How Emotional Experiences Are Shaped by the Sense of Self

Introduction: The Interviewee and Her Emotional Context

The interviewee was a 55-year-old mother employed at a mortgage servicing company. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she had been required to work from home — a situation she found deeply challenging and frustrating, as none of the conveniences of her office were available to her. The primary emotion she reported was anger. She was physically pained by working twelve-hour days in a dining room chair that was hard on her back and hands, having undergone spinal surgery just a year before, and she missed her comfortable office chair. Her home computer and Wi-Fi connection were slower than the systems at her workplace, where she normally had access to two screens simultaneously. With everyone working remotely, tasks took longer to accomplish, and she was frequently frustrated by colleagues who, also overwhelmed, worked more slowly than usual and called on her for additional help. By the end of each workday, she described herself as mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted.

Feeling Rules, Deep Acting, and the Expression of Anger

The ways in which the mother expressed her emotions were appropriate within the context of Arlie 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 was receptive to this and would typically talk her down from her highest points of stress. At the end of the day, however, she still felt stressed and worn out.

This pattern could be an example of what Hochschild calls "deep acting" (35) — the process by which a person spontaneously expresses a real feeling that "has been self-induced" (Hochschild 35). It is possible that the mother was self-inducing her own anger in an effort to ensure that her boss recognized how much time, effort, and energy she was investing in her work. Her sense of self, however, was negatively affected by this: she was convinced that she was overwhelmed, and that the absence of ordinary workplace conveniences genuinely compounded into an impossibly difficult situation. From her perspective, her job had become ten times harder now that she was working without her ergonomic chair, with only one computer screen instead of two, with a slower internet connection, and with colleagues she suspected were not genuinely working but merely appearing to be online.

There does not appear to be any misfit in terms of how the feeling rules operate here. The mother believed so deeply in her own misfortune that she genuinely felt overwhelmed and angry. She also understood that she had a boss willing to hear her frustrations — ensuring that her suffering would not go unnoticed and that her sacrifices would be on record for the future.

As Jack Katz suggests, expressing these emotions can also be a way to "resolve emotional tension" (19). The deep acting thus conjures the emotions so that the need to release them becomes real. Just as an angry Los Angeles driver curses at other drivers from within his own car — though they cannot hear him — because it quickly relieves stress, she calls her boss when her emotions reach a peak and she requires release.

Tie Signs and the Boss–Employee Relationship

As Erving Goffman explains, tie signs "contain evidence" about the nature of a relationship (195). The relationship between the mother and her boss, as she described it, functions as a tie sign. Early in the interview she presented herself as an extremely dedicated worker who never slacks. She is the kind of employee who wants to ensure that her efforts do not go unappreciated by her superiors, because unacknowledged virtue would feel wasted — as though tossed into the void.

When, at the end of the interview, she described how she can always call her boss to vent, this functions as a tie sign — almost like two lovers holding hands in public. Holding hands is a declaration to third parties of a special bond; in the same way, the casual and comfortable manner in which she describes her boss's willingness to listen signals to the interviewer that she is respected and valued by her superior. Otherwise her complaints would not be heard at all, and she would be telling a very different story. The suggestion inherent in the tie sign is that at the end of the day she knows her hard work is being duly noted, recorded, and will eventually be rewarded — perhaps with a recognition such as employee of the month.

Conclusion

There are numerous ways to examine the emotional experience of the mother interviewed here. She could be said to be engaged in deep acting, or it could be that her "Me" and "I" are working together to create a self-reinforcing sense of identity. It could be that she is signaling her own value and status through a tie sign. Or her behavior could be understood as a front — an effect of the tension arising from her loss of social geometry. In all likelihood, each of these frameworks captures a dimension of a single, complex emotional reality.

Works Cited

Goffman, Erving. "Tie Signs."

Hochschild, Arlie. Managed Heart. University of California Press, 2012.

Katz, Jack. How Emotions Work. University of Chicago Press, 1999.