ABSTRACT
Emotions differ from these other patterns of affect in that emotions are responses to occurrences in moments or situations. The self can be included among those targets of feeling. When we have an emotion, we feel ourselves moving into situations, interacting with the elements there, finding comfortable or uncomfortable locations, residing in those moments, and then moving away. In sociology perhaps the most prominent scholar emphasizing this view of emotions as self-agency is Norman Denzin. Instead, people are their emotions. That is, emotions are disclosures of people's ever-changing placements in the world, manifestations of who they are at any particular point in place and time. Restricting the concept of emotion to self-based feeling may be a departure from general psychological usage, but it is not a shift from the way ordinary people use this term. Those publicly supported rationales serve as 'cultural permissions' to harbor some kinds of emotions and put those emotions into action.
