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Feeling Rules

Feeling rules is the term used to describe socially accepted norms and beliefs of how one should feel within a given context. This term was initially introduced by sociologist and Berkeley professor Arlie Russel Hochschild in 1979 in the American Journal of Sociology. The concept of feeling rules fits into Hochschild’s larger concept of emotion management, which describes how individuals are socialized to feel certain ways that are appropriate to the situation one is experiencing. In essence, emotion management is the process of understanding and manipulating what one feels with regards to the situation and the feeling rules are the actual guidelines and sanctions upon which the individual decides how one will feel.

Feeling Rules and Emotion Management

Hochschild introduces two approaches to aide in studying emotion management and feeling rules. The first approach is studying primary emotions which instinctively happen when one experiences a certain feeling. These primary emotions are reflexive and help in the understanding of emotion management because it illustrates how social factors influence the emotions of the individual at first. The second approach to understanding emotion management and feeling rules is the study of secondary acts which is the individual’s reaction to the initial feeling. This approach focuses on how social factors affect what people think about what they feel and what they do about what they feel. When studying feeling rules, it is more beneficial to focus on the latter approach because these are the acts that the feeling rules govern.

When understanding emotion management it is important to differentiate between the organismic accounts of emotion and the interactive accounts of emotion. The organismic account of emotion entails the biological factors that account for emotion and are not seen as suitable influences on how people suppress or evoke their emotions. On the other hand, the interactive aspect of emotion holds that social interactions manipulate emotion more consistently than biological factors. Social interactions help people first label their emotion, interpret what they are feeling, and then decide how they want to manage their emotion while organismic factors merely just hold the body accountable for the feeling the individual is experiencing.

Within emotion management, the individual’s main goal is to judge how appropriate one’s own feeling is by comparing the feeling according to the situation in which the feeling was first felt. Hochschild gives the example of the bride who on her wedding day feels anxiety while she knows she should be feeling happy. Her emotional management skills allow her to asses her feeling of anxiety and compare it to other weddings and brides she collectively knows. This comparison is aided by the feeling rule in our society that weddings are a joyous occasion and it is socially unacceptable for brides to feel anything but happiness. When an individual tries to bring about emotions that were not originally there it is referred to as evocation while suppression is the term used when an individual tries to rid oneself of an undesired emotion that one originally feels. In the bride example, the bride is trying to evoke the emotion of being happy while suppressing the feeling of anxiety and nervousness because she feels the social norms about weddings constitutes doing just that.

Feeling Rules as Guidelines

Feeling rules act as guidelines to emotion in every day life. They are socially constructed and vary depending on the culture and views of the individual. Different people have different beliefs as to what are appropriate feelings and what constitute inappropriate feelings. When people stray from the normal feeling rules of their culture, there are certain sanctions applied to them. Feeling rules contain many different subsets of rules and regulations as to the extent of one’s feeling, the direction of the emotion, and the duration of that emotion. For example, people can be seen as having too much or too little of a certain emotion in a given situation which is referred to as the extent of the feeling, the direction entails when one can feel a certain way, and the duration applies to how long within a given situation a person should evoke such feelings. These all vary within the context of the culture the individual is a member of.

Feeling rules are not formally written or implemented through an agency, but they do have some similarities with other formal regulations such as etiquette, manners, and other socially accepted ways of communicating. Within these rules, one knows the social limitations that are acceptable in the situation and therefore creates a “metaphoric floor and ceiling.” However, feeling rules differ from other specified rules in that since the feeling rule is considered to be the antecedent to action it is hard to implement it as a written rule in society. Since these feeling rules are not formally codified conventions, they are ever-changing and very elastic. Certain feeling rules may be very prominent in one decade and then fall in another. Also, the changing aspect of a person’s own belief system allows certain feeling rules to come in and out of their lives. A person’s own ideology influences how they come to describe certain meanings to certain situations and those meanings can change once that person adopts a new ideological position.

Criticisms

Although Hochschild’s theory of emotion work, emotion management, and feeling rules are generally accepted there are some criticisms and developments that have been written since her initial article had been published. According to Norman K. Denzin, Hochschild’s fault lies in the fact that she does not include self-interactions and self-referencing in the formula of emotion management and feeling rules. Catherine Theodosius, author of Recovering Emotion from Emotion Management, expands Hochschild’s theory to include cognitive forces in the labeling of emotions. Theodosius believes that Hochschild’s theory holds external factors as the main influence in emotion while ignoring the unconscious influences that the individual might have. She agrees with Hochschild in that emotion is learned and understood through socialization; however she feels that emotion is still dependent upon cognitive forces that the individual has no control over.

References

Hochschild, Arlie Russel. "Emotion Work, Feeling Rules and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology Vol. 85 No. 3 (1979): 551-575

Denzin, Norman K. "A Note on Emotionality, Self, and Interaction." American Journal of Sociology Vol. 89 No. 2 (1983): 402-409

Theodosius, Catherine. "Recovering Emotion from Emotion Management." Essex University Vol. 40 No. 5 (2006):893-910

"Arlie Hochschild, Professor" http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/hochschild/publications.htm