Young people’s voices on emotions: a narrative inquiry

Abstract

This article presents an innovative narrative inquiry study carried out in a primary school in Aotearoa New Zealand with three young people who provide insights into how they perceive, construct, give meaning to, and make sense of their own emotions. The analysis from this primary research draws on Foucauldian scholarship to examine how the narratives that young people construct about their feelings are shaped by dominant psy-discourses on emotions. We argue that through these discourses, certain voices of authority, knowledge, and ways of seeing are privileged in schools—while others are silenced—in order to label young people as emotionally or mentally “unwell” and in need of expert assistance. In doing so, we suggest that critical interdisciplinary work by health, psychology, counselling, and education professionals in schools can create spaces to explore inter-professional dialogue and reflexivity, as well as to challenge orthodox approaches to young people’s emotional lives.

Keywords:

• Emotions
• Foucault
• psy-professionals
• school
• wellbeing

Due to the growing concern for the complex circumstances that young people face in contemporary society, such as bullying (Nassem, 2017), gaming addiction (Lobel et al., 2017), climate change (Sampaio & Sequeira, 2022), poverty (World Health Organization, 2021b), and the COVID-19 pandemic (Hoffmann & Duffy, 2021), the mental health and wellbeing of young people has become a key policy area for global health organisations (United Nations Children’s Fund, 2021; World Health Organization, 2021a). Reports of increasing rates of youth suicide, self-harm, and mental illness (United Nations Children’s Fund, 2021; World Health Organization, 2021a, 2021b) have led journalists, politicians, educators, and health professionals to advocate for more mental health and wellbeing services for young people. The locus for the detection of such issues, as well as the delivery of additional support in Western societies, has typically taken place in and through compulsory education.

While public education’s increased focus on children’s emotions may appear to be a positive step (that is, common sense and progressive), in this article we raise concerns that particular authorities, forms of knowledge, and ways of seeing emotions are privileged in schools—while others are silenced—in an endeavour to label children as emotionally or mentally “unwell”. By examining how young people construct emotions, we provide a Foucauldian analysis of how power operates within schools to guide children, adolescents, and teenagers towards certain beliefs and actions for “better” mental health and wellbeing.

Troubling emotions

Central to the concern for modern life’s troubling circumstances and their consequences, young people’s emotions—what they feel and how such feelings are understood, expressed, and enacted—have become a prominent site where psy-experts can engage and negotiate dominant ideas about their emotions, as well as potential mental health and wellbeing issues (see Barry et al., 2017; Coombes et al., 2013). However, as scholars have demonstrated, dominant understandings of emotions have changed over time and remain contested. For instance, the seventeenth-century medical physician Thomas Willis was a central figure in shifting Western understandings of emotions away from their original association with the soul and spirit through theorising their production as a result of the physical body (Watt Smith, 2015). This understanding of human emotions as somatic laid the groundwork for eighteenth-century scholars, such as Thomas Brown, to measure and rationalise human conduct (for example, intellect, cognition, and behaviour) as feelings (Dixon, 2012). Since this time, a considerable amount of literature and theories about emotion has been produced (see for example, Dixon, 2012; Horwitz & Wakefield, 2007; Massumi, 1995).

Due to their perceived devious conduct and lack of “morals”, Aries (1965) notes that by the nineteenth century, young people—particularly those of the working class—had become a growing concern for Victorian society. The apprehension of young people’s poor demeanour led to the advent of compulsory education in England during the 1870s (Sadovnik & Coughlan, 2016) and eventually positioned schools as the ideal testing sites for new psychological theories regarding the moral and emotional development of young people (Aries, 1965; Baker, 1999). Happiness, identified and discussed by the participants in this study, represents one feeling that illustrates the transformation of an emotion into a “newer” psychological concept and its integration into the education system.

