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Sociology of Emotions Newsletter

Hello everyone and welcome back! Before we get into plans for the up-coming year - including new officers and com-mittees, next year’s ASA program, and two pro-posed changes to the bylaws - I want to ex-press my gratitude to Daniel Shank for continu-ing his excellent work as the section newsletter editor. Daniel is a recent PhD from the Univer-sity of Georgia and a current postdoc at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. As those of you who have been newsletter editor in the past (and for those of you have turned the hon-or down but may be considering it in the future) the news-letter is literally the heartbeat of the section. As Daniel continues his second year as Newsletter Editor, he has a lot of great ideas, including continuing the always-popular “What’s On Your Bookshelf?” and book reviews. He also has a number of new ideas about showcasing recent pub-lications and gathering resources so that it’s easier for us, as scholars interested in emotion, to keep track of just what emotions scholarship is being published and im-portantly, where. Although Daniel has a lot of systems in

place following his first superlative year as newsletter editor, he still needs content. So I encourage you to send in your stuff and when he sends out bulk requests or personalized emails: Say Yes! Say yes to book reviews, to essays, and whatever else you have on your mind as it relates to section business. I’d also like to thank Jessica Leveto, who just accepted a tenure track position at Kent State University Ashtabula (Congratulations, Jessica!) for her continued work as Webmaster and Social Media Manag-

er. In addition to reviving and maintaining our website (http://www2.asanet.org/Emotions/index.html), Jessica continues to usher the section into the 21st century, ahead, I might add, of many other sections within the ASA. If you haven’t already, Like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SocEmotions) and follow us on Twit-ter (http://www.twitter.com/SocEmotions) to keep up all the latest news between newsletters. Finally, I would also like to take this opportunity to thank last year’s officers and committee members, includ-ing my predecessor, Robin Simon, for their dedicated and outstanding work on behalf of the section. Grow The Membership? Every year the question always arises: Do we grow the membership or do we continue as we are - a vi-brant, yet small section? As of the time of this writing, the official count for section membership is 263, which is only slightly lower than it was this time last year, and not that far away from the magical 300, which would give us more money from ASA and an additional paper session on the schedule. Because we’re facing three years of being allot-ted only two sessions (including the business meeting and council meeting), Jordan Brown (jbrown11@luc.edu), Loy-ola University, and I have started a membership drive. In an email that was sent to the membership we asked teaching members to 1) encourage their graduate students to join or 2) donate money so that we could start a graduate student membership fund in order to fund inter-ested graduate students who may find the membership fee to be prohibitively expensive. I am happy to say that within four hours of that email, one of our members, who has chosen to remain anonymous, donated $300 in order to get that fund off of the ground. So, if you have graduate students to whom you would like to offer a paid member-ship, we have the funds to cover them. All you have to do is send their name and their ASAID number to our intrepid

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Fall 2012 Newsletter Volume 26, Number 3

Newsletter Content Daniel Shank,

University of Alabama at Birmingham

FROM THE CHAIR’S DESK ............ 1-3

SECTION OFFICERS ....................... 2

COMMITTEE MEMBERS ................... 4

ASA 2013 PROGRAM .................... 4

WHAT’S ON YOUR BOOKSHELF? (JENNIFER PIERCE) ........................ 4

YOUR VOTE (THEODORE KEMPER) . 5

NEW CITES: BOOKS ....................... 6

NEW CITES: ARTICLES ...................................................... 6

CALL FOR 2013 EMOTIONS SECTION AWARDS .................. 6

TESTING ELIAS’S “INVISIBLE SHAME” PROPOSITION (THOMAS SCHEFF)........................................................................ 7-8

ASA DENVER PHOTOS: MEETING AND AWARDS ................ 9

CONGRATULATIONS .......................................................... 9

Content for Spring Newsletter Deadline: Feb 15, 2013

Email Daniel at: dbshank@uab.edu

From the Chair’s Desk Kathryn Lively, Dartmouth College

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Sociology of Emotions Newsletter

