Emotion – Culture, Cognition, and Action (culturecog)

The Promise of Affective Science and the Sociology of Emotions

The sociology of emotions is a curious subfield. On the one hand, the recognition that the study of emotions (and their dynamics) overlap with nearly every single thing sociologists care to study suggests they deserve central casting in the myriad studies that fill journals and monographs (Turner and Stets 2006). On the other hand, the sociology of emotions remains stuck in neutral, waiting for the sort of “renaissance” experienced by cognition when cultural sociology “discovered” schemas (DiMaggio 1997) and dual-process models (Lizardo et al. 2016, Vaisey 2009). This sort of paradox makes some sense, for emotions, or what founding sociologists like Cooley called sentiments, have nearly always been a part of the discipline. Weber’s most important typologies included affectual action and charismatic authority; as early as The Division of Labour, Durkheim had emotions front and center in his theory of deviance and crime; and, the aforementioned Cooley premised his entire social psychology on pride and shame transforming self into a moral thing. But, simultaneously, the study or use of emotions in sociological analysis remained mired in false Cartesian binaries (see Damasio 1994) that propped up misogynistic commitments to dichotomizing cognition (masculine) and affect (feminine), while also being tainted by association with Freudian psychoanalysis.

The 1970s saw these old barriers erode, as social psychologists—especially symbolic interactionists of a variety of flavors—began to mine the emotional veins of self (Shott 1979), roles/identities (Burke and Reitzes 1981), situations (Heise 1977), structure (Kemper 1978), and performance/expectations (Hochschild 1979—for the sake of argument, I put Hochschild here even though she [so far as I know] nor I would really call her a symbolic interactionist). Over the course of the next few decades, the most important theoretical and empirical work explaining how and why solidarity between individuals, as well as between individuals and groups, is produced and maintained centered emotions (Collins 1988, 2004, Lawler 1992, Lawler et al. 2009, Turner 2007). These works drew from Durkheim and picked up threads of Goffman’s (1956, 1967) that “felt” more important than sometimes even Goffman let on, while often like Turner’s evolutionary work on emotions or Collin’s interaction ritual chains, borrowing from nascent brain science. But, beyond these, work in the sociology of emotions remained relatively the same as it had in the earliest innovative days while its contribution beyond the sociology of emotions was held back.

Omar and I (2020) have argued previously that one of the glaring problems is that the sociology of emotions remains rooted in the Cartesian separation of mind and body that haunts social science. Emotions are, generally speaking, treated as mediating variables—e.g., signals that one’s cognitive appraisal of a situation does not match the information received about the situation (Burke and Stets 2009, Robinson 2014)—or dependent variables—e.g., emotions are things to be managed through cognitive or linguistic work (Hochschild 1983). A third option, which also treats emotions as dependent variables, posits that relational patterns like superordinate-subordinate constrain emotions either by structural fiat (Kemper 1978) or via cultural beliefs about what incumbents in these positions should and can do (Ridgeway 2006). What if the next frontier for emotions scholarship considers emotions and affect (the sociocultural labels we learn and the neurophysiological/biological response to stimuli) as independent variables?

Some Important Facts

Studying an intrapersonal force or dynamic is not radical, as cultural sociology has largely accepted the fact that cognitive mechanisms are at the root of a theory of action (Vaisey 2009). Action is caused, at least in some way, shape, or form by cognition without doing violence to the social factors beyond the organism. Affect, however, remains on the sidelines despite several key facts.

Affect, as a motivating force of motor response, is older than cognition (Panskepp 1998). Evolution appears to have worked heavily on the subcortical emotion centers in mammals to encourage both the active pursuit of life-sustaining resources and the avoidance/aversion to painful life-destroying resources. And, given the exceptionally enlarged emotional architecture in our brains (in comparison to our closest cousins, gorillas and chimps), it is plausible to suggest emotions played an outsized role in humans developing and expanding their cultural repertoire for language, kinship, social organization, and so forth. In other words, emotions have been causal, historically speaking.
Undoubtedly, they are causal still today. First, the subcortical areas of the brain play an important role in memory (which is the root of a social self, for instance) (LeDoux 2000). Second, human brain imaging reveals that affect is not resigned to subcortical areas of the brain, but is actually deeply integrated with areas usually reserved for cognition (Davidson 2003). Emotions, then, can control our cognition and behavior, command it in some cases (e.g., a panic attack), and, at the very least coordinate with cognitive functions. Any theory of action that fails to account for affect is dubious is unable to realistically explain social or solitary behavior cognition (Blakemore and Vuilleumier 2017).
Consequently, the vast majority of social psychological processes such as comparison, appraisal, or reflection as well as the vast majority of “causal” explanations sociologists employ like values, interests, or ideology are inextricably tied to affect. If we can no more make a decision about which toothpaste to buy without affect then we should not be surprised that comparing and choosing social objects requires affect as well.
A point Lizardo and I make is that sociologists too often rely on cognitive appraisals of emotions, focusing on self-reports about valence (negative/positive), intensity, mood (longer lasting feelings), and psychologized language like loneliness. However, emotions are visceral, bodily things (Adolphs et al. 2003), and sociologists cannot only borrow from psychological research and methods on emotions.
Emotions may be “social constructs” in so far as a given group of people produce and reproduce labels for different bodily feelings experienced in different situations and which carry different meanings about the (a) appropriateness of those feelings, (b) expectations for their expression or suppression, and (c) “rules” about the duration and intensity of situationally-triggered emotions. However, much of this applies to either highly institutionalized settings, like formal ceremonies (e.g., funerals), where ritual participants approach the “center” of the community and the center must be protected from moral transgression (Shils 1975) or routinized encounters where interaction itself is ritualized (Goffman 1967, Collins 2004). But the need for rules and expectations implies that affect, if left to its own devices, can wreak havoc. Moreover, it ignores the diverse array of solitary actions that consume a significant portion of our daily lives (Cohen 2015), as well as ignores the fact that emotions are often things others “use” as means of affecting others’ feelings, thoughts, and actions (Thoits 1996).