Compulsory happiness

Originating from the word “happ”, happiness initially denoted a feeling of “chance-luck-success” that arose from “happenstance” (Binkley, 2015; Watt Smith, 2015) and was, therefore, understood as unpredictable and impractical to maintain throughout life. However, philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Jeremy Bentham (see Plant, 1975) argued that other concepts, such as hedonism, utilitarianism, and liberalism (see Binkley, 2015, Hyman, 2014; Jain et al., 2019), should be incorporated into the notion of happiness. Happiness was positioned as central to a modern—”good” and ordered—society. Here we see the emotion first being theorised as a part of the wider body-politic, rather than simply a feeling that belongs exclusively to the individual. The early championing of happiness “for all” eventually led to the rise of an emotional “norm” in Western societies (Binkley, 2015; Hyman, 2014) and, together with the increasing prominence of psy-knowledge during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Rose, 1996b; Scull, 1993), authorised one particular field to formulate technologies and strategies that aimed to measure, control, and obtain happiness: positive psychology (Binkley, 2015).

Deriving from the work of Martin Seligman (2002), the field of positive psychology has made use of ideas such as morality, self-help and wellness (Cabanas & Illouz, 2019) to offer alternative understandings of feelings, as categories of “positive” or “negative” attribution (Frawley, 2015; Seligman, 2002) rather than traditional psychopathologies (for example, see American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Yet despite its various ideas, measurements, and social theories on happiness (see Carr, 2011), positive psychology has continued to support the dominant understanding of emotions as a primarily biological concept (Darwin, 1872; Jain et al., 2019). Most notably, the transformation of happiness by positive psychology into the state of wellbeing and “the good life” (Carr, 2011; Davies, 2015) has not only justified its primary aim to enhance happiness for all (Hyman, 2014) but also authorised various experts and professionals to conduct studies that have sought to “improve” young people’s lives through working on their emotions.

Studying emotional health and wellbeing

Through privileging certain biomedical technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, emotional health is one dominant field of study that conceptualises and measures young people’s feelings as a product of particular bodily organs—like the limbic system (Midgley et al., 2017)—to theorise and research their emotions as the result of “healthy” or “pathological” brain functioning (American Psychiatric Association, 2013; Belden et al., 2014). Likewise, quantitative psychological measures such as the child behaviour checklist (Achenbach, 1991) and the strengths and difficulties questionnaire (Goodman, 1997), have been used to increase the understanding of young people’s emotions as issues, difficulties, or symptoms of mental illness (Bilancia & Rescorla, 2010; Ministry of Health, 2018). Hence, young people, who exhibit “unhappy” emotions, may be identified as needing certain expert help in order to improve or cure their “unhealthy”, mentally unwell, risky feelings (Cabanas, 2016; Davies, 2015). Although these studies support a foundational tenet of emotional health—namely, to improve conduct, one must improve feeling via improving the physical body and vice versa (Coombes et al., 2013)—they also serve to illustrate how society has privileged the intervention of emotional and mental health experts and expert discourses on young people’s emotions.

The call to destigmatise mental health (World Health Organization, 2021a) and promote holistic health (O’Connor et al., 2018) has also led to the emergence of emotional wellbeing as another prevalent field of research. Studies on the emotional wellbeing of young people have utilised a range of quantitative measures—for instance, the self-report resiliency inventory and the satisfaction with life scale (Oberle, 2018)—and qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews (Children’s Commissioner & NZ School Trustees Association, 2018, p. 5), to support guiding young people towards answering the question of “what makes you happy”. Other research has investigated young people’s ideas on “what makes a good life” (Office of the Children’s Commissioner & Oranga Tamariki, 2019), identifying that obtaining happiness is one of the key elements. Wellbeing studies have also led experts to devise, research, and promote ideas such as emotional intelligence, management, self-regulation, and competencies (Coombes et al., 2013; Humphrey et al., 2007; O’Connor et al., 2018) that aim to train and exercise young people’s emotions towards supporting certain socially desired conduct, such as attending class, actively engaging in learning activities, achieving higher grades and striving for healthier lifestyles (Children’s Commissioner & NZ School Trustees Association, 2018; O’Connor et al., 2018; Oberle, 2018).

Although studies of young people’s emotions often acknowledge their perspectives as valuable, the ongoing drive to discipline emotions encourages their feelings to be viewed and produced as “troubling” objects by parents, peers, teachers, and policymakers. This may work to affirm the authority of social actors (for example, psychologists, psychotherapists, counsellors, and wellbeing and health experts), as well as current, dominant biomedical discourses on emotions and feelings.

