Emotion Work

Emotion work is the effort involved in manipulating the emotions of oneself and others. Created by Arlie Hochschild, the idea of emotion work fits under the broader umbrella of “emotion management,” the work required to generate feelings that are “appropriate” for a situation. Hochschild's conceptualization of emotion management develops a social constructionist view of emotions that builds from Erving Goffman, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx. In expanding this work to create her model, Hochschild makes distinctions between “surface-acting” and “deep-acting,” as well as “emotion work” and “emotional labor.”

According to Goffman, people seek deference from others, prompting interaction. Through interaction, we try to manage the impressions of ourselves formed in the minds of others, and these interactions arouse emotions within ourselves. When impression management is successful, it fosters positive emotions, and when it fails to meet expectations, it fosters negative emotions, such as embarrassment. Thus, Goffman suggests a sociology of emotions based on social interaction. Implicit is the idea that interactions occurring externally to the individual act as an emotional stimulus. Though interactions are interpreted cognitively according to the definition of the situation, they also stimulate an emotional response. This elicitation-response conceptualization is shared with the psychophysiological tradition of William James, who connects emotions to environmental stimuli. However, Goffman's emphasis on social interaction, prefaced by impression management, represents a break from psychophysiological approaches. Successful acts of impression management create smooth interactions and elicit positive emotions, and vice versa. These interactions occur externally to the individual yet act as a stimulus resulting in an internal emotional response.

Where Goffman breaks from psychophysiological approaches through an examination of social interaction, [Page 249]Hochschild makes a second break through a consideration of social structure in the form of “feeling rules.” Feeling rules outline how people ought to feel in particular situations, providing an idealized (and even normative) guide for how we label, assess, manage, and express our emotions. Bound with feeling rules, emotions serve a “signal function,” signaling an “inner perspective” that we “apply when we go about seeing,” informing our actions and interactions (Hochschild 1983:229–30). Here, Hochschild builds heavily on Freud, but whereas Freud views the signal function of emotions as marking unconscious libidinal drives, Hochschild's emphasis on feeling rules places emotions within a knowable social world.

Hochschild argues that people actively manipulate their emotions to match feeling rules. Following Goffman, Hochschild recognizes that one mode of emotion management involves the outward production of expressions for the sake of interaction. Hochschild labels efforts to manipulate emotions through impression management “surface-acting.” Through surface-acting, we manufacture an external facade to control interaction, arousing an internal emotional response. Using the lens of surface-acting, Cahill and Eggleston (1994:304) examine how wheelchair users manage the emotions associated with helping behavior. They document how wheelchair users “cover their embarrassment with good humor” as a means to control interactions and reduce the emotional discomfort of the wheelchair user and the helper.

Moving beyond Goffman, Hochschild identifies a second mode of emotion management that she labels “deep-acting.” Where surface-acting involves the management of emotion from the “outside-in,” deep-acting involves the management from the “inside-out.” Through deep-acting, people work on their internal emotional states prior to interaction with others. Deep-acting often involves altering cognitions about a situation, helping us to manipulate baseline feelings and generating emotions that match feeling rules. In turn, these manipulated emotions serve a signal function, indicating the proper line of interaction. Using Hochschild's concept of deep-acting, Pierce (1995) analyzes the emotion management of law students during a mock

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