Chapter 70: The Sociology of Emotions

ALLISON WISECUP & DAWN T. ROBINSON & LYNN SMITH-LOVIN

The sociology of emotions Social psychology in the first half of the twentieth century was dominated first by behaviorist principles and then by a cognitive backlash to that behaviorism. By the 1970s, the disciplines of sociology and psychology were ready for a new intellectual agenda, this one focused on the central role of emotions. Since emotions are experienced as internal, physiological states, a sociology of emotion might seem like an oxymoron. But influential works published almost simultaneously by several major sociologists in the late 1970s and early 1980s showed that a major intellectual movement was afoot (Collins 1975, 1981; Heise 1979; Hochschild 1983; Kemper 1978; Scheff 1979). By the second half of the twentieth century, there were several major reviews of the cumulating sociological work on emotions (Gordon 1990; Scheff 1988; Thoits 1989). Two themes were common in those early overviews. One was a developing definition of emotion as incorporating ...

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