Methodological approach

In this research we utilised a number of qualitative methods in order to be able to present, understand, and examine young people’s ideas and thoughts on emotions. Our qualitative methodology adopted a constructionist (Crotty, 1998) narrative approach (Clandinin, 2007) that invited three young people to share their experiences and understandings of emotions through storytelling. The (co)constructed nature of narratives (Gergen, 1994; Greig et al., 2013) highlighted the importance of researcher reflexivity (Lewis, 2014). This included the need to pay close attention to the social context (Clandinin, 2007; Cohen, 2008), as the school environment, the relationships between participants, and the relationship between the researcher and participants, all work to shape the research process, questions and evidence (Clandinin et al., 2015). The narratives constructed and presented in this study are not beyond recycling the dominant ways of speaking about emotions (that is, those produced by psy-professions), phrases utilised by the researcher or the participants remain enmeshed within a powerful psy-language despite the potential for nuanced meanings to be produced through discursive story telling. However, by drawing on the ontological perspective of idealism (Pelczar, 2015), we argue that there are alternative ways of seeing young people’s emotions, other than only through a biomedical lens. Thus, the narrative approach taken in this study invited young people to share stories that illustrated their understanding of emotions and how they constructed and produced “what is true” for them and their lives (Cohen, 2008; Gergen, 1994). We employed a Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992) to examine how a small group of young people understand emotions and how their subjectivities may be guided by certain discourses and authorities.

Foucault’s ideas on discourse, power/knowledge (1980a, 1980b), and governmentality (1991) provided a valuable framework for analysing how power can be exercised (Foucault, 1995) to guide and shape the subjectivities of young people in schools with their own (and others’) emotions. For Foucault (1978), discourses arise at the point where knowledge and power intersect and, although language is an essential part of discourse (Clandinin, 2007), it should “not be considered as a simple translation between reality and language but as practices that shape perceptions of reality” (Markula & Pringle, 2006, p. 31, emphasis original). Therefore, the narratives and discussions produced by the participants present various discourses and practices (Pedersen, 2009)—formed through the intersection of power and specific constructed emotional knowledges—which served to guide their understanding of, and conduct with, their emotions.

This research was centred on a visual methods approach, in particular the provision of four visual vignettes drawn by the primary researcher (RM; see Figures 1–4) to elicit conversations with young people and aid construction of their narratives. This technique required participants to draw on their own experience, knowledge, and understanding of the vignette content (Clandinin, 2007), as well as providing a “buffer” for participants that allowed them to retell a narrative from the perspective of an imagined character or someone in their own lives.

Figure 1. Visual vignette one.

Figure 2. Visual vignette two.

Figure 3. Visual vignette three.

Figure 4. Visual vignette four.

Focus groups were used as a means to provide the young people with the opportunity to share, contest, negotiate and construct narratives, ideas, thoughts and beliefs (Carey & Asbury, 2012) on emotions across all four visual vignettes. Three core open-ended questions—“what might be happening here?”, “what led to this?”, and “what might happen next?”—were used to enable the young people to engage with the visual vignettes, share their stories, and provide some semi-structured direction when needed (Xerri, 2018). Although focus groups provide a rich environment for social research (Carey & Asbury, 2012), they also generate some unique ethical challenges, in particular, confidentiality. The young people’s spontaneous decision to keep the discussion private, as well as to use their self-selected pseudonyms during the recordings, illustrated the participants’ commitment and capacity to create a safe research setting. The sensitive nature of the research topic (see Dickson-Swift, 2017) meant that it was also important to consider how to address potential distress. Here, the young people volunteered to monitor each other’s research experience (Greig et al., 2013), and appreciated that they could stop the focus group discussion at any point (and contact their parents—or access a trusted member of the school’s pastoral care team—if they felt distressed). A handout of local and national support services was also available to the young people.

After ethics approval was granted by the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee (UAHPEC), all the young people aged ten to twelve at Mataora School (the names of the school as well as the young people are pseudonyms) were invited to participant in the study. From Mataora School’s population, comprised of 81 per cent Māori (the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand), three young people assented to participate in two, sixty-minute, focus group discussions.