Secretary Treasurer, Amy Wilkins (amy.wilkins@colorado.edu). If you have any other sug-gestions regarding hitting the magic 300 membership mark please contact Jordan or me. Again, given that we’re looking at three years of one session (that’s only 4 papers, folks!), the amount of research being done on emotions within the section (not to mention the discipline), and the fact that we’re only 37 people away, this is as good a time as any to attempt to break that barrier, hopefully for good. Our Members Rock Building on Robin’s vision of a more inclusive sec-tion, I, too, attempted to tap into some new blood while forming committees for 2012-2013. I must admit that after hearing stories from other chairs about having to wheedle their members to participate, I was thrilled to find willing and ready participation. Indeed, even after I had the com-mittees finalized, I still had additional people asking how they could get involved. (Indeed, a brand new member just sent me an email asking about the opportunities to do book reviews; See? A more generous, exciting, and exu-berant group of scholars I have yet to find!) The list of sec-tion officers and committee members for the up-coming year appears at the bottom of this page and on page 4 respectively. Also, in the newsletter, you’ll find a call for nominations for the 2013 Graduate Student Paper Award and Recent Contribution Award (page 6). Please remem-ber to nominate your students, professors, and col-leagues! And, if push comes to shove, feel free to nomi-nate yourself! 2013 Program So far, the bulk of my work as Section Chair has gone to planning the 2013 Program (page 4). The pro-gram is in excellent shape and our sessions will hopefully reflect the full range of substantive, theoretical, and meth-odological expertise for which our section is known. Clare

Stacey (Kent State) will be organizing our single paper session, Emotions and Inequality and I have put together an invited session for the Chair’s Hour that will highlight just a small sample of new and cutting-edge scholarship being done by our section’s graduate students, our future senior colleagues. We’re also co-sponsoring a roundtable session with Social Psychology; Scott Savage (UC-Riverside) is organizing the roundtables. Consider The Roundtables! It’s worth noting that last year we did not have any emotions submissions to the roundtables. I often think that roundtables get a bad rap - that we somehow think that they’re not as prestigious or as exciting as panels. I actu-ally disagree. Roundtables are their own thing and they’re a great place to present new ideas and to get real feed-back - dialogue level feedback, as opposed to the rapid fire questions you often encounter at panels. So I encour-age you to submit your work to the roundtables as well as to the panel organizer; we have the tables, let’s fill them up. Encourage your students and your colleagues to con-sider the roundtables. Consider them yourself! How cool would it be for four or five of you to submit along a particu-lar theme and use the roundtable time as an opportunity to hash out common ideas? It seems like every year someone’s complaining about not having enough ses-sions; if that’s truly a concern, then it’s a shame to let a resource like the roundtables go by untapped. My rant on roundtables aside, I am very apprecia-tive for Clare Stacey and Scott Savage for organizing. The Chair’s Hour I am also grateful - and truth be told, very proud - of the four graduate students who have graciously agreed to talk about their own research and their future contribu-tions to the substantive area of emotion in a space usually reserved for the most senior scholars in the section. In a true spirit of passing the baton on to the next generation of

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Emotions Section Officers

Chair Kathryn Lively Dartmouth College Kathryn.J.Lively@Dartmouth.edu

Chair Elect \ Council Jody Clay-Warner University of Georgia jclayw@uga.edu

Past Chair Robin Simon Wake Forest University simonr@wfu.edu

Council Lisa Slattery Walker University of North Carolina, Charlotte lisa.walker@uncc.edu

Council Lauren Rivera Northwestern University l-rivera@kellogg.northwestern.edu

Council (student) Lindsey Ayers Kent State University lindsey.ayers@comcast.net

Secretary-Treasurer Amy Wilkins University of Colorado, Boulder amy.wilkins@colorado.edu

Newsletter Editor Daniel Shank University of Alabama, Birmingham dbshank@uab.edu

Webmaster and Social Media Manager

Jessica Leveto Kent State University, Ashtabula jleveto@kent.edu

(From the Chair’s Desk continued)

