartbroken,” she says, and at another point, “I actually haven’t cried
at all.” Grief expresses a relation of mutual dependence and interdependence, a loss
of self in the loss of the other (Freud 1917). In light of Ray’s rejection, dependence
is the very relation that Agnes now judges to be a mistake. She is urgent to move
on. As she repeats several times, “there’s no going back.”
Not grief but disappointment is the emotion that Agnes stresses, a disappointment
“just in myself.” She says, for example, “maybe I didn’t see something that I could
have changed, or maybe a lot of not really regrets, but in a way, where I wish
Copyright 2013. Routledge.
all along I had taken classes or even got myself another job, just to prepare if
something like this happened.”
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32 The Emotions and Cultural Analysis
For Agnes, the breakup is a deep personal failure. She was caught unprepared.
She had put off finishing her degree and three years out of the workforce had left
her feeling uncompetitive, no longer on the “cutting edge” but “out of the loop.”
She now feels that she was “too lazy” and not “ambitious enough.” She “just sort
of let him take over” while she “just sort of played with two babies for a couple
of years.” She regards this dependence as “embarrassing,” and wants to put “all of
this failure” behind her.
Agnes is also ashamed of her emotional responses. Though it has only been a
month since Ray left, she thinks that by now she should have moved on emotionally
and established a new life plan. She acknowledges that her experience is made
more difficult by the fact that she has almost no social support. She says: “Yeah,
you feel a little more alone, or I feel like yeah, just probably more pressure to do it
on my own, so it’s like nobody even understands the beginning of how I feel, how
are they going to help me, so that’s a big thing, I think. It’s just added pressure to
get my life to where theirs is at, or whatever, settled.”
At the same time, Agnes notes that the isolation is largely self-imposed. She
does not want those close to her to know her feelings. She believes her reactions—
feelings of rejection, numbness, and others she is not sure how to name—are more
intense than they should be. While other people, she says, can just shrug it off—
“yeah, it’s no big deal, so you just get another boyfriend and move on”—she is
still struggling. She “hates” the idea of appearing “weak” or “inferior” or being
the object of anyone’s sympathy. She has never “been one to ask for help or ask
for anything,” and a significant part of her urgency to “overcome it all, really fast”
is so that “nobody will notice” and her children will never hear how their “mom
struggled.” She therefore conceals her feelings from family and friends, acting
“like nothing’s wrong,” and going out of her way to “hide from some people.”
She’ll contact them later when, she says, “I’m doing good.”
Another factor to which Agnes attributes her sense of urgency is her own
personality: she is the kind of person who “puts a lot of pressure on myself.” Yet
she also concedes that this “criticizing” attitude is in fact new. What has taken
place is a challenge to her self-understanding that is of a different order from
past experience. Earlier, she says, “I had a lot of confidence,” a confidence she
now sees as naïve: “Like I could accomplish so much. I could go to Hollywood
and I’d be an actress immediately, like that. I’ve always been really stupid like
that.” Perhaps recognizing that it’s not just “all me,” Agnes shifts to the second
person when talking about the pressure to achieve. “It’s like you don’t have time
to sit down and cry right now,” she says. “You have to work. Work, work, work.”
Then she continues in the first person, “I feel guilty, actually, like I’ve got to do
something … if I sit down and not focus, or if I don’t run around and focus on
what I need to get done.” Nonetheless, for Agnes, determined effort and visible,
tangible accomplishments are the way forward. She will not be some “stereotypical
single mother,” but strong, independent, and successful. She will “focus more on
the reality” and not waste time dreaming about what should have been or giving
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Emotions as Commentaries on Cultural Norms 33
vent to her (briefly acknowledged) anger and resentment. She will “keep pushing”
herself and in this single-minded way hopes to “overcome it all.”
Emotional Predicaments
Agnes was interviewed as part of a larger study explored the ways in which
people make sense of and deal with emotional and psychic distress in everyday
life.1 She was one of a subgroup of two dozen interview participants for whom
relationship issues, especially the loss of a significant other by death, divorce, or
breakup, had created an emotional “predicament.”2 By “predicament,” I mean,
following political theorist William Connolly (2009: 1121), “A situation lived and
felt from the inside … something you seek to ameliorate or rise above.” In each
case, the reported predicament was not the relationship conflict or loss per se.
At least initially, time 1, so to speak, some emotion, such as grief or a feeling of
rejection, was construed as a meaningful response to the situation. The problem
arose subsequently, from a sense of failure in the relationship or loss and a gap
that opened between emotional experience and the participant’s evaluation of
their circumstances. At time 2, participants described their emotional experience
as inappropriate, either in its intensity or in its duration. They now construed
their circumstances as not warranting such strong feelings or not warranting the
continuation of bad feelings. In some cases, they went further, re-narrating their
past emotions as alien, brought about not, as previously thought, by the situation
but by a medical condition extrinsic to the situation and non-expressive of the self.
In all cases, the predicament represented for the participant a direct challenge to
their self-worth and agency as a competent social actor.
Like Agnes, participants typically spoke most clearly about the end state they
desired—the return of their self-respect, for example, or the reassertion of their
autonomy, or getting on with a more productive life free of the bad feelings. In
search of this end state, some participants had sought professional help. Over
half had received a diagnosis—generally of depression—and were taking a
1 Interview participants, ranging in age from 18 to 63, were recruited through

