How Sentiments Organize Social Action

Abstract

Sociological studies of affect and associated processes have a long tradition in the discipline, originating with Durkheim's interest in religious belief and practice. Contemporary interest in the area has focused on several distinct instances in which affective evaluations are learned, are expressed toward others, organize behavior in social situations, and change. Attitudes, emotions, feelings, moods, and sentiments are distinguished from one another and studied as distinct factors in the organization of social action. Affective information is socialized in families and reinforced in social institutions as the actor matures. Interaction with others and the exchange of social rewards leads to patterns of social organization in proximal and distal groups as actors identify others who share similar patterns of orientation to social objects. Status structures in groups are ref lected in patterns of sentiment distribution. Similarly, sentiment and emotion structures impact status behavior in groups. Technological developments have advanced measurement of emotional reactions, expression of sentiments toward social objects, and identification of social structures in social media. Theoretical developments in the study of sentiment and emotion are highlighted in the essay. How sentiments organize social actionSociological interest in affect as a Durkheimian social fact traces its roots to the examination of ecstatic expression in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912, 2001). Contemporary study has differentiated several concepts to account for feeling states of social actors. The target of the state has been differentiated, its intensity measured, and its duration mapped. Measures of affect states initially relied on direct observation of behavior, self reports in surveys and experimental settings, and textual analysis of field notes of ethnographers. The use of video cameras, with facial recognition software, has made possible the analysis of facial expressions as actors react to social stimuli. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has made possible the capture of states of the brain as social experiences happen in real time. Technological change has made possible the examination of text produced by actors for its affective content. Each of these developments has expanded the domain of research on how sentiments, attitudes, emotions, and mood arise and organize social activity.I review social psychological research on sentiments, one of the affective processes, by first explicating a taxonomic scheme made possible by treating targets, intensity, and duration as variables. Links to learning theory and theories of interpersonal inequality are highlighted as well as applied research employing concepts from other subfields in sociology. Technological changes in measurement processes have dramatically expanded our understanding of these processes. Not only have measures of sentiment, emotion, and mood improved dramatically but also generative models have made possible prediction of behavior with dramatic precision.The pa...

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