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emotion scholarship I hope that all of you will make it a priority to come to this session and support Kimberly Rog-ers (Duke University), Brandon Jackson (Florida State Uni-versity), Katie James (University of Georgia), and Sonny Nordmarken (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) as they share with us their insights into the sociology of emo-tion and catch a glimpse of what the future holds for our work and the section. Party Planning Just as Social Psychology has so generously al-lowed us to share their roundtables, we will also be joining them for a on-site reception. Jan Stets, the current Social Psychology Section Chair, and former Emotions Chair, was enthusiastic about having a combined reception with the Emotions Section, given the number of us who are members of both sections and the overlap in ideas be-tween our members. As always, this event will allow us all a chance to interact in a more informal and easy-going environment. As the date approaches, I’ll provide addition-al information about the meetings, including deadlines for the on-line submissions and the ASA-sponsored Emotions Session, in future newsletters. Council Business (Stay With Me Now!) The previous council proposed one set of changes to the bylaws. We’ll be voting on these proposed changes this spring; descriptions of the changes (and the existing by-laws) will be included in the spring newsletter. Changes to the Graduate Student Paper Award The first set of changes will specify in bylaws that: 1) the graduate student recipient(s) will receive a monetary prize, and 2) the prize will be $250. Both of these changes were unanimously supported by council. Finally, due to some very last minute coordination by our outgoing chair, the council voted to support an ASA amicus curiae brief to the US Supreme Court when the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) case comes up for review. Thanks to Robin’s quick action, I am proud, and I know she is too, that we were able to stand with other ASA sections and other interests groups within the ASA in sup-port of this extremely important civil rights issue. News of the World I’m not sure whether it’s because we were all just so recently in Denver or what, but I just can’t seem to let go of the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado that resulted in 12 dead and 58 injured during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight. Or maybe because just a month later, six people were gunned down in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, before the gunman himself was shot dead,. Or that on Au-gust 23, The Onion ran the following headline: “Nation Cel-ebrates Full Week Without a Deadly Mass Shooting,” only to be updated 12 hours later: “Never Mind.” Since the most infamous mass shooting in American history occurred in

Columbine in 1996, there have been over 30 similar at-tacks, with victims numbering in the hundreds. Taking the long view that C. Wright Mills urged us to take in his once infamous but now only famous, treatise, The Sociological Imagination, it seems that attacks such as these, carried out by individuals, are, indeed, social problems. But ironically, and as Mills’ himself foretold, many of today’s social problems both stem from and result in emotional problems. Problems are arising seemingly en masse as a result of perceived injustice, shifting social roles, disconfirmations in fundamental identities, and in a host of miscellaneous discriminations and indignities that are all too often couched in moral overtones, designed to agitate, enrage, and enflame. As I watched the devastation that came out of that darkened theatre in Aurora, I was struck by the talking heads, the psychologists, the psychiatrists. The ones who presented the shooter as someone who lacked empathy, as if empathy was some sort of individual trait, a predeter-mined characteristic if you will or that the shooter’s marked lack of sympathy was some sort of malignant condition that had plagued him since birth. I continued to watch the news, thinking about what I, as a sociologist having stud-ied emotions for over a decade now, know about empathy. As I pulled out my well read copy of Candace Clark’s Misery and Company: Sympathy in Everyday Life, Nathan Otto and Amber Lupton, residents of Boulder, CO and co-founders of The Safe Conflict Project (http://www.safeconflict.org/), an organization whose goal is to eradicate war across the planet, released a 6 part tele-series on empathy

1. In a series of poorly lit videos that

looked like they’d been shot with little more than the cam-era on their MacBook Pro, they walked their viewers through the process of taking the role of the other. They offered insight into calibration. They talked about pacing. The gave tips on building rapport. They talked about emo-tion management and emotional expression. They de-scribed alleviating social distance and creating transparen-cy in light of otherwise convoluted symbolic interaction. In other words, they talked about any number of topics that I also discuss, at least academically, in my classrooms. And I wondered, as I often wonder, where is the sociological perspective in our daily news? And is there anything I can do, either in my role as a teacher, or a scholar, or as chair of this section, to make the sociology of emotions more visible, more relevant, more heard in our daily lives? We know so much about how emotions operate. We know the how, the what, the who, the when, and, sometimes, if we’re really good, the why. I have to wonder as headlines and photos from around the world talk about anger, shame, and rage, if it’s time to ask the next ques-tion: How can our work further and more-deeply impact the world? ————————————————— 1 If you would like to sign up for parts 2-4 of the series, you

may do so at http://disciplineoflove.com.