advertisements—on the Internet site Craig’s List, to flyers posted in public places, and to
notices in “city paper” type of publications—that ran in the metropolitan areas of Chicago,
Baltimore, Boston, and in central Virginia (Charlottesville and Harrisonburg areas). The
ads asked potential participants if they struggled with being sad, with being anxious in
social situations, or with concentration and attention problems, and might be willing to talk
about their experience. Because the interviews would last two hours and the participant
would have to travel to our offices, we offered them a $50 gift card to participate. The three
types of struggles were chosen because they are among the most common forms of psychic
distress reported in America today.
2 Besides the issue of relationship problems, the concern of this chapter, the other
general categories of predicament were problems with underperformance and being
overwhelmed with life circumstances (Davis 2009).
psychoactive medication. Most of these had been or were currently also receiving
some psychotherapy. Other participants accounted for their feelings and sought to
manage or overcome them in alternative ways.
Agnes, for instance, was clear that she did not want to classify her emotions in
terms of an “illness.” For the time being, she was confident that she could rise above
her circumstances without help. She was ready to reconsider, however, to “think
there’s something probably wrong with my head” and take medication, if she did
not get things accomplished in the very near future. Whether on medication or not,
in therapy or not, in all these cases, coping with or managing the predicament was
a question of restoring damaged self-image.
Emotional predicaments, the everyday accounts of and efforts to manage
failure experiences and emotional deviance represent important tools for cultural
analysis. At issue in these predicaments are the “social” emotions. In the evaluative
approach to emotions articulated by Charles Taylor (1985) and Margaret Archer
(2000), the social or “subject-referring” emotions, like shame, remorse, pride,
and so on, arise in our relations with other people and the social order, at the
confluence of our concerns and the normative evaluations we confront in living in
society. These emotions incorporate a sense of what is important to us in our lives
and so involve our self-worth and vision of the good life.
At the same time, I want to argue, extending the logic of this position, they also
illuminate the normative frameworks that are inescapably involved. For example,
according to Taylor (1985: 55), feeling shame is to be aware of a situation as
shameful, as one that “shows me up to be base, or to have some unavowable
and degrading property, or to be dishonorable.” Though we may feel such an
emotion wrongly or irrationally, our evaluation is not simply a matter of how we
happen to feel about it. Our emotion reflects how we think things are in the social
world—what is base or degrading or dishonorable—and so necessarily references
the normative standards, moral rules, and visions of the good life that constitute
the cultural order. Social emotionality provides a window on the norms of self,
feeling, and relationship under which people live.
Emotional predicaments are a rich source for understanding the dynamic
interplay of social emotions and cultural norms. Predicaments bring out into the
open questions of what is acceptable and unacceptable, creditable and discreditable,
normal and deviant, boundaries that are typically taken for granted in the flow of
everyday life. Drawing these distinctions and making contrasts express—clearly
or obliquely—commitments and judgments about what obligations, expectations,
and ideals we confront and our relation to them. Norms become visible in those
moments when they are violated.
In gathering data on emotional predicaments, my method was to interview
people of varying social locations and at various distances in time from the situation
that originally set in motion the ongoing predicament. This single-interview
approach has limitations. Understanding a participant’s responses and motivations
is constrained by the relative dearth of personal background knowledge and
context. Every person has a history and some mix of joys and sorrows, and this
history is relevant to how they face emotional turmoil in the present and work
out their personhood. Rather than depth on the individual level, my aim was for
breadth to make comparisons and find patterns in the norms by which conduct and
emotion was judged.
Every person’s reflection on their emotionality also has a history. How people
perceive and describe their emotions is not some fixed, once-and-for-all activity
but a process that involves monitoring, articulating, and reevaluating emotions
and their imports; a second-order (introspective) process that can both reshape
emotionality and reorder judgments of what matters. The very interview was an
opportunity for this second-order reflection. According to some participants this
was the first time they had publicly engaged with questions about their feelings
and the situations that gave rise to them. Single interviews are not some final
word, but in giving some history of their predicament, virtually every participant
recounted change in their understanding and feelings. Some diachronic perspective
was available.
In working out the relationship between emotions and cultural analysis, I begin
with a consideration of what emotions are and their relation to our evaluations and
the normative order. In this I follow and build upon the work of Taylor and Archer.
I then consider the analysis of emotional predicaments, drawing on representative
cases and exploring some norms of relationship, emotion, and self that emerged
from the interviews.
Emotions and the Normative Order
Common approaches in social science conceptualize emotion in ways that

obscure the relation between emotion and culture. Social psychology has come
to be heavily influenced by the “automaticity juggernaut,” which proposes that
everyday thought, feeling, and action is in large measure, if not wholly controlled
by, reflex-like processes that operate outside conscious awareness or voluntary
control (Kihlstrom 2008). Psychologist Timothy Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves,
is a prominent example. For Wilson (2002: 6), consciousness plays only the most
minimal role in human experience, something like the “size of a snowball” on top
of an iceberg.3 We know very little about what we are doing, why we do it, or how
we feel about it. Our true feelings, as opposed to how we think we should feel,
are produced by our “adaptive unconscious” and can be little elucidated by any
deliberate introspection and articulation. In other areas of psychology, there is a
decided movement toward subsuming the study of emotions under evolutionary
biology, physiology, and especially neurophysiology (Griffiths 1997). Emotions
are behavioral response mechanisms and offer little for the study of culture.
3 A phenomenally popular version of Wilson and others’ notion of the adaptive

unconscious is Gladwell (2005).
Rational actor models have always had a difficult time accommodating

