EMOTIONAL PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

Emotional Personal Experience

Emotional Personal Experience

Introduction

Emotions define the way we respond to our social, built, or created environment and involve a way of understanding the world. Our understanding of emotion is gendered, and there are gendered emotional expectations. The experiences of both motherhood and non motherhood are infused by emotion and emotional expectations, which necessitates the management of emotions by mothers and non mothers. In addition, those who support women through these experiences—family members, friends, and health and social care professionals—are also more likely to be women themselves, and they too engage in emotion work and management. Emotions are reactions psycho physiological representing modes of adaptation to certain environmental stimuli or of oneself (Kemper 1991, 330-42). Psychologically, emotions alter attention, make up the ranks certain behaviors guide individuals' responses and activate relevant associative networks in memory (Pollack and Thoits 1989, 22-34).

The understanding of emotion is gendered in that they are connected to beliefs about what is typical, natural, or appropriate for women and men. Historically, particular emotions have been associated with women and with femininity. Women have been characterized as sensitive, intuitive, and immersed in personal relationships; but also as naturally weak and easy to exploit, submissive, passive, docile, dependent, and so on. From this perspective, women are considered more like children than adults in that they are immature, weak, helpless, and subject to emotional display. Yet, despite these negative connotations, women who adopt and display these characteristics are considered to be well adjusted. There have been fewer corresponding descriptions of the typical man, not least because throughout history, men have been commonly considered to be rational rather than emotional.

Most current research findings suggest very few gender differences when men and women and boys and girls are asked what they know about emotion, but the less information that is made available about a person, the more both sexes will rely on emotion stereotypes. Such stereotypes are an important part of learning the practice or performance of gendered behavior. It emerges, then, that when emotion and gender are intertwined, stereotypical speculations of masculine/ feminine emotions are explored. Thus, exploring shared beliefs about emotions is one way to understand what gender means and how it operates and is negotiated in human relationships (Lovaglia and Houser 1996, 864-80).

Groundbreaking work by Arlie Russell Hochschild highlighted the hard work associated with the regulation and management of one's own emotions and the emotions of others. Hochschild differentiated between emotional labor (the management of emotion within paid labor) and emotion (al) work (the management of emotion in personal and intimate relationships). Emotional labor and work then is performed in order to conform to dominant expectations in a given situation, and many authors suggest that in both the workplace and the home, it is women who engage in this activity more than men.

Discussion

The sociology of emotion management and emotional labor predominantly understands emotions in terms of social and cultural manipulation, transformation, and restraint. While this aspect of emotions is important it does not exhaust the ...