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Abstract
Emotions comprise part of the meaning-making process of individuals and are easily integrated in cognitive constructions of reality. U.S. emotion culture upholds a standard of cheerfulness commonly practiced in interpersonal communication. The adopted emotional norm tends to affect representations of the everyday reality shared in conversation. Twelve respondents, who have lived both in the United States and Europe, describe the cheerful style they witness in their U.S. environments and illuminate how it interacts with their cognitive process. The realities of home, workplace, leisure time, business and education are reconceptualized during the communication act in the direction of greater positivity than originally perceived. The reframing ensues “naturally” from the national emotion culture—namely, the value placed on positive emotions in U.S. culture.
Notes
*Frieda works as a production assistant for a company contracted by National Geographic and she travels to various locations where a documentary is to be shot to help organize the production.
Alan J. Fridlund and James A. Russell, “The Functions of Facial Expression: What's in a Face?,” in The Sage Handbook of Nonverbal Communication, ed. Valerie Manusov and Miles L. Patterson (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 299–319.
James D. Laird, Feelings: The Perception of Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); James D. Laird and Nicholas Apostoleris, “Emotional Self-Control and Self-Perception: Feelings Are the Solution, Not the Problem,” in The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions, ed. Rom Harré and W. Gerrod Parrott (London: Sage, 1996), 285–301; William James, “What is an Emotion?,” Mind 9 (1884): 188–205.
Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 813–36.
Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure,” American Journal of Sociology 85 (1979): 551–75; Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Steven L. Gordon, “Social Structural Effects on Emotion,” in Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions, ed. Theodore D. Kemper (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 163–66; Theodore D. Kemper, “Social Models in the Explanation of Emotions,” in Handbook of Emotions, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones (New York: Guilford, 2000), 45–58.
Hochschild, “Emotion Work,” 560–61; Hochschild, The Managed Heart.
Hochschild, The Managed Heart; Martin B. Tolich, “Alienating and Liberating Emotions at Work: Supermarket Clerks’ Performance of Customer Service,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22 (1993): 361–81.
See, for example: Sigal G. Barsade, “The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and Its Influence on Group Behavior,” Administrative Science Quarterly 47 (2002): 644–75; Michael R. Cunningham, “Weather, Mood, and Helping Behavior: Quasi Experiments with the Sunshine Samaritan,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1979): 1947–56; Seth Kaplan et al., “On the Role of Positive and Negative Affectivity in Job Performance: A Meta-Analytic Investigation,” Journal of Applied Psychology 94 (2009): 162–76.
Alice M. Isen, “Some Ways in Which Positive Affect Influences Decision-Making and Problem-Solving,” in Handbook of Emotions, 3rd ed., ed. Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett (New York: Guilford, 2008), 548–73; Elizabeth A. Kensinger and Daniel L. Schacter, “Memory and Emotion,” in Handbook of Emotions, 3rd ed., ed. Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett (New York: Guilford, 2008), 601–17.
Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
Carol Z. Stearns “‘Lord Help Me Walk Humbly': Anger and Sadness in England and America, 1570–1750,” in Emotion and Social Change: Toward a New Psychohistory, ed. Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 39–68; Carol Barr-Zisowitz, “Sadness,” in Handbook of Emotions, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones (New York: Guilford, 2000), 611–13.
Jacquelyn C. Miller, “An ‘Uncommon Tranquility of Mind': Emotional Self-Control and the Construction of a Middle-Class Identity in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” Journal of Social History 30 (1996): 129–30.
Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 155–56.
John Crowley, This Sheba, Self: The Conceptualization of Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 106; Toby Ditz, “Shipwrecked; or, Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” The Journal of American History 81 (1994): 51–80.
Cary Carson, “The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?,” in Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 483–697; Alison Bell, “Emulation and Social Empowerment: Material, Social, and Economic Dynamics in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Virginia,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6 (2002): 253–98.
Nancy Schnog, “Changing Emotions: Moods and the Nineteenth-Century American Woman Writer,” in Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, ed. Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 89.
Peter N. Stearns, “Anger and American Work,” in Emotion and Social Change, ed. Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 131; Peter N. Stearns, American Cool (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 122, 219.
Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936); Harry Tipper et al., The Principles of Advertising (New York: Ronald Press Co., 1920), 63–66, 154–60, 173, 243; Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 119.
Examples include: Charles Leland, Sunshine in Thought (1862; repr., Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1959); Orison Marden, Cheerfulness as a Life Power (New York: Crowell, 1899); Ralph Waldo Trine, On the Open Road: Being Some Thoughts and a Little Creed of Wholesome Living (New York: Crowell, 1908); George V. N. Dearborn, The Influence of Joy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1916); A. Hopkinson, Be Merry: Some Thoughts on Mirth as a Christian Duty (Milwaukee: Morehouse, 1925); Robert Schauffler, Enjoy Living: An Invitation to Happiness (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1939); Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951); Lionel Tiger, Optimism: The Biology of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979); and many others. The genre is practically nonexistent in Europe.