embodiment. In these theories, emotions are treated as an impediment to clear-
sighted reason and strategic choice. “By virtue of the high levels of arousal and
valence they induce,” political theorist Jon Elster (1999: 200) writes in a book that
revealingly treats emotions and addictions together, “emotions and cravings are
among the most powerful sources of denial, self-deception, and rationalization in
human life.” Given the ineluctable role of emotions in human life, rational choice
theorists do not attempt to expunge them. Rather, the theoretical effort is directed
to subordinating emotion, taming and reframing passions in terms of “preference”
and “rational desire.” Emotions add little to the theory or deepen its perspective
on the socio-cultural order.
Social constructionist approaches offer more promise. They allow that cultural
elements, like social norms and shared expectations, importantly shape emotional
life. The psychologist James Averill (1980: 312), for example, argues that: “An
emotion is a transitory social role (a socially constituted syndrome) that includes
an individual’s appraisal of the situation, and is interpreted as a passion rather than
as an action.”
In this view, “being angry” is a role, a “socially prescribed set of responses,”
that an individual adopts on those occasions and in those situations that society
specifies as appropriate. Averill takes the position that emotion is produced
strategically. People, knowing the social roles, deliberately conform their behavior
to the normative expectations in order to achieve desired ends.4 He also seems
to allow, though, for socialization into social practices in such a way that people
produce the role-defined emotion without having a mental representation of the
role or a motive for conforming to it. In this approach and others, constructionists
emphasize the variability of emotions across time and place, stress concepts
of emotion (labels and beliefs) and shifting definitions of the situation, and
deemphasize or deny emotions any ontological status (Thoits 1989).
While certainly making a place for culture, constructionism’s commitments
yield a very weak account of emotion itself and how it powers our commitments, as
well as a very truncated understanding of the significance of normative standards
and why people seek to conform to them.
The approach I take here treats emotions as relational to what we care about,
as emergent from situations and providing, in the words of sociologist Margaret
Archer (2000), “commentaries upon our concerns.” The commentary is an
evaluative awareness of a situation and its relevance, or what the philosopher
Charles Taylor calls its “import,” for our desires and aversions, attachments and
aspirations. In this view, to experience an emotion is to perceive a situation as
bearing a particular import. Agnes, introduced above, experienced disappointment
“just in myself” because her sense of being unprepared for being deserted by her
4 Arlie Hochschild’s (1979) notion of “deep acting”—“conscious, deliberate efforts

to suppress or evoke feeling”—has a similar strategic quality. She draws on what she calls
the “interactive model” of emotion.
fiancé bears the import of personal failure. The sense of personal failure, then,
is the grounds or basis for her feeling of disappointment. Or, put differently, her
disappointment is the emotional commentary on a situation experienced as failure.
Similarly, to give a name to an emotion is a matter of, in Taylor’s (1985:
49) words, “making explicit … the import of the situation as we experience it.”
Defining emotions as relational to an import-ascription also means that they are
fallible. The way we evaluate our circumstances may be wrong or unwarranted.
Agnes, for instance, may have no legitimate grounds for her post-hoc sense
of responsibility for her present situation. If not, if her sense of responsibility
(however understandable) is mistaken, then her disappointment, emergent from
that reading of her responsibility, is mistaken as well. Alternatively, we may
experience an emotion that is sharply incongruent with our reading of the import
a given situation has for us. Agnes feels guilty at any relaxation of her frantic
striving, yet she believes this is unreasonable and in her considered judgment
believes that all the activity is actually counterproductive. In the absence of an
appropriate import—something she has done or is doing wrong—then feeling
guilty makes no sense. Of course, on further (second-order) reflection, she may
decide that it is not guilt but some other emotion she is feeling, or even come to
see some actual wrong, of which she previously had but a vague intimation, that
has provoked the guilt. But the point holds: our emotional commentaries may be
mistaken.
The fallibility of our emotions is important to stress because in the evaluative
approach argued by Taylor and Archer fallibility is the starting point for second-
order reflection on first-order emotions. We do not simply experience emotions,
we reflect upon them, transforming them in the process, and reordering our
priorities. Taylor calls this process “transvaluation,” signaling that our reflection
on our emotionality is not simply some cognitive or rationalizing process but an
evaluative one. Efforts to understand our emotions and the characterization of a
situation they presuppose (e.g. guilt implies a wrong), Taylor (1985: 64) says,
“admit of—and very often we feel that they call for—further articulation.” This
act of reflection necessarily raises the question of whether the initial articulation
is adequate, and can set in motion a process of progressive interrogation of self
and circumstances. We may reject previous interpretations as “incomplete or
distortive” in our effort to elaborate a more “penetrating characterization” of the
relevant imports. The new formulation, in turn, can and often does lead to changes
in how we feel. In the transvaluation, then, both judgment and emotionality remain
intertwined and each is subject to revision in the dialogue between them.
One of the long-standing problems in the study of emotions has been how to
subsume the very wide array of phenomena typically designated emotions under a
general theory. Most investigators of this question conclude that there are no valid
generalizations that provide common denominators for emotions or distinguish
them from other psychological phenomena. “They do not constitute”, in the
words of one such investigator, “a single object of knowledge” (Griffiths 1997:
14). Following this line, Archer, while holding that all emotions are commentaries
involving import ascriptions, distinguishes three clusters of (first-order) emotions

