The culture of emotions, also known as "emotionology," 1 consists of the collective emotional standards of a society. These include norms of feeling and emotion expression, desirable ideals and an admissible range of emotion experience in concurrence with definite situations. Arlie Hochschild has introduced the concept of feeling rules, which can be said to be "the side of ideology that deals with emotion and feeling." 2 This "emotional ideology" ensures group cohesion and allows for cultural self-identification. It is important to note that "feeling rules" refer to mental states and not simply appearances. While we all perform in a Goffmanesque sense, 3 we also try to feel in ways that our culture dictates-as in "I started to try and make myself like him." 4 The self does some emotion management to create, intensify, suppress and transform its emotions in conformity with the normative emotional regime. 5 We learn, as part of our culture, to control the types of emotions we experience and their intensity: for example, we get angry at our child's omission and at our boss' unfairness with a different degree of intensity, and it is precisely this difference that makes our anger appropriate or inappropriate.The most common emotion management technique is based on the link between emotion experience and emotion expression, which are biologically inseparable and interdependent. William James first noted that emotion display triggers feeling, just as feeling triggers emotion display. "Sit all day in a moping posture, sigh and reply to everything in a dismal voice, and your melancholy lingers," he observed in 1884. 6 Numerous empirical studies since then have shown that adopting a posture of fear or anger incites the respective emotion; 7 by the same token, producing a smile, even by mechanically holding a pencil across one's mouth, brings about a feeling of merriment. 8 We can work ourselves comparatively easily into the feeling we're aiming at simply by altering our facial expression.Another well-known emotion management technique is cognitive selfstimulation. 9 One may evoke emotionally charged ideas or situational representations in one's mind in order to induce a desired emotion. Since emotions have a substantial cognitive component, 10 we can influence our emotion experience by entertaining certain thoughts, memories of events, images, and so on.Emotion culture, of course, is time-and space-relative. The history of emotions has shown how our conceptualization of emotions changes in time and, with it, so does the social emotion experience. 11 The anthropology of emotions has shown how emotion experience differs from one society to another. 12 Yet, any society has some sort of formal emotion culture that can be grasped from