All three participants identified as Māori, Logan described himself as a passionate sportsman who loved food and action movies; Dan shared his love of books and video games; and Jake emphasised his value of friendship and expressed a great interest in foods from around the world. Each focus group began with whakawhanaungatanga (relationship building) which was designed in consultation with a kaumatua (Māori elder) to include: a short mihi (welcome) and pepeha (introduction); time to share and learn about each other; kai (food) and water/juice—signifying gratitude and recognition of the young people’s willingness to share their knowledge; and a karakia (prayer)—to give thanks for the food. Dan, Logan, and Jake’s discussions were audio-recorded and then transcribed by the primary researcher (RM). We then read and re-read the focus group transcripts, coding the text with potential discourse which were derived from looking at recurring themes and language, and noted key ways of understanding emotions that were expressed by participants. As a central part of this reflexive process, Foucauldian concepts and scholarship were used alongside the coding to provide a nuanced critique of how power/knowledge “worked”. Through engaging in partnership and guidance with the kaumatua, continually examining our research positionality as well as the existing power relationships, our study follows established University of Auckland protocols, striving to uphold and honour the knowledge of the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand (Crawford & Langridge, 2022). Excerpts from each transcript have been reproduced in the section below to highlight some notable issues on emotions raised by the young people. Our analysis of the narratives follow in the discussion section.

The study: young people’s voices

Visual vignette one

Rob: What might be happening here?

Dan: I think that she might be bored because… maybe… she has to wait in detention because somebody told on her for doing something that she didn’t actually do.

Logan: Yeah! *nodding a lot*

Rob: So, what might have led our character here to be waiting?

Logan: She was playing with her friends, kind of, and like they were doing something wrong—that they weren’t supposed to do. But someone—someone… saw them doing it… So, the person … went to go to a teacher … yeah, they got in trouble for the bad thing that they weren’t supposed to do.

Rob: So, what might happen next?

Logan: She would be in detention… And while she was in detention the teacher might have called her parents! And told her—and her friends’ parents—that they were doing something that they weren’t supposed to do… So, when she got home—when both of them got home—they were in big trouble.

*Dan and Jake nodding*

Rob: What do you think is going on inside for our character?

Jake: She’s doesn’t know what to do…

Logan: She would probably feel, er, like… very sad, bored… She’s sad… Yeah, doesn’t know what to do—that’s the reason why she is bored. She’s sad because she’s grounded from, like, all her devices that she had.

Dan: Sadness.

Logan: activities… Like, activities she was able to do…

Jake: but now she can’t.

Rob: What are your thoughts about sadness Dan?

Dan: Sadness is… a very, a very hard emotion to feel.

*Jake nodding*

Jake: That’s true.

Dan: Sadness is a…

Logan: Is like a feeling *clears throat* th…

Dan: that’s bad for you.

Logan: Nah, it’s somethi… It’s a feeling… it like, it hurts but… instead of like, hurting—like pain—it’s sad.

Jake: It hurts your feelings.

Logan: Cause, you can’t feel your hurt in your body; so, you cry… So that’s called… that’s sad.

*Dan and Jake nodding*

Dan: It’s a mental pain… not a physical pain.

Jake: Yeah.

Dan: Because if your sad… You do nothing, you just lie [down]; and if you’re sad you can start to cry and… it’s kind of boring and you feel so alone.

Visual vignette two

Jake led a narrative—describing this visual vignette as an “annoyed” school mate—to highlight how teasing about “personal stuff” would involve yelling and emotions of mad, annoyed, and anger in schools.

Rob: What advice might you hear being given?

Dan: Mm… if I am at my house, like I just lock myself in my bedroom, calm down.

Jake: Or forget what happened and block everything off.

Rob: What advice might they give to themselves?

Logan: Mm… Anger is a choice.

Rob: Tell me more about that?

Logan: uh… what I mean by that is like, like, you can choose to be angry, or… you can choose to be calm. And if you choose to be angry… that means that you’re going to lead into something that is not good…

Jake: You don’t have to be angry.

Dan: Keep calm, keep calm, keep calm.

Jake: Maybe he can do something else.

Dan: If you were angry you don’t get anything done. You’re just angry and you hurt others and yourself by being angry.

Rob: When someone’s feeling like this, who might a good support?

Logan: Again…. the friends, family, relatives—especially your grandparents. Oh, they’d calm you down fast.

Dan: Maybe, A.M.S.