with different properties. These clusters, she argues, are emergent from distinct
contexts of experience and involve distinctive kinds of preoccupations and
standards. A very brief sketch risks oversimplification but is necessary because the
connection I want to make between emotional predicaments and the cultural order
builds directly on her distinctions.
Archer clusters emotions as emergent from the three orders that constitute
the human condition: the natural, the practical, and the social or discursive.
Interactions with the natural environment involve the emotions that we normally
think of as viscerally generated, like fear, anger, disgust, and awe. These emotions
are elicited by events that generate concerns about physical wellbeing, whether of
pleasure or pain. Though the capacity to feel pain and pleasure is physiological,
and the emergence of emotions in this cluster need involve no reference to either
material culture or language, what takes place is not simply a gut reaction or
reflex. There is an intermediate step and it entails our thoughts about the meaning
of what is transpiring. We know that wild bears are dangerous, fire burns, apples
on the ground are decaying. These emotions are elicited by situations that we
anticipate will be threatening or rewarding for our bodies. They, in turn, have
an action tendency toward the environment, such as flight for fear, resistance for
anger, emission for disgust, and so on.
The first cluster involves relations between the body and the environment. The
second involves the relationship between a subject and inanimate objects in the
world of material culture. Interactions in what Archer calls the “practical order” are
linked to human praxis and the primary concern is competence or “performative
achievement.”
This cluster of emotions includes those such as boredom, frustration,
satisfaction, and exhilaration. They are elicited by the feedback, positive or
negative, that emerges between the undertaker of a task and the objective standards
of task performance (social judgments about the performance are another matter;
what is in view here are relations with objects—riding a bike, playing a guitar,
fixing a widget). If the task is freely undertaken and the achievement matters to the
subject, then consistently falling short on a task or being insufficiently challenged
will generate frustration or dysphoria as emotional commentaries and lead often
enough to the abandoning of the task. Performing well on a challenging task, on
the other hand, will be reflected in feelings of satisfaction or joy, which feelings
encourage further activity and skill acquisition. Unlike relations in the natural
order, concerns in the practical order are not laid down in our bodily constitution
and therefore do not involve any “fight or flight-like” direct action tendency.
A final cluster of emotions is emergent from relations between a subject
and the social order. This cluster includes emotions like shame, remorse, pride,
admiration, envy, jealousy, self-contempt, and guilt. These are the emotions which
Taylor (1985: 54) says have “subject-referring” properties. They concern our
very status as subjects and involve our subjective compliance. Unlike matters in
the natural and practical orders, where standards are fairly objective and have
consequences independent of subjective judgment (bee stings hurt; the widget

works or it doesn’t), the emergence of social emotions requires the individual’s
concordance with the normative judgments coming from the social order. “It is
perfectly possible,” for example, as Archer (2000: 217) writes, “to be wholly
indifferent about school achievement, whilst dispassionately recognizing the
standards and expectations involved.” In this sense, the emotions in this cluster
are social through and through; they arise in social interaction, the standards are
social norms (judgments of approval/disapproval of conduct), and the standards
require approbation to give rise to emotionality.
Moreover, because these social emotions, in Taylor’s (1985: 60) words,
“incorporate a sense of what is important to us in our lives as subjects,” then what
is fundamentally at stake is our self-worth. How we define our self-worth is a
question of the projects we have invested ourselves in, our attachments, the things
we count as truly significant. These determine which normative evaluations matter
enough for us to be ashamed, or remorseful, or proud, or otherwise emotional
about them. The differential impact of social norms, in other words, reflects
different visions of the good life in society. Therefore, “in strict parallel,” Archer
(2000: 220) argues, “what we are emotional about also makes it possible to know
what constitutes the good life in society for particular people.” Pushing this line
of thinking one step further brings us to the argument I want to make about the
importance of emotions and emotional predicaments for cultural analysis.
Self-worth, and particularly agency as a competent social actor, is precisely
what is in the balance for interview participants in their emotional predicaments.
Their issues are not with the natural or practical orders but with emotions emergent
from their failure to conform to social norms of relationship, feeling, and self.
Following Archer we can say that their emotionality sheds light on their picture
of the good life in society. But we can also go further. If social emotionality arises
at the confluence of personal definitions of self-worth and normative order, then
“what we are emotional about” illuminates not only our self-definitions but, “in
strict parallel,” the normative order as well. This illumination of culture, I want
to further argue, holds to an important degree even if the norm applicable is in
error. As emphasized above, our emotional commentaries may be mistaken in two
different ways. Our feelings may be at odds with our understanding of a situation,
as with Agnes’ guilt even though she is aware of no wrongdoing. This is the sense
in which we might speak of an emotion as being irrational.
We might also get things wrong in another way. We may misapply norms to
ourselves. This gets to the question raised by Agnes’ disappointment with herself.
She did not see the breakup coming and did not take steps during the relationship
to shield against the risk of one. Were these violations of norms of personal
responsibility or were they like “survivor guilt,” a taking of responsibility in an
area where none actually exists? My view is that the breakup has occasioned a
shift in normative frameworks for Agnes. In complex societies like the United
States there are multiple normative registers. While engaged and raising children
with her fiancé, Agnes appears to have lived her relationship according to more
covenantal norms of long-term solidarity, devotion, and care. After the breakup,
she is now thinking in terms of contractual norms of reciprocity, independence,
and risk-management. Both registers exist as models of committed relationships
in contemporary society. We might say Agnes is applying the contractual norms
anachronistically in light of the breakup but within that register she may fairly
judge herself to have violated its norms.
So the issue of error with respect to norms is complicated. Archer (2000: 216)
gives the more straightforward example of feeling ashamed at being short. Clearly
this is a misapplication; one cannot be morally responsible for one’s height. Yet,
shame in this situation is imaginable precisely because of the positive cultural
valuation of tall stature, a valuation that, as with beauty, easily slides from the
external physical attribute to a judgment of internal character. Even if making a
category error, people are feeling the weight and responding to evaluative cues not
of their own invention but in the social environment. Excepting the delusional,
cases of misapplication do not negate social emotionality from illuminating
normative standards at work in the world.
Emotional predicaments are significant for cultural analysis as windows on this
interface between emotions and norms. These predicaments foreground emotional
experience, eliciting circumstances, comparisons with others, and context-relevant
norms that are normally left in the background. Like chronic illness, unwelcome
strong emotion and the persistence of negative affect can force questions and an
accounting of what has gone wrong and why. The accounting necessarily involves
some assessment of normal or legitimate conduct and feeling and a comparison
against these standards. At a minimum, the standards are brought into view as the
shadow on the wall cast by the articulation of what is felt. Even in cases where
people disavow any evaluative appraisal or basis to their troublesome emotions,
some standards are made visible. Emotions are judged alien because they are
marked as inconsistent with how people should respond in similar circumstances.
This bringing into view, even if indirectly, is what makes predicaments important
tools for cultural analysis. We see what is typically implicit and otherwise seldom
articulated even when recognized.
Emotions and Norms of Relationship, Feeling, and Selfhood
In her senior year of college, Jessica, 23, a recent graduate at the time of the
interview, discovered that her boyfriend had been cheating on her with another
girl. She had only been dating him for a little over a month, and the relationship
was not yet very serious. Nonetheless, upon hearing the news of his infidelity, she
went into a tailspin. She was “crying all the time,” she said, lacked motivation
to go to classes, and was “using sleep to avoid day-to-day situations” that she
normally would have enjoyed. Looking back on her emotional state at the time,
she recalled, “It’s not like I’m going to jump out the window or anything, but I am
very sad.”
A dedicated athlete throughout high school and college, Jessica’s sense of