Implications

If my argument that emotion’s scholarship has largely stalled is correct, but emotions are central to individual and social life, what are we to do? Of the myriad directions one could suggest, I will emphasize four that feel most consanguine to sociological inquiry.

The first suggestion picks up on a larger set of questions being raised recently by sociologists of youth and education around the largely abandoned conceptual process of socialization (Guhin et al. 2021). Once a central explanatory framework for understanding how a society “out there” could find its way inside each of us, socialization, like most bits and pieces of functionalism, was tossed out with the icky water. Prematurely, it would seem because it has not been replaced meaningfully, which has subsequently constrained a once-vibrant area of interest: child (and adolescent) development from a sociological perspective. Studying emotions and emotional socialization seems fruitful for so many reasons. For one, the rules and the patterning of emotions-behaviors is really only an adult trait. Childhood and adolescence is a period of unbridled affect, as anyone with a toddler knows well. How do we teach emotion regulation? How is this teaching process distributed across classic demographic and socioeconomic categories? How effective are social forces versus natural brain development for emotion regulation? What about teaching emotion dysregulation? Finally, the most interesting set of questions revolve around social emotions like guilt, shame, pride, and empathy (Decety and Howard 2013). At this point, sociology has ceded these culturally-coded emotions to psychological research, despite the unique methodological tools sociologists possess. For example, studying a high school’s ecosystem and status hierarchy seems an incredibly important pathway to understanding shame and pride, empathy and sympathy. Here, kids are learning, supposedly, the rules of the affectual game. Rather than reduce their experiences to DSM labels like anxiety or depression, why not expand the lens through which we view mundane and spectacular youth experiences?
A second related, implication centers on what I would call emotional styles or biographies. Sociologists are familiar with these sorts of metaphors, as groups have “styles” (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003) or biographies shaped by a collective memory. These sorts of styles or biographies shape many things like the ways parents and children interface with teachers and the educational system more generally (Lareau 2003). Research has suggested that different personality types appear to correlate with different affectual “styles,” which suggests there is something neurophysiological about doing emotions (Montag et al. 2021). My best guess is that there are social forces that play a role as well, but oddly, mainstream sociologists rarely bother to ask about emotions—likely a reflection of the ingrained Cartesian binary and not negligence on the part of social scientists.
Shifting gears, a third implication builds on the dual processes models approach (Vaisey 2009, Lizardo et al. 2016) and the elephant-rider metaphor. The metaphor itself is designed to explain how implicit cultural knowledge (the elephant) is largely responsible for the direction the rider takes. Deliberate, conscious action is possible but less impactful. But, what guides the elephant? To date, the answer has largely been deeply internalized values or nondeclarative knowledge, but how do we acquire those? How does the brain sort through the variety of potential ideas, scripts, frames, or schema available? And, once internalized, how does the brain choose between different schema or knowledge? Emotions are part of the answer, as affectually tagged memories are most intensely, most readily, and quickly recalled (Catani et al. 2013). But, the rider’s level of effort in directing the elephant is no less shaped by affect. In fact, emotions appear to have a dual process related to deliberate, intentional action as well (Blakemore and Vuilleumier 2017). On the one hand, internal, affectual sensations can become associated with patterned behavior, That is, recognizable affectual sensations signals “action readiness [in order to] prepare and guide the body for action” (p. 300). On the other hand, there are preconscious motivation systems that evolved to seek positive resources and avoid their negative counterparts. A child touches a hot stove and does not need their parents to teach them never to touch that stove again. Whenever they get near a stove they will become more alert and cautious. Of course, these aversions can become pathological (and no less conscious), leading to all sorts of strange phobias and disorders. The point, however, is that emotions are causal in two different ways for the rider, which seems an important addition to the dual-process models perspective, as does the consideration of how affect coordinates, controls, and sometimes commands the so-called automatic cognition that is the elephant.
The final implication speaks directly to the methodological tools we use. For the most part, emotions are measured through self-report (Stets and Carter 2012), which often conflate cognitive appraisals of emotions with emotions and affect. I would point the reader towards highly innovative efforts, like those found in Katz (1999), Collins’ (2004), and Scheff’s (1990) work, respectively. All of these use some form of ultra-micro methods that make employ audio-visual technology, careful observation, and in some cases, linguistic analyses. But, these are simply a starting point, sources of inspired analytic strategy. Ethnographic techniques are easily repurposed to include emotions and affect, as careful observation of bodily display, language, and situational cues are hallmarks of good ethnographic work (Summers-Effler 2009). Even users of quantitative methods should think more carefully about how to ask about emotions, even if that means including basic questions for the sake of explorative social science.

