Feeling Rules in Motion: A Situational Theory of Intra-Situational Emotional Fluctuations

• In Event: Narratives of Emotion: Situational, Temporal, Flexible

Abstract

Sociologists have shown that emotional norms vary across institutional, cultural, and historical contexts. Less attention has been paid to intra-situational emotional fluctuations: how the same participants move between different emotional registers within a single encounter, and how these shifts become locally intelligible rather than normatively disruptive. This paper develops a situational account of emotional regulation by arguing that adherence to feeling rules is not continuous across an event, but depends on what I call involvement alignment, the degree to which participants’ main involvement matches the dominant involvement organizing the setting.

I draw on the case of funeral services, where strong feeling rules prescribe solemnity, grief, and composure, yet participants regularly shift into joking, chatting, logistical coordination, and other forms of interaction that generate different emotional currents. Using ethnographic observations across thirty funeral cases, I show that these shifts are organized through what I call affective interactional pockets: locally sustained interactional enclaves in which participants become jointly absorbed in a subordinate activity, temporarily bracketing the dominant frame. Within these pockets, interaction itself produces emotions, laughter, irritation, urgency, playfulness, that diverge from the feeling rules associated with the larger event, without necessarily constituting a breach.

The analysis shows how affective pockets form, persist, and dissolve through interactional coordination and situational cues, and how participants are differentially positioned to enter them. In particular, immediate family members, especially those with fewer financial resources, are more likely to be pulled into logistical pockets, limiting their ability to sustain a grieving mood. By showing how emotional conformity is intermittently suspended and reestablished within the same encounter, the paper contributes to the sociology of emotions and interactionist theory with a more dynamic account of situational emotional order.

Author

• Alan Chen, New York University