Sociology of emotions
In this case, in order to understand the mind, affect and rational thought must be considered since humans find motivation among non-rational factors such as levels of emotional commitment to norms, values, and beliefs.
For example, the discipline of Sociology allows scholars to focus on the impact that factors such as social group (gender, class, race, and so on), culture, time, interactions, and situations may shape or influence human emotion.
[9][10][6] The discipline sees human feeling and emotions as something that is experienced and constantly coming into existence in the context of cultural and historical variation; in other words, they shift and change depending on the social situation.
[13][1] Gordon posits that it is only through the socialization process that individuals learn emotion vocabulary that allows them to name internal sensations connected to the objects, events, and relationships that they encounter.
[14][15] The social constructionist perspective fails connect the activation, experience, and expressions of emotions to the human body.
Within classical sociological texts, a tension can be found within the description of individual humans: a duality between asocial impulses and social capacities.
[19] For classical theorists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the "natural man" is motivated by instinct and impulse, but within the context of civil society, these "animalistic" traits transform into morals such justice or duty.
[19] This type of idea influenced Comte, and later his successor, Durkheim, both scholars of the French tradition who believed that society possessed the "status of a moral absolute."
In this way, they viewed Society like a human body or organism, where there were different "parts" that each worked to fulfill the needs of the social whole.
Both Comte and Durkheim pointed to the idea that it was the social collective that stimulated and directed emotions in a way that supported a broader societal moral order.
[19][23] Simmel believed that the soul helps resolve internal conflicts between a person's individual, pre-social emotions and abilities and their social capacities.
[19] Simmel believed that interactions develop through the creation of shared mental orientations and social emotions that stem from human associations.
[19] Weber saw rationalization as a way that humans increase their knowledge of how to pursue goals in the realm of science and technology, but in turn detracted from emotions that can come with experience, such as charisma.
[30][32] Extending beyond face-to-face human interaction, electronic messages now contain emojis and emoticons that represent facial expressions for various emotion categories.