In short, emotions remain central to understanding and explaining how we think and act, but also remain mired in antiquated notions of mind-body, rationality-irrationality, and masculine-feminine. Moreover, old insecurities surrounding the differences between psychological and sociological social psychology—which are simply microcosms of broader insecurities writ large in sociology—have generally prohibited the conceptualization of emotions as independent, causal variables, delimiting the directions the sociology of emotion may go. The next frontier, arguably, is incorporating affective sciences into the study of emotions, and allowing brain science to speak to sociology and vice versa.

References

Abrutyn, Seth and Omar Lizardo. 2020. “Grief, Care, and Play: Theorizing the Affective Roots of the Social Self.” Advances in Group Processes 37:79-108.

Adolphs, Ralph, Daniel Tranel and Antonio R. Damasio. 2003. “Dissociable Neural Systems for Recognizing Emotions.” Brain and Cognition 52:61-69.

Blakemore, Rebekah L. and Patrik Vuilleumier. 2017. “An Emotional Call to Action: Integrating Affective Neuroscience in Models of Motor Control.” Emotion Review 9(4):299-309.

Burke, Peter J. and Donald C. Reitzes. 1981. “The Link between Identities and Role Performance.” Social Psychology Quarterly 44(2):83-92.

Burke, Peter J. and Jan E. Stets. 2009. Identity Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Catani, Marco, Flavio Dell’Acqua and Michel Thiebaut De Schotten. 2013. “A Revised Limbic System Model for Memory, Emotion and Behaviour.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 37(8):1724-37.

Cohen, Ira J. 2015. Solitary Action: Acting on Our Own in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Collins, Randall. 1988. “The Micro Contribution to Macro Sociology.” Sociological Theory 6(2):242-53.

—. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Damasio, Antonio. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books.

Davidson, Richard J. 2003. “Seven Sins in the Study of Emotion: Correctives from Affective Neuroscience.” Brain and Cognition 52:129-32.

Decety, Jean and Lauren H. Howard. 2013. “The Role of Affect in the Neurodevelopment of Morality.” Child Development Perspectives 7(1):49-54.

DiMaggio, Paul. 1997. “Culture and Cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23:268-87.

Eliasoph, Nina and Paul Lichterman. 2003. “Culture in Interaction.” American Journal of Sociology 108(4):735-94.

Goffman, Erving. 1956. “Embarrassment and Social Organization.” American Journal of Sociology 22(3):264-71.

—. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Pantheon Books.

Guhin, Jeff, Jessica McCrory Calacro and Cynthia Miller-Idriss. 2021. “Whatever Happened to Socialization?”. Annual Review of Sociology 47:109-29.

Heise, David. 1977. “Social Action as the Control of Affect.” Behavioral Sciences 22(3):163-77.

Hochschild, Arlie. 1979. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85(3):551-72.

—. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Katz, Jack. 1999. How Emotions Work. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Kemper, Theodore. 1978. A Social Interactional Theory of Emotions. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lawler, Edward J. 1992. “Affective Attachments to Nested Groups: Choice-Process Theory.” American Sociological Review 57(3):327-39.

Lawler, Edward J., Shane Thye and Jeongkoo Yoon. 2009. Social Commitments in a Depersonalized World. New York: Russell Sage.

LeDoux, Joseph. 2000. “Cognitive-Emotional Interactions: Listening to the Brain.” Pp. 129-55 in Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion, edited by R. D. Lane and L. Nadel. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lizardo, Omar, Robert Mowry, Brandon Sepulvado, Dustin S. Stoltz, Marshall A. Taylor, Justin Van Ness and Michael Wood. 2016. “What Are Dual Process Models? Implications for Cultural Analysis in Sociology.” Sociological Theory 34(4):287-310.

Montag, Christian, Jon D. Elhai and Kenneth L. Davis. 2021. “A Comprehensive Review of Studies Using the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales in the Psychological and Psychiatric Sciences.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 125:160-67.

Panskepp, Jaak. 1998. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ridgeway, Cecilia L. 2006. “Expectation States Theory and Emotion.” Pp. 374-67 in Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions, edited by J. E. Stets and J. H. Turner. New York: Springer.

Robinson, Dawn, T. 2014. “The Role of Cultural Meanings and Situated Interaction in Shaping Emotion.” Emotion Review 8(3):189-95.

Scheff, Thomas. 1990. Microsociology: Discourse, Emotion and Social Structure. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Shils, Edward. 1975. “Ritual and Crisis.” Pp. 153-63 in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology, edited by E. Shils. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shott, Susan. 1979. “Emotion and Social Life: A Symbolic Interactionist Analysis.” American Journal of Sociology 84(6):1317-34.

Stets, Jan E. and Michael J. Carter. 2012. “A Theory of the Self for the Sociology of Morality.” American Sociological Review 77(1):120-40.

Summers-Effler, Erika. 2009. Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Thoits, Peggy A. 1996. “Managing the Emotions of Others.” Symbolic Interaction 19(2):85-109.

Turner, Jonathan H. 2007. Human Emotions: A Sociological Theory. New York: Routledge.

Turner, Jonathan H. and Jan E. Stets, eds. 2006. Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions. New York: Springer.

