How Emotional Experiences are Influenced by One s Sense of Self
The interviewee was a mother, age 55, employee of a mortgage servicing company. Because of COVID 19, she has been stuck working from home, which is very challenging and frustrating for her as none of the conveniences of her office are at her disposal and it makes her work more difficult and time consuming. The primary emotion she feels is anger: she is physically pained by working 12 hour days sitting in a dining room chair that is hard on her back and hands, since she had spinal surgery a year ago; she misses her comfortable office chair. Her computer and wi-fi are slower than the system at work, where she has two computer screens that she can use at once to help speed up her work. With everyone working from home, the tasks are more slowly accomplished and she is often frustrated by her co-workers who, also overwhelmed, move more slowly than normal and who also call out for help, which adds to her work and frustration. By the end of her day, she is mentally, emotionally and physically exhausted.

The ways in which the mother expressed her emotions were appropriate within the context of Hochschild’s notion of “feeling rules.” She said that she would call her boss to vent, which is a commonly accepted practice, and she noted that her boss is okay with it and is very personable and would usually talk her down from her high stress attack, but that at the end of the day she would still feel stressed and wiped out. This all could be an example of what Hochschild calls “deep acting” (35). This is where the person expresses spontaneously a real feeling that “has been self-induced” (Hochschild 35). It is possible the mother is self-inducing her own anger in an effort to get the attention of her boss so that he knows how much time and work and effort and energy she is putting into her work to help the company. Her sense of self, however, is negatively affected by this because she is convinced that she is overwhelmed by the work that she is doing and that the absence of the little conveniences really do add up to create a very difficult situation for her so that it comes across like her job is now 10x harder or even impossible to do now that she is working at home, does not have her comfortable office chair, has only one computer screen instead of two, has a slower Internet connection, and has to rely on colleagues who are also working from home and who, she suspects are not really working but are rather faking being online.

There does not appear to be any misfit in terms of how the feeling rules are in play, for it could easily be shown that the mother is believing so deeply in her own misfortunate circumstance that she really does feel overwhelmed and angry about her situation. She knows that she has a boss that she can vent to and make her frustrations heard and that this will ensure that her suffering is not going unnoticed and that in the future it might be something that she can fall back on, for instance, to show how much she personally sacrificed for the company.

But as Katz indicates expressing these emotions could also be a way to “resolve emotional tension” (19). Thus, the deep acting conjures up the emotions, so that the need to vent them becomes real, and like the angry LA driver who...…she will be at sea—so she must continuously send out distress signals to her boss to let him know that she is still out there and will need to be picked up and rescued at some point. At any rate, she does not want to be forgotten and she feels insecure in this new working environment because there is no “there” there—she is not in a workplace that she can call her own and that has a working group with a working hierarchy: everyone is adrift and on their own and it is very much like being lost in a forest or at sea—one does not know whether the others are closer to the hierarchy or further away, whether the others are gaining in power over her or whether they are losing in power. She cannot see what relationship they are cultivating with their superiors during the lockdown and cannot see how that might be affecting her own status and position. There is a great deal of job insecurity that she is probably experiencing where her emotions are looked at from this perspective and that could help to explain why she feels the need to call her boss to vent—it is a way to let him know that she exists and that she is still with them.

In conclusion, there are numerous ways to examine the emotional experience of the mother interviewed here. She could be said to be deep acting, or it could be that her “Me” and “I” are at work in creating a sense of self that is self-reinforcing. It could be that she is merely attempting to signal her own value and status through a tie sign. Or it could be a front or effect of her sense of tension in this new social geometry.

Works Cited…