Rob: A.M.S?

Dan: Anger Management Support.

Rob: Oh, right. Could you tell me a little more about that Dan?

Dan: Anger management support is, um, a support thing that um… help people that… can… kind of, it’s hard for them to calm down if they are anger.

Like visual vignette one, young people identified whānau (family) as the primary support; however, obtaining the emotion of calmness is recognised by the group as a specialised skill that requires “expert” support.

Visual vignette three

The young people presented varying narratives of feeling hurt, getting a “growling” (being told off), or a relative passing away to explain this visual vignette.

Rob: What would happen after that?

Logan: hmmm… probably goes to school—has a bad day… cause he got, cause his friends don’t like him no more.

Rob: Right, so he could feel like no one likes him?

Logan: Yeah, has no friends, he’s all alone. He starts getting depressed.

Rob: Right, depressed…? Tell me more about depressed?

Logan: Depressed to me is like when you are super sad… And like, you’re sad because… like something made you sad… Or someone some slash something made fun of you and be mean to you. And that causes you to be depressed.

Dan: Depression’s a sadness that it is hard to get out of, it’s hard to calm down.

Logan: Well, you just got to let it all out.

Jake: Mm… *nodding*

Rob: What are your thoughts about sadness?

Dan: It’s not a good feeling.

Logan: Yeah, like a feeling that you don’t want it to get to you.

Jake: It’s… bad.

Rob: It’s bad? Tell me a little bit about why it’s bad?

Jake: Cause then that might lead to… more sadness.

*Logan & Dan nodding*

Rob: Is there anything that would stop this person from sharing this emotion?

Dan: Maybe they just don’t… they don’t want to let anyone else feel for them. Because they feel like they should be tough.

Rob: If you a friend or a classmate were feeling this way, what might others need to know?

Dan: Maybe D.M.S. Depression Management.

Rob: Tell me more about this?

Dan: I think that they should have anger management support and depression management support. So, that if someone’s feeling, like, really sad—there are a group of people who can come and help them.

Rob: Who would be in that group of people?

Dan: Probably like… some experts on how to calm down. People who have felt it before… Maybe, um, people… who’ve had depression before but found a way to calm down; can help this person calm down *points to visual vignette three*.

Visual vignette four

Logan: What led to this moment is probably, the first reason: She got up early. Usually people when they get up they’re still tired, but it looks like when she got up she wasn’t tired. And, when she got to school, said hi to all her friends… and she looks like—that she has like—good luck.

Rob: So, what’s going on inside for our character here?

Logan: She’s very happy, she like… doesn’t know what to say. She’s speechless.

Rob: Speechless? Tell me more about that kind of happiness?

Logan: Okay *chuckles*, so what I mean by speechless happiness is, mmm… is like when she’s so happy she doesn’t know what to say.

*Dan models opening his mouth while smiling with his hands raised in the air*

Rob: So, sounds like luck and happiness kind of go together?

Logan: M-hm! Luck and happiness are like twins.

Rob: Like twins?

Logan: Yeah! Cause, like, when you’re, when you’re lucky—you’re happy at the same time.

Rob: Is there anything that would stop this person from being able to share that emotion of happiness?

Logan: One word…

Dan: Being sad… You can’t have two emotions at the same time.

Logan: m-hm… * nodding* Mmm… *frowns and shakes his head*

Dan: Hard to… anyway…

Logan: Sad and mad.

Dan: Yeah, those… I mean like… happy emotions and then negative emotions.

Rob: Tell me more about negative emotions?

Dan: Negative emotions are like… being depressed, being sad, being angry, being annoyed. A bad emotion that you should not have a lot.

Rob: Okay, right… and so, happiness is… positive?

Logan: M-hm! *nodding*

Dan: It’s something that you should have every single day.

Rob: If someone was feeling this way, what advice might you hear being given to them?

Logan: Stay happy, always. Don’t think about negative thoughts… And yea.

Dan: And be, positive!

Rob: What advice might you give to this person?

Logan: Mm… I dunno… I wouldn’t give any advice really.

Dan: Cause, they’re being good, happy. They don’t need advice.

Rob: What advice do you think they might give to themselves?

Dan: Stay happy, keep happy, and always be happy…

Logan: and stay positive!