Vaisey, Stephen. 2009. “Motivation and Justification: A Dual Process Model of Culture in Action.” American Journal of Sociology 114(+):1675-715.

Cultural Cognition in Time, from Memory to Imagination

Over the past few years, I have been thinking about the concept of imagination. It emerged out of my efforts to understand the generational change in public opinion about same-sex marriage in the U.S. when it became clear to me that young and old simply imagined homosexuality and same-sex marriage in different ways [see also three essential readings on the imagination: (Appadurai 1996; Orgad 2012; Strauss 2006)]. It wasn’t that the two cohorts disagreed about the issue; it’s that they couldn’t even understand each other. I realized that the imagination represents an implicit domain of political cognition that by-and-large goes unrecognized and unacknowledged by people when they talk to each other, while nonetheless structuring the debate in a way that is similar to framing.[1] I published my initial argument here (No paywall!), and have elaborated on this theory of imagination in my recent book (Definitely paywall!).

One thing that sets my view of the imagination apart from the ways that some other social scientists invoke the concept is that I see an important connection with the concept of collective memory. In many usages (e.g. Castoriadis 1987; Taylor 2002), the idea of the social imagination or the social imaginary is so broad that it most closely approximates the concept of culture—that incomprehensible whole that signifies everything and nothing all at the same time (Strauss makes this critique effectively). By contrast, I think the argument that Olick (1999) makes for collective memory fits well with Strauss’ critique of the social imaginary: we need a dual, individualist-collectivist theory of the imagination, one that anchors the cultural and cognitive versions of the concept in each other. Simply put, minds imagine things just like minds remember things, but the resources and the effects of imagination and memory are cultural and social.

Certainly, the cognitive process of remembering is distinguished in part by its retrospective temporal horizon, and in the empirical work of many sociologists (Baiocchi et al. 2014; Perrin 2006), the imagination’s temporal horizon is future-oriented: actions that we could take to solve a problem, or visions of a better society. Thus, it makes some sense (from a phenomenological perspective, at least) that we can think of collective memory and the social imagination as cultural-cognitive processes that occupy different spots on a temporal continuum.

However, I’d like to make the case that the social imagination is not just future-oriented, but present-oriented. I will also make the case that collective memory may be fruitfully theorized as the past-oriented variant of the social imagination. The ultimate goal of this essay is to persuade sociologists that the imagination is something of a master cultural-cognitive process, with variants that correspond to different phenomenological time horizons, and that is influenced by positive and negative socio-emotional forces.

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In purely psychological terms, the imagination is the mind’s capacity to construct a mental image of a non-present phenomenon. Whether past-, present-, or future-oriented, and whether the imagined entity is real (horse) or unreal (unicorn), the cognitive process is essentially the same. Sociologically speaking, however, different imaginations have different effects: individuals’ imaginations of stereotypical and counter-stereotypical people will either reinforce or attenuate prejudicial attitudes and implicit biases (Blair, Ma and Lenton 2001; Slusher and Anderson 1987). Thus, there are political consequences to people’s imaginations: cultivating one’s capacity to produce (and act on) counter-stereotypic mental images may be an effective strategy for combatting implicit racism, sexism, and other forms of enduring prejudice.

As a sociological process, the social imagination is the process that shapes the patterns of associations that define cultural schemas, or the cultural content of a schema. In other words, the social imagination is the cultural-cognitive process that govern the creation, maintenance, and deconstruction of stereotypes, prototypes, categories, and concepts of all kinds. Certainly, other (material, structural, political, whatever) factors are involved in this process, too—like oppression, socialization, etc.—but the social imagination is the culture-cognition nexus. As Orgad (2012) shows, the mass media are one of the most critical institutions involved in contests of the social imagination. In this view, media consumption improves, not reduces, our capacity to imagine because it provides us with many of the fundamental resources for producing mental images. If you combine this understanding of the social imagination with the psychological research describe above, we can explain why stereotypical and counter-stereotypical media representations are so important: media representations can create, maintain, change, or destroy the cultural associations that define different groups of people in the public mind.

As far as I’ve read, Glaeser’s (2011) Political Epistemicsis one of the master treatises on the social imagination, though he doesn’t put it in those terms. Glaeser uses “understanding” to refer to this realm of cultural-cognition, and he uses the term to refer to both the process and its outcome. On page 10, Glaeser begins his definition of understanding by characterizing it as a process: “Understanding is a process of orientation…”; however, one page earlier, Glaeser writes of it as an achievement, or outcome: “understanding is achieved in a process of orientation…” My own view is that the imagination is this process of orientation that produces understandings. This follows Kant (1929), who, in Critique of Pure Reason, argues that the “transcendental power of imagination” is the fundamental synthetic capacity of mind that combines perception and the cultural categories of understanding, thus structuring all human knowledge and experience.

If we keep this Kantian philosophy of the imagination at the center of our thinking, we might also conceive of memory as another species of imagination: one in which the original sensory perception took place in some bygone time and which is continually brought to life in mental images in the present by synthesizing those past perceptions with current mental structures (hence, the well-known power of our memories to change over time and for our present biography, self-identity, and social context to shape our memories into something other than what actually happened).

In sum, the imagination can be future-oriented (our ability to imagine possible future actions or solutions to social problems), present-oriented (our schemas, stereotypes, and understandings), or past-oriented (our memories).