(From the Chair’s Desk continued)

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Recent Contribution Award Amy Wharton, Chair, Washington State University Jody Clay-Warner, University of Georgia Jamie Mullaney, Goacher College

Graduate Student Paper Committee Miliann Kang, Chair, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Richard Serpe, Kent State University Melissa Sloan, University of South Florida

Program Committee Clare Stacy, Kent State University, Session - Emotions and Inequality Kathryn Lively, Dartmouth College, Chair’s Hour Scott Savage, UC-Riverside - Roundtables (with Social Psychology)

Nominations Committee Rebecca Erickson, University of Akron, Chair Amy Kroska, University of Oklahoma Doug Shrock, Florida State University Alison Bianchi, University of Iowa Kathleen M. Brennan, West Carolina

Recruitment Committee Jordan Brown, Loyola University, Chair Kathryn Lively, Dartmouth College

Amy Wilkins' Goths, Wannabes, and Christians: The Boundaries of Sex, Style, and Status (U of Chicago Press, 2008). This fascinating, theoretically sophisticated, and beautifully written ethnography reveals the varied ways that gender and sexuality in three different youth subcul-tures (i.e., Goths, Wannabes, and Christians) are embed-ded within dominant raced and classed social meanings and understandings in the United States. There are many sociological findings and theoretical interventions to rec-ommend about this book, but what would be of most inter-est to scholars in the sociology of emotion lies in Wilkins consideration of the central role that “emotion work” plays in constructing social boundaries within these youth groups and against those outside of them. The Unity Christian group she studied, for in-stance, values above all being “just good people” and good people are "happy" and "nice." In using these emo-tions to draw lines between “good” and “not good” people, Unity Christians also create moral boundaries between Christians and non-Christians as well as between more and less authentic Christians in their own subcul-ture. Further, as Wilkins’ intersectional analysis reveals, niceness itself in American culture is a gendered, raced, and classed emotion. White middle class women are ex-pected to be "nice"; lower class women, particularly Black and Puerto Rican women, are understood as loud and emotionally combative. However different this Christian group might seem vis-a-vis other youth groups, they are appealing (wittingly or not) to dominant white, middle class norms. By contrast, Goths, who are also predominantly Anglo American and middle-class, adopt as their central emotional and stylistic motif "darkness," a norm they col-lectively embrace and practice. And, in yet another case, for Puerto Rican Wannabes (white female youth who take on Puerto Rican styles), the expression of pain and sad-ness not only bucks against socially desirable expectations of “compulsory happiness,” but is also understood as an "authentic" identity. In the case of Wannabes, “attitude,” or a more combative emotional style, is also an element of group membership, a style that they imagine challenges the boundaries of passive, white middle-class feminini-ty. For each of the subcultures Wilkins studied, emotions become a way to create group boundaries and to construct authentic identities. Wilkins’ attention here to race, class, and gender in emotion work is an especial-ly innovative contribution to the sociology of emo-tions. The extant literature tends to focus primarily on gen-der and emotion work. What has received far less attention is the role race, class, and gender play in constructing dif-ferent kinds of “feeling rules” for varied social groups, par-ticularly for American youth.

What’s On Your Bookshelf? Jennifer Pierce, University of Minnesota

Emotions Committees (2012-2013)

ASA 2013 Program

Invited Chair’s Hour: The Next Generation of Emotions Research Organized by Kathryn Lively - Kimberly Rogers (Duke University) - Brandon Jackson (Florida State University), - Katie James (University of Georgia) - Sonny Nordmarken (University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Emotion and Inequality Session Organized by Clare Stacey

Emotion\Social Psychology Roundtables Organized by Scott Savage

WE NEED A FEW MORE MEMBERS * ASK YOUR COLLEAGUES TO JOIN * ASK AND SIGN UP YOUR GRADUATE STUDENTS * SEND AN EMAIL TO ONE PERSON WHO MIGHT BENEFIT FROM AND ENJOY OUR SECTION * POST ON A RELATED LISTSERV