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 22–24, 110–16; T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Rise of American Advertising,” Wilson Quarterly 7 (1983): 156–67; Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (New York: Morrow, 1984), 97–98; Ernest Turner, The Shocking History of Advertising! (New York: Dutton, 1953), 297, 321, 336.
Stearns, American Cool, 139–41, 183–92, 245.
Christina Kotchemidova, “From Good Cheer to ‘Drive-by Smiling': A Social History of Cheerfulness,” Journal of Social History 39 (2005), 15–17, 297.
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 10–11, 91–93, 137–38, 147–49; Hochschild, “Emotion Work,” 569–70.
Dean Peabody, National Characteristics (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 174–79.
Klos Sokol, Shortcuts to Poland (Krakow: Wydawnictwo, 1997), 176, as cited in Anna Wierzbicka, Emotions Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 247.
Cas Wouters, “Etiquette Books and Emotion Management in the Twentieth Century: American Habitus in International Comparison,” in An Emotional History of the United States, ed. Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 283–304.
Wierzbicka, Emotions Across Languages, 246–47.
Wierzbicka, Emotions Across Languages, 247.
Wierzbicka, Emotions Across Languages, 251. See also Anna Wierzbicka, “Emotion, Language, and ‘Cultural Scripts’,” in Emotion and Culture: Empirical Studies of Mutual Influence, ed. Shinobu Kitayama and Hazel Rose Markus (Washington: American Psychological Association, 1994), 178–92.
Boy Scouts of America, http://www.scouting.org/BoyScouts.aspx
Boy Scouts of America, “Year in Review,” http://www.scouting.org/About/FactSheets/YearinReview.aspx
See: Union of German Scouts, “About Guiding and Scouting in Germany,” http://www.pfadfinden.de/fileadmin/BUND/international/Info-rdp-2008-07-31.pdf; Scouting and Guiding Federation of Turkey, “Promise of Scouting,” http://www.tif.org.tr/eng/promise.html; Belgian Scout Groups, “La Loi Scout,” http://www.195sgp.be/NewSwp/t_loiscout.htm
Italian National Scout Corpus, “Compliance with the Promise and the Law,” http://www.cngei.it/vediMacro.phtml?IDMacro=4624
Gordon, “Social Structural Effects,” 163–64; Hochschild, “Emotion Work,” 562–63.
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 35–48.
James, “What is an Emotion?” 198.
R. B. Zajonc, Sheila T. Murphy, and Marita Inglehart, “Feeling and Facial Efference: Implications of the Vascular Theory of Emotion,” Psychological Review 96 (1989): 395–416; Fritz Strack, Leonard Martin, and Sabine Stepper, “Inhibiting and Facilitating Conditions of the Human Smile: A Nonobtrusive Test ofthe Facial Feedback Hypothesis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54 (1988): 768–77.
Sandra E. Duclos et al., “Emotion-Specific Effects of Facial Expressions and Postures on Emotional Experience,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57 (1989): 100–08; Sabine Stepper and Fritz Strack, “Proprioceptive Determinants of Emotional and Nonemotional Feelings,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64 (1993): 211–20.
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 41, 44.
Hochschild, “Emotion Work,” 561.
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 35–48.
Peggy A. Thoits, “Emotional Deviance: Research Agendas,” in Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions, ed. Theodore Kemper (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 180–203; Catherine Lutz, “Depression and the Translation of Emotional Worlds,” in Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder, ed. Arthur Kleinman and Byron Good (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 63–64, 70–74.
Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions”; Carol Z. Stearns, “‘Lord Help Me Walk Humbly’,” 54.
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 254.
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 114–16.
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 104–05.
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 121, 133.
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 11.
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 148.
Tolich, “Alienating and Liberating Emotions at Work,” 372–77.
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 4.
See: Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, 1st American ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1982); Abram de Swaan, “From Management by Command to Management by Negotiation,” in The Management of Normality: Critical Essays in Health and Welfare (New York: Routledge, 1990), 150–60; Jürgen Gerhards, “The Changing Culture of Emotions in Modern Society,” Social Science Information 28 (1989): 737–54; Cas Wouters, “Formalization and Informalization: Changing Tension Balances in Civilizing Processes,” Theory, Culture and Society 3 (1986): 1–18; Hans Bertens, “Why Molly Doesn't: Humanism's Long, Long Shadow,” in Emotion in Postmodernism, ed. Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 1997), 25–37; Willem Mastenbroek, “Organizational Behavior as Emotion Management,” in Emotions in the Workplace: Research, Theory and Practice, ed. Neal M. Ashkanasy, Charmine E. J. Härtel, and Wilfred Zerbe (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000), 19–35.
Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1986).
Cas Wouters, “The Sociology of Emotions and Flight Attendants: Hochschild's Managed Heart,” Theory, Culture and Society 6 (1989), 114–18.
Wouters, “The Sociology of Emotions,” 116.
Wouters, “The Sociology of Emotions,” 118–19.
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 131, 187.
Wouters, “Etiquette Books and Emotion Management,” 300.
See Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1987).
Magda B. Arnold, Emotion and Personality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960); Richard S. Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Robert C. Solomon, The Passions (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 87, 127; Robert C. Solomon, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 13–28, 203–17.
Robert C. Solomon, Not Passion's Slave: Emotions and Choice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 100–01.
Ferdinand de Saussure, “Linguistic Value,” in The Communication Theory Reader, ed. Paul Cobley (London: Routledge, 1996), 99–109.
Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2002), 102–10.
Rom Harré, “An Outline of the Social Constructionist Viewpoint,” in The Social Construction of Emotions, ed. Rom Harré (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1986), 2–14; Shula Sommers, “Understanding Emotions: Some Interdisciplinary Considerations,” in Emotion and Social Change: Toward a New Psychohistory, ed. Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 24; W. Gerrod Parrott and Rom Harré, “Overview,” in The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions, ed. Rom Harré and W. Gerrod Parrott (London: Sage, 1996), 1.
Richard E. Petty et al., “Positive Mood and Persuasion: Different Roles for Affect under High- and Low-Elaboration Conditions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64 (1993): 5–20.
Larissa Z. Tiedens and Susan Linton, “Judgment Under Emotional Certainty and Uncertainty: The Effects of Specific Emotions on Information Processing,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81 (2001): 973–88; Rima Ahmad El-Hajje, “The Effect of Mood on Group Decision-Making” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toledo, 1996).
Sigal G. Barsade, Arthur P. Brief, and Sandra E. Spataro, “The Affective Revolution in Organizational Behavior: The Emergence of a Paradigm,” in Organizational Behavior: The State of the Science, ed. Jerald Greenberg (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2003), 3–52.
Schnog, “Changing Emotions.”
Based on: Yvonna S. Lincoln and Egon G. Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1985); Thomas A. Schwandt, “Constructivist, Interpretivist Approaches to Human Inquiry,” in The Landscape of Qualitative Research: Theories and Issues, ed. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 221–59.
Wouters, “Etiquette Books and Emotion Management.”
Kevin McMahon, McLuhan's Wake, video recording (Montreal: Primitive Entertainment/National Film Board of Canada, 2002), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faK9HUvH2ck
Lincoln and Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry, 102.
Norman K. Denzin, Interpretive Interactionism (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989).
Amanda Coffey and Paul Atkinson, Making Sense of Qualitative Data (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 32.
Mats Alvesson and Kaj Sköldberg, Reflexive Methodology: New Vistas for Qualitative Research, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2009), 53–74.
Lincoln and Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry.
Exactly as in Wouters, “Etiquette Books and Emotion Management.”
Lincoln and Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry, 289–331; Coffey and Atkinson, Making Sense of Qualitative Data, 30.
Lincoln and Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry, 37.
Denzin and Lincoln, The Landscape of Qualitative Research, 3–4.
Denzin and Lincoln, The Landscape of Qualitative Research, 243.
Wouters, “Etiquette Books and Emotion Management,” 296.
As defined by: Gordon, “Social Structural Effects on Emotion,” 163; and Hochschild, “Emotion Work,” 562–63.
Kotchemidova, “From Good Cheer to Drive-by Smiling.”
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 114–16.
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Doubleday, 1966).
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 137–56.
Hochschild, The Managed Heart; and Tolich, “Alienating and Liberating Emotions at Work.”
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 121.
Schnog, “Changing Emotions,” 93.
Carol Barr-Zisowitz, “Sadness,” 611–13.
Robin Lakoff, Language and Woman's Place (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).
Catherine A. Lutz, “Engendered Emotion: Gender, Power and the Rhetoric of Emotional Control in American Discourse,” in The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions, ed. Rom Harré and W. Gerrod Parrott (London: Sage, 1996), 151–70; Stearns, American Cool, 263.
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 131, 187.
Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality.
Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions,” 825–28.
Goffman, Frame Analysis.
In Saussurian terms, of course, signified and signifier are inseparable; and the sound of the word creates the meaning. See: Saussure, “Linguistic Value.”
Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality.
Denzin and Lincoln, The Landscape of Qualitative Research, 221–28.