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Beyond distinguishing these three different forms of imagination, as classifed by their temporal horizon, we should differentiate between real and fantastical variants of each. Since a simple distinction between real/correct and unreal/incorrect versions of a mental image is philosophically untenable (even impossible, in the case of future-oriented mental images—things that have not yet occurred), I would argue that any given mental image should be conceived as existing on a continuum, whose polar ends represent ideal-typical, emotion-driven fantasies that “pull” our imagination in either direction. In this rendering, the ideal-typical end points are the only points on the continuum that could be labeled as the purely unreal; actually existing mental images would fall somewhere on the continuum and whose degree of “realness” is variable and relationally determined.

The point of establishing this continuum is not to determine whether one imagined mental image is more correct than another in some absolute sense, but rather to begin to discern the socio-emotional forces that are inevitably involved in the process of imagination and the sociological consequences of producing various kinds of mental images. For example, the prevalence of handgun ownership and attitudes about gun rights in the U.S. must certainly take into account the fear-driven imagination that a criminal who is waiting to rob and murder you is hiding behind every corn stalk in the state of Iowa. Whether past-, present-, or future-oriented, our mental images of reality are constructed within a socio-emotional landscape; as social scientists, it behooves us to think seriously about those landscapes, how they affect our imaginations, and how social action ultimately makes sense to the actors who imagine the world as they do.

Thus, we have three different continuums for the social imagination—one for each temporal horizon—in which mental images are constructed. The mental image’s location on the continuum is influenced by the extent to which positive and negative emotional circumstances influence the process of imagination.

Future-Oriented Imagination: The Domain of Possibility

Let’s take the domain of future-oriented imagination first: the domain of possibility. The social imagination of the possible is inevitably informed by the emotions of fear and hope and situated in relation to social conditions of dystopia and utopia. Karen Cerulo (2008) has already written on the cognitive and cultural dynamics of this domain. Another notable example of the sociology of possibility is Erik Olin Wright’s “Real Utopias” research program (e.g., Wright 2013), which promises a sociology of liberation if we take it seriously.

Present-Oriented Imagination: The Domain of Understanding

The social imagination of the present happens in the domain of understanding. As mentioned above, Glaeser’s Political Epistemics is the essential read on how processes of validation reinforce and challenge existing understandings. Glaeser labels these types of validation as recognition, resonance, and corroboration. In addition to them being cognitive, cultural, and social in nature, they are also emotional. The present-oriented process of imagination is anchored by two fantastical emotional tendencies: the extreme cynical denial of reality that we might call delusion, and the extreme polyannaish denial of reality that we might call naiveté. All understandings and misunderstandings can be conceived in terms of their socio-emotional tenor, as well as in their cognitive, cultural, and social terms.

Past-Oriented Imagination: The Domain of Memory

Finally, turning to the domain of memory, our imaginary reconstructions of past events are influenced by the socio-emotional poles of denial of the negative and romanticization of the positive. The unreal social recollections driven by these emotions are those of erasure and nostalgia: in its extreme forms, collective memory has the potential to totally eliminate the past or construct a fantasy past that never existed. One classic sociological illustration of the importance of nostalgia is, of course, Stephanie Coontz’s The Way We Never Were (1992); this example shows clearly how the romanticization of the past is not purely cognitive or cultural, but structured by institutional power relations like those that reinforce patriarchy. In a parallel (maybe mutually constitutive) way, structures of oppression contribute to the ongoing erasure of women, people of color, and the working class from history in part because of how the socio-emotional consequences of these structures lead to us to produce distorted imaginations of the past.

Obviously, these are just simple thumb-nail sketches, but I believe that understanding the social imagination in its various temporal horizons is important, not just for explaining social action (in the interpretive, symbolic interactionist vein) but also for creating social change. Positive and negative emotions are powerful forces, and the terms on which people produce their imaginations of the world will also affect how they act in that world. Like the old idea of cognitive liberation (McAdam 1982) implies, how we imagine the world can determine whether we mobilize for justice or surrender to despair. The social imagination is very much like other social institutions; it is a cultural entity in which past, present, and future intersect. Sociology should devote some attention to this institution as we do to the others.

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Baiocchi, Gianpaolo, Elizabeth A. Bennett, Alissa Cordner, Peter Taylor Klein, and Stephanie Savell. 2014. The Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Blair, Irene V., Jennifer E. Ma, and Alison P. Lenton. 2001. “Imagining Stereotypes Away: The Moderation of Implicit Stereotypes through Mental Imagery.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81 (5): 828-841.

Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cerulo, Karen A. 2008. Never Saw it Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Coontz, Stephanie. 1992. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books.

Glaeser, Andreas. 2011. Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 1929. Critique of Pure Reason. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

McAdam, Doug. 1982. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nelson, Thomas E., Rosalee A. Clawson, and Zoe M. Oxley. 1997. “Media Framing of a Civil Liberties Conflict and its Effects on Tolerance.” American Political Science Review, 91 (3): 567-583.

Olick, Jeffrey K. 1999. “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures.” Sociological Theory, 17 (3): 333-348.

Orgad, Shani. 2012. Media Representation and the Global Imagination. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Perrin, Andrew J. 2006. Citizen Speak: The Democratic Imagination in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Slusher, Morgan P., and Craig A. Anderson. 1987. “When Reality Monitoring Fails: The Role of Imagination in Stereotype Maintenance.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52 (4): 653-662.