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It's a presidential election year and passions are aflame: love, fear, hate, contempt, depression. Fresh from the editorial pages, partisans are deep into the issues--immigration, job creation, abortion, gay rights, financial regulation, taxes, Afghanistan, China, and so on. As if the candidate or the policies were what determined which lev-er you pull or where on the touch-screen you touch. But if the candidate and/or the issues don't matter, what does? The answer: relationships. Without relationship the neonate couldn't survive and later there is relationship be-cause no one lives in hermithood. Relationship, however, comes at a price. It doesn't just sustain us, but requires something in return. And our tendency is to give what it wants, because if it is not to one then it must be to anoth-er. Because only in relationship can we survive. Now, what has this to do with elections or, for that matter, with the proposition that 1 + 1 = 2? Let's take the latter first. Do you think that the arithmetic of two sentenc-es ago is correct? And, if you do, what gives you the right to think so? How you got to believe that one plus one sum to two is most likely buried now in an irretrievable past. But, it can be plausibly reconstructed. Imagine a first-grade teacher writing the equation on the blackboard and saying the words and getting you and other kids to say the words so they could lodge in your brain. Reflect! Did you do anything more than absorb what your teacher told you was the case? Surely, you did not do what mathematician-logicians Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead did and actually prove that 1 + 1 = 2? No, you simply accept-ed as truth what you were told by an important other in your life. Just as you do with a great deal of what you do, even about whom to vote for and why the partisans on the other side are fools or knaves. Am I trying to tell you that you, the imperial YOU, aren't in charge of your own thinking and your own feel-ings when it comes to the election? The long answer is yes. You are merely an instrument, abiding by or following the inputs of others, the others with whom you have or have had important relationships. Maybe you'll grant that others count when it comes to the one-and-one thing, but not with regard to the election and how you feel about it. But, I ask, how is the election different from any other content that has been poured into you over the years? Have you done the heavy lifting when it comes to the issues, for example, immigra-tion policy? That is, have you researched the questions involving ethnicity, demographics, education, employment, standard of living, existing law, democracy theory, the phi-losophy of rights and so on? Yet you do have an opinion and at the backyard party this summer you may have ar-gued your side of the case, maybe a little hotly, with some idiot who took an opposite position. But let's face it: you were only mouthing other people's arguments and were waxing irate, not because of

the substantive difference, but because the fool wouldn't see things your way, that is, the way your tutors or guides on immigration policy have put it to you. Your anger is on account of the assault, not on the logic of your argument, but on the relationships you have with the others who have transmitted that argu-ment to you. Their position is: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me!" They want your wholehearted commit-ment. But why would we simply be mouthpieces of other parties, spouting their thoughts without a thought as to their origin. It is because this is what those other parties want us to do. It is part of the payback in relationships. Just as your teacher drilled one-plus-one into you. S/he wanted you spout her/his thought on the subject, blindly if you will, but precisely and eternally and never to think or speak otherwise. And that's precisely what you do and why you will get enraged should someone try to trap you in a Gar-finkelian breaching experiment by claiming that one plus one don't sum to two. You need passionately to defend one-plus-one because you need, still, to show him/her who taught you that you learned your lesson well and that you deserve the smile and the nod of approval that you got when you first demonstrated that you could do the math as it had been delivered to you. Quick summation. You do 1 + 1 = 2 because you want the credit for getting it right, you want to please the one who taught you and you want to avoid that person's poor opinion of you should you sum it wrong. It's no differ-ent when it comes to politics or ethics or esthetics or other domains of conduct. You think, say, do, vote what and how others have trained you by carrot-and-stick method to think, say, do, vote. Is this deflating? And does it make you angry with me? Oh, well, such is life. But consider this: It's the same for all of us because that's what it means to be in relation-ship with others. We want others' good opinions, we want to please them and we don't want them to be distraught with us. The only way to do this is to do what they want us to do. And if we can't or won't it's because some other oth-ers have taught us not to be so pliable and conforming. Ho, hum! So! You are not going to take being the pawn of A...because you are willing to be the pawn of B! I say this because someone in my past framed it that way and in-stilled the thought in me. But don't even think of these things on November 6.

YOUR VOTE Theodore Kemper, St. John’s University

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Berns, Nancy. 2011. Closure: The Rush to End Grief

and What It Costs Us. Temple University. Purchase.

de Courville Nicol, Valérie. 2011. Social Economies of

Fear and Desire: Emotional Regulation, Emotion Man-

agement, and Embodied Autonomy. New York: Pal-

grave Macmillan. Purchase.

Giner-Sorolla, Roger. 2012. Judging Passions: Moral

Emotions in Persons and Groups. Taylor & Francis.

Purchase.

Henricks, Thomas. 2012. Selves, Societies, and Emo-

tions: Understanding the Pathways of Experience.”

Paradigm. Purchase.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2012. The Outsourced Self:

Intimate Life in Market Times. Metropoitan. Purchase

Justice 21 Committee of the Society for the Study of

Social Problems. 2012. CreateSpace Independent. Pur-

chase.

Pixley, Jocelyn. Forthcoming 2012. Emotions in Fi-

nance: Booms, Busts, and Uncertainty. Second Edition.