Dan: Being positive is basically being happy… all the time.

Logan: Being positive to me is like, like, staying on track… being positive like… staying nice. Like, you don’t even think about anything negative, like, your mind is just filled with good things instead of bad. It’s like when you want to get work done, and you’re thinking positive about it. All of these… *gestures over all the visual vignettes* All of these, should be happy… Cause happy is like the opposite of every… it’s like the opposite of sad; it’s the opposite of anger; and it’s the opposite of bored.

Dan: Yes.

Discussing young people’s happiness

A discourse of positivity: supporting happiness

Happiness was framed by the young people in two key ways. One was aligned to “traditional” understandings that related to luck (see Watt Smith, 2015), such as when Logan stated that “luck and happiness are like twins… when you’re lucky—you’re happy at the same time”; while the other formulated their understanding of happiness in terms of feelings through a discourse of positivity (Binkley, 2015). As Dan explained, “[b]eing positive is basically being happy”. However, positivity has been noted by scholars as a complex and complicated discourse comprised of numerous psychological ideas and beliefs (Carr, 2011) that, like contemporary theories and studies on emotions, adopt a clinical gaze (Foucault, 1976). A clinical gaze works to promote certain paradigms—namely, materialism and positivism (Crotty, 1998)—which inscribe specific biological states on young people. In this particular case, Logan’s clarification of “[b]eing positive to me is like… you’re thinking positive”, illustrates how his understanding of happiness draws on positive thinking; a discourse that employs individuals to manipulate their thoughts in order to achieve greater wellbeing (Davies, 2015; Hyman, 2014). Advancing his understanding of positive thinking, Logan presents the idea that “your mind is just filled with good things instead of bad” and, in doing so, illuminates how young people may position their emotions as binaries of good and bad.

Logan’s statement also draws attention to how contemporary psychological theories of brain/thoughts/feelings (Carr, 2011; Midgley et al., 2017) which utilise discourses of naturalness and biology (Hyman, 2014) operate to produce the mind as a type of container; an idea that then encourages young people to survey and filter their thoughts towards happiness. Dan’s individualisation of happiness as “something that you should have every single day” reflects how the temporality of happiness (Binkley, 2015) generates contemporary norms that—along with the processes of naturalisation, individualisation and responsibilisation (Cabanas, 2016)—stimulates young people to surveil (Foucault, 1995) themselves and their peers’ emotions and thoughts. This, in turn, makes it increasingly difficult for young people to resist the idea that they should be constantly happy.

Morality is another central tenant of positivity (Cabanas, 2016; Davies, 2015; Hyman, 2014) that presents itself through the participants’ acknowledgement of happiness as “being good” (Dan) and positive. For Logan, the moral “goodness” of happiness is found in its capacity to direct his conduct towards the right standards of citizenship (Binkley, 2015): “staying nice… staying on track” and getting “work done”. Obtaining and sustaining these kinds of attitudes, values, characteristics, and traits permits young people to position themselves as “correct” (and, therefore, “good”). However, the focus on happiness as a means to govern young people to be more socially, academically, and economically productive (O’Connor et al., 2018; Sadovnik & Coughlan, 2016) demonstrates how emotions may be disciplined in order to shape understandings and ways of being that serve the future neoliberal workforce and society (Cabanas & Illouz, 2019; Cohen, 2016).

While pursuing certain “right” conduct and “good” emotions is one outcome of adhering to the dominant discourse of happiness, its capacity to subsume a multiplicity of emotions is exemplified in the way it shapes the other feelings discussed by the participants. For instance, Dan’s clear delineation between “happy emotions” and then “negative emotions” illustrates how his commitment to positivity equates other feelings—like anger or sadness—as “bad [negative] emotion[s] that you should not have a lot.” Jake also defines sadness as a “bad” emotion, while for Dan sadness is a complex feeling that has the capacity to lead individuals to deviate from good conduct: “you do nothing, you just lie [down]”.