Strauss, Claudia. 2006. “The Imaginary.” Anthropological Theory, 6 (3): 322-344.

Taylor, Charles. 2002. “Modern Social Imaginaries.” Public Culture, 14 (1): 91-124.

Wright, Erik Olin. 2013. “Transforming Capitalism Through Real Utopias.” American Sociological Review, 78 (1): 1-25.

[1] Framing and imagination are different concepts, and it is important to distinguish between them. Framing is a communicative process with cognitive effects, while the imagination is fundamentally a cognitive process, albeit with cultural influences. Setting that difference aside, though, and focusing purely on the sociological level of each concept, the social imagination is the process that shapes the pattern of associations that define cultural schemas, while framing is the process that shapes explicit cognition (for more on how framing works through deliberate, rather than automatic processing, see Nelson, Thomas E., Rosalee A. Clawson, and Zoe M. Oxley. 1997. “Media Framing of a Civil Liberties Conflict and its Effects on Tolerance.” American Political Science Review91 (3): 567-583.)

Durkheimian Sociology and its Discontents, Part II: Why Culture, Social Psychology, & Emotions Matter to Suicide

In a previous post, I argued that despite its importance and “classical” status, sociologists have not contributed to the study of suicide as much as they could. While Anna Mueller and I have yet to posit a general or formal theoretical statement on suicide, in this post, I attempt to distill the basic theoretical ideas we’ve been developing for the last five years. Our work began as an effort to “test” Durkheim (Abrutyn and Mueller 2014; Mueller and Abrutyn 2015), but, very rapidly, our first quantitative studies led us to begin writing the first of four theoretical pieces formalizing Durkheim’s arch nemesis’, Gabriel Tarde’s theory of contagion (Abrutyn and Mueller 2014a). We eventually concluded that the data we needed did not exist, and through some luck, we found a field site to begin qualitatively assessing our evolving sociological view of suicide (Mueller and Abrutyn 2016). This fieldwork led to three other theoretical pieces that build on and go far beyond the Tarde piece to emphasize how cultural sociology, social psychological, and emotions shape suicidality (Abrutyn and Mueller 2014b, 2016, 2018)—particularly diffusion and clustering.

Cultural Foundations

In the 1960s, Jack Douglas (1970) offered an important critique of the conventional Durkheimian approach to suicide, arguing that suicide statistics were questionable due to various professional and personal issues surrounding medical examiner’s and coroner’s work. His larger point was that phenomenological meanings mattered more than suicide rates. About a decade later, David Phillips (1974) presented compelling evidence that audiences exposed to media reporting of suicide were at a risk of temporary spikes in suicide rates—e.g., U.S. and British suicide rates jumped 13% and 10%, respectively, following publicization of Marilyn Monroe’s suicide. We argue that there are important lessons gleaned from these two divergences from classic Durkheimian sociology.

First, meanings matter. Meanings are located in (1) general societal schema available to most people, (2) localized cultural codes that draw from and refract these general schema to make sense of the actual experiences of group of people inhabiting a delimited temporal and geographic space, and (3) the idiosyncratic schema any person in that group possesses, built from their own biography and experiences. A small, but growing body of historical (Barbagli 2015), anthropological (cf. Chua 2014; Stevenson 2014), and cultural psychological (Canetto 2012) research confirms this. For instance, some research on Canadian indigenous communities, where the suicide rate can be six times that of the Canadian average, found that youth in one community explain their own suicidality as a means of belonging (Niezen 2009); a counterintuitive finding for sociologists who think of integration as healthy. Nevertheless, these studies stop short of moving beyond broad-stroke assessments of culture. Meanings are, after all made real, embodied, and crystallized in social relationships; and, thus, social relationships—as Durkheim argued, but not quite how he imagined—matter too.

The Meaning and Meaningfulness of Social Relationships

The connection between social relationships and suicide, as studies using network principles have shown, has a structural side (Bearman 1991; Pescosolido 1994; Baller and Richardson 2009), yet they are eminently cultural as well in form and content. They are the social units in which cultural meanings emerge, spread, become available/accessible/applicable, and are stored.

Not surprisingly, and contrary to epidemiological and psychological accounts that favor a “disease” model approach to suicide “contagion,” our work has shown that network ties are only one factor, while having a friend tell you about their suicidality can lead you to develop new suicidal thoughts (Mueller and Abrutyn 2015); and in the case of girls, new suicidal behaviors. At the relational level, the general and local cultural mechanisms are further refracted. The direct, reciprocal nature of these ties, make culture real, imbuing it with affect (Lawler 2002). This increases the odds that codes will be internalized and integrated with existing understandings of suicide, and, ultimately, mobilized in how people interpret events or situations, make sense of their own problems, and consider options for resolving said problems. In particular, it is the emotional dimension of culture and social relationships that adds the final ingredient to my vision of the future of the sociology of suicide.