Cambridge. Purchase.

New Cites: Books

Cottingham, Marci D. 2012. “Interaction Ritual Theory and

Sports Fans: Emotion, Symbols, and Solidarity.” Sociology

of Sport Journal. 29(2): 168-185.

Doan, Long. “A Social Model of Persistent Mood States.” So-

cial Psychology Quarterly. 75(3): 198-218.

Lu, Alexander. 2011. “Stress and Physical Health Deterioration

in the Aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.” Socio-

logical Perspectives. 54(2):229-50.

Stets, Jan. 2012 . “Current Emotion Research in Sociology:

Advances in the Discipline.” Emotion Review. 4(3): 326-

334.

Treas, Judith, Tanja van der Lippe, and Tsui-o ChloeTai. 2011.

“The Happy Homemaker? Married Women’s Well-Being

in Cross National Perspective.” Social Forces. 90(1): 111-

132.

New Cites: Articles

ASA's Sociology of Emotions Section’s Recent Contri-bution Award Nominations are being sought for the most outstanding article published in the last two years that advances the sociology of emotions empirically, theoretically, or method-ologically. To submit a nomination, please send a PDF file of the paper to Amy Wharton (wharton@vancouver.wsu.edu) by March 1, 2013. ASA’s Sociology of Emotions Section’s Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award Nominations are being sought for the most outstanding, article-length graduate student paper that contributes to the sociology of emotions empirically, theoretically, or method-ologically. Authors of eligible papers must be graduate stu-dents at the time of the paper's submission. Multiple-authored papers are eligible for the award if all authors are graduate students. Papers that have been accepted for publication at the time of nomination are not eligible. To submit a nomination, please send a PDF file of the paper to Miliann Kang (miliannkang@gmail.com). Deadline for sub-

missions is March 1, 2013.

Emotions Section Awards

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This paper tests a hypothesis about the visibility of terms for shame in five languages for two centuries. In an extraordinary study (1939; 1978) of five hundred years of Eu-ropean history, the sociologist Norbert Elias analyzed eti-quette and education manuals in three countries. Two key propositions resulted: 1. As physical pun-ishment decreased, shame became in-creasingly dominant as the main agent of social control. 2. As shame became more prevalent, it also became unspeak-able and virtually invisible because of taboo. There has been little response to either proposition, but because of a new device, Ngrams, the second can be tested sys-tematically with historical data. Shapes of the Historical Decline of the Use of Shame Terms The five charts on page 8 were procured from Google Ngrams, based on millions of digitalized books (Aiden and Michael 2011). All of the graphs support the Elias conjecture, since they all show decline in the use of the term for shame in the five languages. The decline of the use of the s-word is remarkably similar, according to the Ngrams, in three of the five languages: American English, British, and French. The Spanish and German cases are similar in that both show decline in usage over the two hundred years, but are substantially different in two ways. First, usage is on a much smaller scale than in the English, British and French cases. In the beginning of the period the highest frequency for Spanish is only about a fifth (approximately .001) of those in the first three graphs (the average is about .005). The earliest high in the Ger-man case is still lower, about .00001, only a tenth of the American, British, and French average. There is an even greater difference in the lowest frequencies at the end of the period. Spanish is again only about one fifth (.0002) of the average of the first three graphs (a little more than .001), and German is still less, about a hundredth (00001). At this point these large differences of scale between the two groups is puzzling. One possibility is that if the number of books used is con-

siderable less than for the English and French cases, the graphs for the Span-ish and German would be less reliable than those for the the first three countries. The second difference between the two groups is in the shape of the graphs. Those for the first group are rela-tively stable, but the Spanish graph is somewhat erratic at first, the German much more erratic, and over the entire period. The rapid changes might also

support the idea that the Spanish and German data is smaller than the other group, and therefore less reliable. Another possibility for the shape of the Spanish chart is historical. Perhaps the sudden changes 1800-1840 concern Spain’s loss of its colonies, and the differ-ences that emerged between languages in Spain and its former Latin-America colonies. The rapid changes in shape are even greater in the German case, and occur in the whole graph, not just in the beginning. Although it also shows a decline, the term schande has undergone many sudden changes in the two hundred year period. From my earlier study that involved German history (1994) I can interpret one of the changes, the rapid downturn in 1945. Schande (intense shame) was one of Hitler’s favorite terms. For example, he usually referred to the democratic German government he displaced, the Wei-mar Republic, as "Fourteen years of shame and dis-grace" In German this phrase carries much greater force than the English translation: Vierzehn Jahren von Schmach und Schande! It almost requires shouting to get it out, which is exactly what Hitler did. He used it as an epithet. But when Hitler was removed from power, his pet terms lost their charm. Conclusion This paper has tested Elias’s hypothesis that the term for shame in five Western languages has become less and less visible in written language over the last 200 years. The Ngram charts support the hypothesis for all five languages tested: in all five, the frequency of the