herself was shaped by a history of success and high achievement. She described
herself as “very stubborn” and “very hard on myself,” and emphasized her work
ethic and how “I’m really upset if I didn’t try hard enough.” Several injuries in
college brought her cross-country career to an end. That was hard to accept, she
said, because running was a “big part of my former personality.” Yet nothing in her
past prepared her to deal with the infidelity and sudden breakup with her boyfriend.
Jessica described her emotional reaction in a very limited vocabulary. She
spoke of being “sad,” “crying over nothing,” “tired,” and “depressed,” but did
not reference any complex emotions—such as jealously, betrayal, anger, or
resentment—that one might have expected under the circumstances. Instead, she
stressed the unreasonableness of having any sort of powerful emotions in reaction
to this situation. “I realized we weren’t even that close. I didn’t know him that
well, and I just shouldn’t be this upset by it,” she recounted. “But it was like I was
kind of obsessed with it.” Moreover, she felt that a month was an inappropriately
long time to be sad about the matter. “I was only seeing him for a little over a
month,” she said, “and a month later I’m still crying over it.”
Though she had no previous experience with infidelity, she still felt that “it
was taking me much longer than normal to get over that kind of thing.” The aspect
of her emotional reaction that Jessica found most disturbing was her self-blame
and sense of personal failure. The infidelity called into question how she had
conducted herself in the relationship and challenged her self-image as confident,
mature, and successful. She had invested emotionally without a commensurate
commitment by her boyfriend and found herself focusing not on his fault but on
her own actions. “Instead of being, ‘How could he have done that to me?’ and ‘I
deserve better,’” she said in describing her immediate reaction to the cheating,
“It was, ‘What did I do wrong?’ and ‘What can I do better?’” Jessica saw her
response and the vulnerability it exposed as a sign that something was seriously
amiss. “In the past—even though [infidelity] had never happened to me—that’s
not an approach I would have taken,” she argued. “It would have been more like I
would have had self-confidence to be like, ‘Well, that’s his loss and I’m better than
that,’ instead of taking all the blame myself even though he’s the one who messed
up.” For Jessica, her lack of confidence and inability to quickly move beyond the
relationship was a sign that she was “not at all myself.”
A month after the breakup, she decided, with her parents’ encouragement, to
seek professional help. She went to see a counselor at the student health center.
They discussed medication but decided to try some talk therapy first. After a few
weeks, however, Jessica decided, “this is helping but I just feel like I need more.”
The counselor referred her to a psychiatrist. “It was probably about two hours
that I talked to him,” Jessica recalled of her meeting, which she attended with
her parents. “He had all kinds of questions; they were about how I feel and what
I feel like on a scale of one to ten and that kind of thing.” The psychiatrist “came
up with a diagnosis” of depression and prescribed both an antidepressant and a
sleeping pill.
Jessica described receiving the formal diagnosis of depression as “a relief.”