The Final Ingredient: Emotions

Since the 1970s, sociologists of emotions—drawing from Cooley’s insights—have argued that social emotions like shame, guilt, or pride act as powerful social forces (cf. Turner 2007 for a review). Externally, social emotions are used as weapons to control others behavior, ranging from public degradation ceremonies used to humiliate and restore order to mundane rituals of deference and demeanor to gossip. The self is a social construct in so far as the primary groups we are socialized in provide meanings that come to make up our (1) “self-construct” or “global” sense of self. Our self is our most cherished possession as it provides a sense of anchorage across social situations. As we develop new meanings anchored in (2) relationships between specific others (role identity), (3) membership in various collectives (group identity), and (4) status characteristics that (a) identify us as belonging to one or more categorical unit (age, race, sex, occupation) and, therefore, (b) obligate or expect us to perform in certain ways and receive certain amounts of rewards and deference (social identity), meanings emerge and are grafted onto our self-concept or become situationally activated.

Social emotions are an evolutionary adaptation (cf. Turner 2007; Tracy et al. 2007). While all animals feel anger (fight) and fear (flight), and mammals also feel various degrees of sadness and happiness, shame and pride seem uniquely human because, as the Adam and Eve story teaches us or our own children’s ease with nudity shows to us, the meanings necessary for eliciting them must be learned. That is because they involve imagining what others, especially significant others, think of us; not just our behavior, but our cherished self. Pride means we’ve lived up to the imagined (and, they are often imagined in so far as they are not accurate reflections of) expectations and obligations of those we care about. Shame is the opposite: we are a failure, contemptuous in the eyes of others, deficient, and, even, polluting. Clinical research finds shame as particularly painful, often verbalized in expressions of feeling small, wanting to hide, and, other phrases like “tear my skin off” or “mortified” (Lewis 1974; Retzinger 1991).

Mortification refers to the death of the self; and, thus, shame is the signal that the self is dying, decaying, or, with chronic shame among violent prisoners, dead (cf. Gilligan 2001). Emotions are the bridge between the structural and cultural milieus we live in and the identities that anchor us in relationships. They saturate cultural meanings such that some become more relevant and essential to our identity (LeDoux 2000). Our memory and, therefore, biography is impossible without emotions, as events “tagged” with more intense emotions are more easily recalled than those that did not elicit intense, long-lasting feelings (Franks 2006). It stands to reason that the next frontier in a sociology of suicide that takes culture and microsociology seriously is one that also mixes social emotions into the theoretical “pot.”

In this spirit, Part III will shed light on where the sociological study of suicide can and should go if we are to reclaim our seat at the table in offering understanding and explanation. And, for becoming truly public in contributing to the prevention of suicide and in post-vention efforts – or those that seek to work with (individual or collective) survivors in the aftermath of a suicide.

Durkheimian Sociology and its Discontents: Why its Time for a New Sociology of Suicide

Since Durkheim showed that certain social structural factors, external to the individual, had a strong positive relationship to variation in suicide rates, sociologists have maintained the argument that suicide is caused by social forces and, therefore, is a phenomenon squarely in the domain of sociology. Yet, western medical professionals (Marsh 2010) and the average person (Lake et al. 2013) continue to “explain” suicidality mainly via psychological factors; primarily mental illness or disorder, or by cognitive appraisals favored by psychology and psychiatry, like depression, burdensomeness, and hopelessness (Cavanaugh et al. 2003).

As is often the case with sociology, sociologists have done little to argue for the value of their science. Since 1980, sociology has published the second fewest amount of studies (405) on suicide; and it’s not even close (psychiatry has published 9951, while molecular biology (!) has produced 1316) (Stack and Bowman 2012:4). When sociologists study suicide, they overwhelmingly favor retesting Durkheim’s 19^th century theses in order to weigh in on the classic’s continued value, as journals love papers that use new data or analytic strategies to test old, foundational ideas (Wray et al. 2011). This does little to help advance the sociological science of suicide and support sociology’s contribution to understanding, explaining, or preventing suicide.

Nevertheless, suicide remains an important phenomenon for sociology. Not only does it constitute a serious social problem—perhaps more urgent today than in Durkheim’s day—it also speaks to theoretical questions central to cultural sociology; particularly one trying to integrate contributions from the cognitive social sciences.

Because suicide is a social act, replete with meanings about why people die by suicide and who we expect to die by suicide, it is fair to ask how people come to acquire proscriptive suicide meanings that make them more vulnerable to suicidality? Of equal importance, are questions about how attitudes become actions: myriad studies show that while ideation is a risk factor for attempting suicide the two are not neatly linked, as most ideators will never attempt suicide (Klonsky and May 2015).

In short, studying suicide presents opportunities for expanding how sociology makes sense of human behavior because it is a performance that evokes meaning in both the actor and her intended/unintended audience. In most cases, the actor, herself, must overcome the severest of prohibitions, ranging from biogenetic safeguards to informal norms and formal laws. And yet, suicide still occurs; it tends to cluster in certain physical and temporal spaces (Haw et al. 2013; Niedzwiedz et al. 2014); and, its diffusion from one person to the next has been empirically verified for nearly five decades, but remains almost completely unexamined in sociology (for exceptions, see my work with Anna Mueller [Abrutyn and Mueller 2014; Mueller and Abrutyn 2015; Mueller et al. 2014], in addition to Baller and Richardson 2002, 2009; Bjarnason 1994).