The manner in which emotions may be surveilled, categorised and positioned by young people demonstrates a process of normalisation (Foucault, 1995), where understandings of positivity direct what is considered “normal” or desirable by wider society (Binkley, 2015) and vice versa. Hence, “bad” and “good” emotions are not simple “truths” but are produced discursively through positivity, biology, and morality (Hyman, 2014), and encourage subjects to measure, rank and compare various emotions against each other. As a result, young people may be guided to understand their emotions as binaries that oppose each other, as Logan illustrates: “cause happy is like the opposite of every… it’s like the opposite of sad; it’s the opposite of anger; and it’s the opposite of bored”. Thus, the prominence of the discourse of happiness for young people may be witnessed here in its capacity to shape and frame how they understand themselves, their emotions and the emotions of others.

A discourse of self: improving positiveness

A discourse of self—noted by scholars as crucial to the advancement of positivity and happiness in society (Binkley, 2015; Hyman, 2014)—also appears in the focus group discussion between Dan, Logan and Jake. The self-advice that “you can choose to be angry or you can choose to be calm” (Logan), “you don’t have to be angry” (Jake) and “stay happy, keep happy, and always be happy…” (Dan) illustrates how notions of authentic-happiness (Seligman, 2002), authentic-selves (Cabanas, 2016), and the central ‘wellbeing’ principle of “autonomy and control over one’s life” (Coverdale & Long, 2015, p. 28), may guide young people to view their lives as individual projects that must be worked on, improved, and enhanced (Rose, 1996a).

Further, the way these young people describe the “rules” of conduct for themselves reflects Foucault’s (1988b) notion of technologies of the self, which focus on the formation and transformation of self in terms of subjectivities (Reveley, 2015). Technologies of the self, such as self-control, self-management, and self-awareness (Barry et al., 2017; Oberle, 2018) have become increasingly common in Western societies (Hyman, 2014). Here, the aim to direct the subjectivities of young people towards constructing an optimal happy-self exemplifies the governance of their emotions through Foucault’s (1995) concept of self-surveillance, where individuals engage in the observation and adjustment of their emotions in order to become responsible citizens (Rimke, 2000).

A discourse of expertise: reforming selves

In addition to the discourses of positivity and self (Frawley, 2015; Hyman, 2014), Dan’s suggestion that schools should have “anger management support and depression management support… experts on how to calm down” illustrates how young people in school settings can be guided by discourses of care, self-help, and expertise (Hyman, 2014) to find, access, and consume specialist services and professionals, such as school guidance counsellors (McLeay & Powell, 2022). The valuing of expert services and expertise for “managing” troubling emotions here emphasises how young people, as “entrepreneurs of themselves” (Rose, 1999, p. 230), may be led to engage with experts—who, by sharing specific psy-knowledge of emotions, re-affirm their goal to pursue their happiest self-projects.

According to Dan, these school “experts” should be “people who have felt it [sadness/depression] before… people… who’ve had depression before but found a way to calm down”. His recommendation highlights the potential demand individuals may place on professionals who, through their own constructed, subjective knowledge (Binkley, 2015), purvey happy and positive expertise that encourage young people to manipulate or eliminate certain “bad” feelings.

The sharing of expert “knowledge” about emotions epitomises disciplinary power (Foucault, 1995). Power is exercised between students, professionals, services, and programmes in schools to train young “docile bodies” (Lupton, 1997) to perceive, know, and conduct themselves in particular ways. Hence, schools are governed to draw on psychological expertise to promote certain theories of emotions to young people, in order to train and exercise them towards happiness and productivity.

Governing young people’s emotions

Although dominant discourses of happiness may lead young people to seek out certain expertise, there are countless other unpredictable, yet definite, ends that young people may be directed towards. For instance, Dan’s statement that “I just lock myself in my bedroom [when I’m angry] and calm down” illustrates how young people—who commit themselves to the constructed norm formulated within the discourse of happiness—may self-examine, as well as self-discipline, their emotions and direct their physical bodies to withdraw or hide from the surveillance of others. Alternatively, Jake’s suggestion to “forget what happened and block everything off” signals Binkley’s (2015) concern that the ideas and beliefs of psychology—in this case regarding happiness and positivity—cajole young people to ignore the socio-cultural contexts that may have led to certain emotions arising in the first instance. Although young people’s responses are varied, the certain, unavoidable, ends (Foucault, 1995) can generally be found in their attempts to minimise certain emotions while maximising others for “happiness”, “wellbeing”, and a “better” life (Binkley, 2015; Hyman, 2014).