It helped her explain herself to others, included her teachers, and confirmed that
there was “really something wrong with me;” she was not “just a slacker.” The
diagnosis was not particularly threatening since she didn’t “really see depression
as a huge deal because lots of people deal with it at some point.” Most importantly,
the diagnosis was a relief because it was “nice” to know “why this is happening
from a scientific standpoint.” The psychiatrist explained, she said, “something
with serotonin levels” and “it made sense.”
Her sadness was the result of a chemical imbalance. “My brain levels or
something,” she maintained, “were off balance because anything would set me
off to cry and I was just sad all the time and tired.” For the most part, she judged
the medication a success because it “helps balance me back out so I wasn’t over
the edge, crying over nothing, and I have energy to do normal day-to-day things.”
Jessica’s emotional predicament and evaluative outlook share some important
similarities with those of Agnes, introduced earlier. For both, strong emotions
are keyed not to the loss of relationship—Jessica like Agnes says little about her
boyfriend and describes the import of her emotions as “crying over nothing”—but
to relationship norms that they hold themselves to have violated. The breakup is a
failure and a challenge to their self-image because it reveals a kind of vulnerable
naïveté surrounding intimacy and commitment. They should have maintained
more autonomy and control and so not have been caught unaware and unprepared.
They should not have left themselves exposed to unwarranted risks and emotional
dependency. They should have known to gauge his commitment and then mirror
their own accordingly. Both believe they should have quickly shrugged off the
relationship, and are distressed by emotional responses that suggest dependence.
Both disavow these emotions: Agnes by hiding them, Jessica by rechanneling
them away from the self as a chemical imbalance.
The norms at work here share a close resemblance to the norms of what
Anthony Giddens (1991: 88–98) calls the “pure relationship.” Giddens derives
his ideal-typical account in part from logical deductions about the effects of social
change but even more directly from the therapeutic literature. His description
represents a fair picture of the ideal derived from popular self-psychology. The
key features of the pure relationship are that it is sought only for the rewards that
it can bring to the partners involved. Each reflexively monitors the relationship for
mutual alignment and reciprocity in commitment and psychic satisfactions. The
relationship, properly maintained, requires that each partner retain their autonomy
and confidence in their own self-identities. Personal closeness is not to give way
to dependence. Intimacy and trust are crucial. While they depend on each partner’s
authenticity within the relationship, they are built on a careful balance of autonomy
and mutual disclosure. In pure relationships, each partner is engaged in a linked
process of both self-exploration and the development of intimacy with the other.
In their emotional predicaments, many of the interview participants who were
dealing with situations involving intimate relationships implicitly judged their
conduct against such pure relationship norms. Like Agnes and Jessica, emotional
fallout from a loss sparked a reevaluation of their previous conduct that was being
lived by some other, and certainly not so pure relational criteria. In context, these
reevaluations appeared less as the turning toward an ideal than as steps to protect
self-worth in the light of heartbreak or rejection.
Not everyone measured themselves according to such normative criteria.
Ike, 47, for example, worked in a customer service department at the time of the
interview. He had long enjoyed the support of a small group of very good friends.
However, over a year-and-a-half period of time he lost all of these relationships
as one moved away, two died (cancer, a drug overdose), and two withdrew from
regular contact because of difficult personal situations. The group had been very
close and Ike relied upon them. “Whenever I had problems,” he said, “I could
always go talk to them.” Moreover, his father, with whom he was close, was in
deteriorating health, and his wife was going through “this menopause thing,” so,
he said, “I can’t talk to her right now” and “that’s kind of difficult.”
Ike described his emotional predicament in terms of his isolation. He had no
one who could help “shoulder my problems” and so he had to “hold everything
in.” His problems included caring for his aging father, who was himself caring for
Ike’s brother’s daughter. That daughter, 20, had a child and a boyfriend whom Ike
described as “like a little thug.” Ike had voiced a lot of anger at that situation, and
at the mistreatment that his two divorced sisters had suffered from their current
boyfriends. He doubted it had done any good. He expressed frustration at his wife’s
moodiness and their almost complete lack of communication. He felt remorse for
not doing more to help the close friend who died of an overdose, and that efforts he
did make for the friend who died of cancer had not worked out. Feeling “drained”
and “stressed and angry,” he had begun to drink more and withdraw from his old
pursuits. “I’m not as jovial as I used to be,” he added.
But what Ike emphasized was not the problems as such. “Everybody,” he
argued, “goes through peaks and valleys.” What he emphasized was that his
emotions needed an “outlet.” He was keeping his emotions “bottled in” because he
had no one with whom to talk them out. Ike depended on his friends. “My support
group,” he noted, “we always kind of balanced each other out. If I needed them,
they were around and they’ll listen. And they’ll give me constructive criticism.
And put me in my place if I’m wrong.” Losing them did not make him regret
that dependence. If anything, the import of his remorse was that they should have
depended on each other even more. In the norms of relationship that shape Ike’s
concerns, being a burden on others is what friends are for.
Emotions Optimal and Efficient
Returning to the predicaments of Agnes and Jessica, we can see that not only
norms of relationship are at stake but norms of feeling as well (Hochschild 1979).
Both Agnes and Jessica construe their strong feelings as overwrought compared
with what they take to be appropriate emotional control and efficiency. Their
emotions are too intense; they are not reasonably proportionate to the triggering
event, the breakup/infidelity, which set them off.
Their emotions are unruly; they have spilled out of their appropriate and pre-
defined boundaries of time and place. Bad feelings have continued long after
they should have stopped. In all of this, their emotions are not responding to their
control or in service of their purposes.
Jen, 22, a college senior at the time of the interview, first began to have problems
in her freshman year. She had just begun a serious relationship with a young man
she knew in high school when she was suddenly whisked away to a college in a
distant state. In the new setting, she had trouble making friends at first, leaving her
feeling alone and confused. She began having severe sleep problems, which was
the first indication to her that something was wrong. Though she had had some
bouts of sadness in high school, difficulties with sleep “had never happened to me
before,” and so she decided to “get it checked out.” She made arrangements to see
a psychiatrist through the student health service.
Jen’s experience with the psychiatrist was very poor. She described him as
“really unprofessional.” “[He] told me,” she said, “nothing was wrong, to read
a few books, try to get control of, like, your cognitive abilities and you will feel
better.” After a few visits, she stopped going and over the course of the next year
began seeing other professionals outside the university system. These experiences
were not much better. She went to a counselor, for instance, who “didn’t really
give me any feedback. I went to her for a couple of months. It was me talking,
never getting any feedback, so I didn’t like that either.” The summer after her
sophomore year of college, still feeling down, she broke up with her boyfriend and
“basically had like a breakdown.” “I wouldn’t say I was suicidal,” she recalled,
“but I was just very, very unhappy.” Her mother intervened and took Sarah to “the
family psychiatrist.” She was diagnosed with depression after two one-hour office
visits and immediately put on an antidepressant. Over the course of the next two
years she went through a series of medications, taking an antidepressant, a mood
stabilizer, and a sleeping pill.
In describing her emotional predicament, Jen said almost nothing about the
breakup, though it was clearly a turning point and the event that led her down the
path to medication. As was common among participants, the breakup or loss itself
received virtually no attention. Instead, the predicament was framed in terms of
the inappropriateness and uncontrollability of her emotional reactions. She noted
that she “always had, especially with guys, like a need—okay now I’m going to
cry—for attention and emotional attachment to the point where I feel like it’s
kind of unhealthy.” In regard to her recent breakup she observed, “I felt like … I
wasn’t as in control of my emotions as maybe I should be, or it would just be nice
to be.” Her predicament was a “struggle” over the gap between actual and ideal
feelings. “You know how you want to feel,” she said, “but you know how you do
feel, and when those coincide you feel like a whole person, and when they don’t
you definitely feel like it’s a struggle to try to keep those people together. At least
that’s how I feel.”
In this struggle, Jen found medication to be helpful. She described herself on