(Continued on page 8)

Testing Elias’s “Invisible Shame” Proposition Thomas Scheff, University of California at Santa Barbara

Abstract: The sociologist Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process in-vestigated European history from the 14

th to the 20

th century. He

analyzed advice offered in English, German, and French etiquette manuals (e.g., bedroom, bathroom, dinner). On this basis, he pro-posed: Shame replaced physical force as the main instrument of social control, but it also became increasingly unspeakable. This paper tests the latter conjecture in the period 1800-2000 in five lan-guages: American and British English, French, German, and Span-ish, using data from Google Ngrams. To the extent that shame be-comes less visible in modernization, then the term itself should oc-cur less frequently not only in speech, but also in writing. Although there are variations in the slope and shape in German and in Span-ish, the conjecture is supported in all five of the languages tested, as shown in the attached graphs. The frequency of shame terms in 2000 is considerably less than in the early 1800s. In modernization, perhaps shame itself became shameful. It is possible that this can be only the first step in an endless series of recursive loops. If this is the case, there may be many important consequences. One pos-sibility is that recursion of shame can lead to silence, and recursion of shame/anger to violence (Scheff 1994; 2012).

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terms for shame decreases. There is also a preliminary attempt to explain why the shapes of the graphs of American English, British, and French shame terms are so similar, and why those for Spanish and German are different. A subsequent paper will test the shame hypothesis for three others languages that are available on Ngrams: Chinese, Russian, and He-brew. Since the study found inde-pendent confirmation that shame has become less visible over the last two hundred years in five modernizing societies, a further hypothesis is pro-posed to account for the findings. Shame becomes invisible because of recursion: as people become ashamed of being ashamed, the pro-cess may continue to the point that shame becomes completely hidden through recursive loops, ending in silence or violence. This cybernetic idea is supported by Retzinger’s sys-tematic study (1991) of the moment by moment exchange of emotions in marital quarrels. The idea should be further tested for individuals and groups, since it could be central to understanding both individual and societal withdrawal and conflict in modern civilization. References Elias, Norbert. 1939. Über den Prozess der Zivilisation). Reprinted in 1978 as The Civilizing Process. Lon-don: Blackwell.

Retzinger, S. M. 1991. Violent Emo-tions: Shame and Rage in Marital Quarrels. Newbury Park: Sage.

Scheff, Thomas. 1994. Bloody Re-venge: Emotions, Nationalism and War. Boulder: Westview.

_____________2012. A Social/Emotional Theory of “Mental Illness.” Intern’l Journal Social Psychiatry. June 12.

American English

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(Testing Invisible Shame continued)

Fall 2012 9

Sociology of Emotions Newsletter

The ASA Section on Sociology of Emotions brings together social and behavioral scientists in order to promote the general development of the study of emotions through the of ideas, theory, research, and teaching. Scholars from a variety of backgrounds are members of this section, and collectively encourage the study of emotions in everyday social life. Substantive topics of investigation include: the expression and experience of emotions, emotions in social interaction, identity and emotions, emotions in historical perspective, the cross-cultural study of emotions, emotions and violence, and the traditions of theory and re-search in the area of emotions.

The website for the ASA Section on Emotions seeks to serve the needs of section members and the greater American Sociological As-sociation community. There you will find information about the Section on Emotions, calls for papers, section awards, key publications in the area of emotions, and a link to the section newsletter. Please visit the website regularly for updates and feel free to contact the section chair, Kathryn Lively for questions, suggestions and comments. Enjoy!!

Congratulations Amy Schalet’s new book Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (University of Chicago Press 2011)

won the Healthy Teen Network’s Carol Men-dez Cassell Award for Excellence in Sexuali-ty Education and the ASA Children and Youth Section's 2012 Distinguished Schol-arly Research Award. Purchase.

ASA Emotions Section Meeting