Jake, Dan and Logan’s narratives also highlight how young people’s emotions have become a central technology for the art of modern government, otherwise known as governmentality (Foucault, 1991). As “the conduct of conduct”, where knowledge (formed through the clinical gaze) and constructed “norms” are exercised in relations (between parents, teachers, psychologists, counsellors, and young people), governmentality employs populations in the regulation of their “bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being” (Foucault, 1988b, p. 18). Happiness, therefore, not only shapes how young people view and understand emotions but guides—and confines (Foucault, 1988a)—young people to justify their own (and others) experiences and conduct according to psychological and psychiatric ideas, categories, and norms (Cohen, 2016; Harbusch, 2022).

Conclusion

The narratives presented in this study illuminate how psy-constructions of happiness have become highly significant within the lives of the participants through the acceptance, promotion, and privileging of positivity, self, and expertise discourses in society. By exploiting the production of knowledge, psy-professionals have succeeded in shaping young people’s understandings of their own and others emotions in order to encourage them towards being their own emotional coaches and taskmasters (Scull, 1993). In taking up the drive to make their “negative” emotions “positive” or happy, young people consolidate the authority and capacity of various mental health and wellbeing experts—such as school guidance counsellors (see for example, McLeay & Powell, 2022)—to shape their emotions as troubling issues, which may then be improved and transformed through their unique expertise.

As such, this study highlights the need for an increase in critical interdisciplinary research that seeks to provide young people with a greater voice on topics that impact their everyday lives, including resilience, emotions, mental health and wellbeing. Further, we recommend school-based psy-experts engage in deconstructing the discourse of happiness in order to think more critically about young people’s lives and the importance—as well as relevance—of their feelings (including sadness, anger, and so on). We also suggest that various school professionals and professional development providers—such as counsellors, teachers, nurses, youth and social workers—engage in critical literature on happiness (Binkley, 2015; Davies, 2015; Hyman, 2014), mental health (Cohen, 2018) and emotions (Mcleay & Powell, 2022) to examine how their work may serve to inadvertently support the powerful voice of psy-professionals at the expense of the emotional needs of young people.

The empirical evidence presented in this study indicates the “success” of psy-professionals in shaping how young people talk, know, and then enact their (as well as others’) emotions. This does not occur by accident, but through a complex education system that actively interacts with imperatives of public health (see for example, Powell, 2020). Therefore, carefully examining how other “non-psy” adults (who play a role in the surveillance and disciplining of young people in school communities) engage with and proliferate these ideas and discourses around young people’s emotions is crucial work for the future.

Moreover, engaging in critical interdisciplinary work—as we are currently involved in ourselves, between sociology, education and counselling—to understand how young people construct their emotions, wellbeing, and mental health is an example of how we can enrich interventions, research, practices, policies, and legislation (inside and outside of schools) that operate to support young people. Further, the proliferation of psy-knowledge in society—particularly those which implicate young people as its subject—signals an increasing need for a more critical stance within education, social work, counselling, and other non-psy-professional fields. As a team of scholars ourselves who come from diverse professional and academic backgrounds, we form part of this interdisciplinary, interprofessional, research collaboration; one that can potentially lead to such critical scholarship on young people’s emotions, happiness, mental health, and wellbeing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roberto McLeay

Roberto McLeay is a Professional Teaching Fellow and Doctoral Candidate in Counselling in the Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Roberto’s background in primary school teaching, pastoral care and counselling has led him to focus on researching children’s emotions in Aotearoa New Zealand schools, with a unique interest in how emotions are used to shape young people’s understandings of themselves and others.

Darren Powell

Darren Powell PhD is an Associate Professor in Health and Physical Education in the Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Formerly a primary school teacher, Darren’s research focuses on how the corporatisation and privatisation of public health and public education impacts children, including the book Schools, Corporations, and the War on Childhood Obesity: How Corporate Philanthropy Shapes Public Health and Education (Routledge, 2020).

Bruce M. Z. Cohen

Bruce M. Z. Cohen PhD is an Associate Professor in Sociology in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Auckland. His publications include the critically acclaimed monographs Mental Health User Narratives: New Perspectives on Illness and Recovery (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Currently, he is researching the marketing of “mental health” discourse under neoliberal conditions.