medication as “a little more rational.” It helped her “keep it together” rather than
“just getting really, really upset.” However, she also described the medication as
less than ideal. “I would say I … hoped for a little bit more, just in the sense of
feeling even better, just feeling like myself basically, or what I picture myself to
be.” Her “picture” of herself, as “active” and “energetic,” centers on an emotional
life that is precise, flexible, and efficient. “I guess the overall idea,” she noted,
“is that I would be able to calm down when I want to and be awake when I want
to. And I don’t feel like I can do that on the medication I’m taking right now.”
Physical energy is one dimension of her ideal self, but another dimension is a
narrower emotional register that is precisely tuned to her control.
Above all, she indicated, “I would like to have a firm grip on my emotions.”
Jen’s predicament was a common one, though in discussing the ideal effects of
a medication she directly expressed standards of emotional control that were
typically latent in the other interviews. With Agnes, Jessica, and others who
framed their predicament in terms of too intense and too enduring emotions, she
measured her experience against norms of affect management that were broadly
similar. These norms bring to mind the management literature, where emotional
control has emerged as a major theme over the past two decades.
One prominent example is Emotional Intelligence, a best-selling book by
Daniel Goleman (1995) that has helped launched a veritable movement in the
world of human resource management and training. The concept, as defined by
Goleman, refers to a set of intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies. The
intrapersonal abilities are: knowing one’s emotions and how to monitor them;
managing emotions; and channeling emotions into self-motivation and drive,
delayed gratification, and an ability to embrace flexibility and adaptability.
The interpersonal skills are recognizing emotions in other people and handling
relationships by managing others’ emotions. Goleman captures the standard
for emotional expression in the simple word “appropriate.” The person of high
emotional intelligence is one whose “emotional life is rich, but appropriate”
(Goleman 1995: 45). This means, among other things, that our emotions are always
in sync with our purposes, never given to extremes or outbursts or impulsiveness,
ready to go into action when needed and shaken off when interfering, and rarely
prone to rumination or guilt or anxiety. Appropriate emotion is emotion that can
be marshaled to our instrumental ends. For many interview participants, just such
standards of appropriate emotion were the terms in which their own emotions
were found wanting and toward which they, like Jen, aspired.
Selves Flexible and Adaptable
Once again, the predicaments of Agnes and Jessica are instructive for the way
they illustrate important norms at work in the lives of many interview participants.
Norms of relationship and emotion are also norms of adequate selfhood. Both
Agnes and Jessica were distressed by how the past retained a hold on them. They
should have quickly and easily let go, “moved on” emotionally, and confidentially
embraced their new circumstances. They should have seen change coming and not
resisted it. Life is lived forward and neither looking back nor getting mad about
how things have transpired is of any use. Personal success in a changing world
involves being flexible, adaptable, and open to the future.
Ron, 41, unemployed at the time of the interview, had a history of painful
breakups with his girlfriends. It began, he recounted:
with the first girl I dated seriously. She cheated on me when I was—and I didn’t
react to that well. I just remember feeling just completely, just out of it and
obsessing and really just not being able to focus on other things. I just felt really
weird … .
As his description suggests, Ron was unable to make sense or articulate the nature
of his strong emotions. He decided to seek the help of a psychiatrist to “see what
was wrong.” The psychiatrist, however, “didn’t think there was anything wrong”
and “eventually those feelings went away.” Then, a few years later, the “same kind
of thing” happened again, and all the bad feelings “seemed to come back.” He
recalled: “I just kind of felt just an emptiness after our relationship ended. I would
question everything in my life. I mean, ‘What am I doing?’ Blah, blah, blah. ‘Why
can’t I make this work?’” He returned to the psychologist. The brief therapy with
her was not particularly successful: “it just didn’t seem to really do the trick.” But
again the feelings eventually went away.
When “the same thing happened” yet another time, Ron was desperate for
answers and anxious to deal “with the problem once and for all.” He first saw the
psychologist. Though the feelings do subside, he told her, “I just keep making the
same mistakes.” Ron did not specify the nature of the mistakes, but he was more
forthcoming about his work life, which was also a recurrent issue for him. Over
the years he had held a “lot of different jobs” and was consistently disappointed
by them. He recounted: “It’s just like either the person or people I work for I don’t
like, or the pay isn’t what I thought it was going to be, [or] the work is different
than what I thought it was going to be.” He also mentioned some problems with
“handling money and stuff like that,” and occasional excess drinking.
Ron’s psychologist suggested that he see a psychiatrist for a consultation. He
was tired of feeling like a failure, and, as with his earlier experiences, thought it
was odd that he felt so “depressed” by the breakups and angry and frustrated by
his recurrent work and other troubles. His friends too thought he was overreacting.
“Is that all?” he reported them saying with respect to breakups and job losses,
“Well, there’s other fish in the sea, other jobs.” The consultation, according to Ron,
