Correcting Behaviors and Policing Emotions: How Behavioral Infractions Become Feeling-Rule Violations

• In Event: 367 - Regular Session. Symbolic Interaction 2

Abstract

This paper examines interactions surrounding the transmission, enforcement, and assessment of compliance with feeling rules. Using ethnographic data, I investigate how an organization prepares low-income black and Latino students to follow the feeling rules they are likely to encounter at the elite boarding high schools they will attend. I find that it was the interactional process surrounding rule reminders—rather than differences in students’ behavioral infractions or in the feeling rules themselves—that was most consequential in shaping evaluations of the student’s compliance with the program’s feeling rules.

Author

• Amanda Barrett Cox, University of Pennsylvania