ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters of this book have provided a basic—and very selective— glimpse into the sociology of emotions. For someone who is new to this area of research, it might seem as though we have covered a lot of ground. Actually, we have only scratched the surface. I have neglected many classic and contemporary studies of the book’s central topics—emotion norms, management, exchanges, labor, and identification. Moreover, I have ignored other sociological perspectives that animate the field, such as affect control theory (Lively and Heise 2014), expectation states theory (Webster and Walker 2014), identity theory (Stets and Trettevik 2014), and ritual theories (Rossner and Meher 2014). I also left out work by sociologists who draw heavily from outside the discipline, such as psychoanalysis (Scheff 2014) as well as evolutionary theory and neuroscience (Franks 2014; Turner 2014). Thus, readers who enjoy this book should seek out a deeper and broader exposure to the field. A select few readers might even want to specialize in the study of emotions in graduate school. Others may be content simply to “live with” (and “test out” in their daily lives) the concepts they’ve acquired from this book.