A follow-up post will offer a new framework setting up what Anna and I have argued and our work suggests as the agenda for a reinvigorated sociological science of suicide. This framework is synthetic and includes leveraging the powerful insights of cultural sociology, social psychology, and, especially, the sociology of emotions. At various points, these subfields intersect in ways that provide pathways for sociology reclaiming its place at the table for explaining suicide and contributing to its prevention. Moreover, because of both the unique and shared qualities suicide has with any other social behavior, it is hopeful that this move towards synthesis will compliment the current debates and discussions surrounding why people feel, think and do what they do.

To Feel or Not to Feel? That is No Longer the Question

It is highly likely that most readers recall learning about Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who, in 1848, had the misfortune of having a 3.5 inch, 13+ lb. metal rod (with a diameter of 1 ¼ inches) impale him. The rod went through his open mouth, behind his left eye, and out of his skull. What was exceptional in all of this, was that it neither exited his skull completely nor did he die from this injury for 12 years! Considering the state of medical knowledge and technique, this was a rather incredible and improbable survival, and I would bet that is what most people remember about his story.

Yet, for a theorist and sociologist, there is much, much more to this anecdote than the sensational. His memory, for instance, was discernibly unaffected, but the injury, by accounts of both former employers and professional “trained” in the “psychology” of yore, had somehow peeled back the protective human layers of socialization. That is, he was described as vacillating between his “intellectual faculties” and “animal propensities”; his behavior and language could be “coarse,” “vulgar,” and offensive to any “decent” people he might encounter. In spite of this, he spent seven of the 12 years left of his life in Chile, working as a long-distance stagecoach driver; which, in 1852, would have demanded a lot of cognitive skills given the temporal and physical and social demands. He was clearly successful.

What can we learn from this case? On the surface, probably not much. A debate between contemporary neuroscientists centers on how much we can draw from MRIs of a skull with no direct empirical evidence. Gage’s former employers may have maligned his reputation to protect their financial interests; doctors of the day were rarely scientific in their orientation or beholden to a professional association backed by the force of legislation; and, psychology was barely in its infancy. Nonetheless, it is not incorrect to say that damaging the brain, in most cases, leads to changes in behavior and personality.

But, what does Gage have to do with sociology and cognition? His case and others that would follow in the early 20^th century inspired a body of research examining brain lesions, particularly the prefontal lobe, which is responsible for rational decision-making. For instance, in one of many experiments, Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, and Anderson (1994) provided “normals” and patients with a $2000 loan, and provided them with four decks of cards and some basic instructions: don’t lose money, but make $$ if possible. Turning a card in pile A or B rewarded $100 while C and D only $50. The catch: some cards in A and B, unbeknownst to the player, demanded a sudden high payment (e.g., $1250), while C and D, on occasion, only asked for small, modest payments (e.g., $100). Normals began by sampling all the decks, showing preferences for A and B at first, but gradually learning that C and D are the best bets. Those with damaged brains, however, started the same way but did not switch to C and D, no matter how many times they bankrupted.

From a series of follow up experiments meant to tease out specific hypotheses about rewards and punishments, and his own clinical work with lesion patients, Antonio Damasio (1995) cogently posited—at the time—a revolutionary thesis: reasoning and rationality are inextricably entwined with emotions. The classic Cartesian model of brain v. soul that undergirds seemingly false (but commonly, often unconsciously, accepted) dichotomies like rationality v. irrationality, cognition v. emotion collapses under the weight of empirical evidence.

This seems eminently sensible. Marketers draw on psychology to appeal not only to our cool rationality, but to our feelings and sentiments. We choose Crest or Colgate, Ford or Toyota, and so forth based on emotions no matter how much “instrumentality” we employ in the decision-making process (see, for example, Camerer 2007). These, of course, are mundane, arbitrary decisions; imagine if we extend this thesis to much more complex decisions, like choosing a partner, a reciprocal gift, or to make amends. It seems true that we can only make big decisions when our brain’s neural systems are linked up and our emotion centers are communicating with various other aspects of our brain (LeDoux 2000).

So, for instance, as information enters the brain it is routed to the hippocampus where it is converted into memories and indexed as either semantic or episodic. The former are general “facts” about things, people, events, and so forth that escape temporality, whereas the latter are person-specific memories with time-stamps. Our self, then, is rooted in memories that are both generalized and specific. At the same time, this information is fed into the amygdala and tagged with a valence, or level of intensity, making them more or less relevant to one’s self—that is, more intensely tagged memories are easier and more likely to be recalled. And, if the most self-relevant information comes from interactions with significant others, then the most basic unit of social organization – the human relationship – is anchored in affective moorings (Lawler et al. 2008; Cozolino 2014).

In particular, knowledge about the social self (semantic autobiographical knowledge), formed in episodes, tagged with powerful affect, and confirmed or activated frequently in encounters, comes to be generalized too, but is differentiated from the other two types in that it activates normally distinct places in the brain they do—that is, it remains rooted in the emotion centers and is what makes our global sense of self perceived as stable and consistent over longer durations and, moreover, drenches appraisals of our own actions as well as others in affect (Turner 2007). This also means, using more familiar sociological terms, goal setting, strategizing, habit, decision-making, selfing and minding are saturated with emotions (Franks 2006).

Memory works because of emotions; our senses work because of emotions; the construction, maintenance, alteration, and destruction of self, depend on our brain’s emotional neuroarchitecture as much as on the social environment’s input. Thus, if we are to take cognitive science seriously, as sociologists, then we must also take seriously the role emotions play in action and organization.