was basically a question and answer session: “It sounded like he [the psychiatrist]
was reading from a prepared list.” In the end the psychiatrist, observing that
psychotherapy “doesn’t seem to work for you,” diagnosed him with a “middle-
level” depression and wrote a prescription for an antidepressant. He explained
“the neuroreceptors with the serotonin thing in your brain sometimes, and I just
thought,” Ron recalled, “well maybe that’s it.”
In light of the diagnosis, Ron re-described his past as a history of depression.
He now saw himself unknowingly suffering a life-long affliction, genetic in origin,
which helped to explain his emotional reactions to negative events as an adult and
even his shyness as a teenager. He disconnected the emotions he previously felt in
response to the cheating/breakups and job problems from any intentional object.
His unruly emotions were the result of an illness that kept him wallowing in the
past. “I mean if I wasn’t depressed,” he argued, “and I didn’t have a job or I didn’t
have a good job or didn’t have a stable relationship, I probably would change those
things without a second thought. I wouldn’t even think about it. Or that I would
just cope.”
Ron’s case is more extreme than Agnes’ or Jessica’s but he is on the same
continuum with them and many of the other interview participants. While negative
events like relationship problems and losses are a fact of life, they are not an
excuse to slow down, or pine for what might have been, or lick your wounds. The
virtuous self is flexible and resilient and resourceful. Life moves on. Norms like
these also find expression in the management literature, where flexible, adaptable
selves are the championed standard for high activation success. A well-known
example is Who Moved My Cheese?, a runaway best-seller (more than 10 million
in print), whose subtitle is “An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work
and in Your Life” (Spencer 1998). The “cheese” of the title is a metaphor for what
people desire to have in life, the things—a career, health, recognition, a family,
and so on—that they believe will make them happy. The book is a parable for how
successful people respond when circumstances change and interfere with or derail
their cherished dreams.
According to the book, successful people expect change and welcome it. They
neither resist nor look back but anticipate change and quickly adapt to it, both in
their circumstances and in themselves. They are never held back by their fears,
or cling to their comfort zone, or play the victim. They know that the “biggest
inhibitor to change” lies within their own mind. So they imagine the future, take
risks, and recognize that better things can always be ahead. They remain light on
their feet, quick to learn from their mistakes, reject illusions, and adapt. In the
imagery of the parable, their running shoes are always close at hand. And, in the
real world, problems and their solutions are usually simple, so successful people
waste little time overanalyzing things.
I am not arguing, here or in previous examples, for any one-to-one correlation
between interview findings and such popular representations. The overlap is
suggestive of common, not direct, cultural influence. And it suggests that when
participants judge themselves defective for not possessing sufficient flexibility
in handling relationship changes, they are responding not merely to their own
personal standards but to real cues in the cultural environment.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have sought to draw out an implication of the evaluative approach
to emotion that connects emotional commentary and normative order. That
connection, I argued, opens possibilities for cultural analysis, particularly through
the empirical window of what I called “emotional predicaments.” Predicaments
illuminate latent commitments that interview participants themselves could
seldom articulate and often simply attributed to their own personalities. I then
utilized this approach in specific cases to explore norms of relationship, feeling,
and self. The norms discussed were by no means exhaustive. Take Agnes once
again. Pure relationship, emotional efficiency, and flexible subjectivity are not
the only components of her evaluative outlook. She hints, for instance, that she
is also angry and resentful, emotions that indicate a justice frame of reference.
However, the relative downplaying of these feelings and the seeming denial of
grief, suggests the centrality of these three normative ideals in her outlook. She
was not alone. With exceptions like Ike, most of the other participants displayed
this outlook in varying degrees, suggesting not only that the normative standards
are interrelated but that they have widespread cultural influence.
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Chapter 2

1 Interview participants, ranging in age from 18 to 63, were recruited through

Emotions and the Normative Order

Common approaches in social science conceptualize emotion in ways that

3 A phenomenally popular version of Wilson and others’ notion of the adaptive

Rational actor models have always had a difficult time accommodating

4 Arlie Hochschild’s (1979) notion of “deep acting”—“conscious, deliberate efforts

involving import ascriptions, distinguishes three clusters of (first-order) emotions

consequences independent of subjective judgment (bee stings hurt; the widget

Emotions and Norms of Relationship, Feeling, and Selfhood

A dedicated athlete throughout high school and college, Jessica’s sense of

Jessica described receiving the formal diagnosis of depression as “a relief.”

Emotions Optimal and Efficient

In this struggle, Jen found medication to be helpful. She described herself on

Selves Flexible and Adaptable

Kihlstrom, J.F. 2008. The automaticity juggernaut—or, are we automatons

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