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Emotions are complex concepts involving multiple systems within the body and mind. How, when and for what purpose emotions are expressed is based on context and relationships. In this chapter I take a relational view of emotion and emotion regulation as applied in classroom settings. I first discuss the concepts of emotion and emotion regulation before exploring the physical, social and psychological processes involved in both producing and regulating emotions. Although teachers use, respond to and regulate emotions as part of their everyday work, I suggest that teachers are underprepared for the extent of the emotion work they encounter, or the cost it may have on their emotional reserves. The requirements to successfully navigate emotions in today's educational environment are underappreciated. Only when we acknowledge the relational and cognitive tasks required of teachers under the demand of multiple relationships and the constraints of the responsibilities placed upon them can we fully appreciate the magnitude of the endeavour.

Although the emotion work of teaching has been part of the conversation for more than 30 years, it remains a side conversation, as sort of an afterthought to academics and the accepted mainstream point of teaching and learning. In this chapter, we reflect on what has occurred in the field in the decade since our book Emotion in school: Understanding how the hidden curriculum influences relationships, leadership, teaching and learning was published. We approach the topic through a lens of tensions that we perceive occurring in the field. Emotions in schools, for the most part, remain the hidden curriculum in that in many ways emotions are still downplayed in the classroom and have no space in teacher preparation programs. Teachers, students, administrators, and teacher educators alike are left to deal with the tensions that confront them that educational researchers have yet to resolve – tensions related to measurement (what are we measuring and why), related to how we define emotion and tensions related to practice. In this short chapter we do not have the space to address all tensions that might arise; we have chosen a few to provoke conversation and thoughts about where the field may go from here. Suggestions for beginning teachers and research for teacher preparation are offered.

Purpose – This chapter presents a social emotions-based analysis of justice dynamics, emphasizing the important influence of social emotions (e.g., envy, empathy, schadenfreude, and vicarious joy) on justice judgments and reactions. The chapter also identifies a dimension for organizing social emotions, based on the degree of congruence they reflect between self and other. Congruent social emotions align the individual experiencing the emotion with the individual who is the target of their emotion, thus leading individuals to reason about and perceive justice in ways that are aligned with the target. Conversely, incongruent social emotions create misalignment and lead to justice perceptions that are misaligned and oppositional with regard to the target.

Methodology/approach – The chapter is informed by research suggesting that justice judgments are subjective. We consider the perspective of each of the key parties to justice (i.e., decision makers, justice recipients, and third parties) to evaluate the effect of (in)congruent social emotions on justice.

Findings – The core argument advanced in the chapter is that the (in)congruence of parties’ social emotions shape whether people evaluate the outcomes, procedures, and treatment encountered by a target as being fair. Fairness judgments, in turn, shape parties’ actions and reactions.

Originality/value – The chapter is the first to offer a framework integrating research on organizational justice with research on social emotions, arguing that social emotions strike at the very foundation of justice dynamics in groups and teams. In addition, the congruence dimension described in the chapter offers a novel and potentially important way of thinking about social emotions.

This conceptual chapter introduces an interdisciplinary model of emotional ambivalence using an adapted framework based on the Affective Events Theory (AET). Given the preoccupation in the current literature with studying affective disposition and discrete emotions, there is opportunity for researchers to explore the presence and influence of conflicting emotions. I use the organizational context of Personal Web Usage (PWU) monitoring to set the stage for a hypothetical discussion of the AET-based model of emotional ambivalence. The likelihood of conflict in the cultural norms and values associated with both monitoring activity and employee behavior presents an opportune setting to study emotional ambivalence. After an in-depth description of the model and its application to the PWU-based monitoring context, I conclude with a brief discussion of potential areas for future research.

Theories in the justice area have proliferated with little regard either to their interconnections or to the general scientific criterion of parsimony. Recently, there have been several attempts to integrate justice theories. However, there has been practically no discussion of theoretical method, that is, precisely what it means to integrate two or more theories and what must be done to accomplish it. This chapter advocates building integrated theories by developing smaller modularized theories that can be formulated and assembled for multiple purposes. To illustrate the process, we construct five modules addressing different areas connected to justice issues and show how they may be combined into a single integrated structure.

This chapter addresses how emotional labor relates to effort; an important mediator in the relationship between emotional labor strategies and important outcomes. To better understand how effort functions in these relationships, a new way of understanding emotional labor strategies is considered. This new approach accounts for effort profiles associated with different types of emotional labor. Consequently, three distinct categories of emotional labor strategies emerge; cause-focused, symptom-focused, and avoidance actions. These new categories are contrasted with the current dichotomous understanding of emotional labor strategies; surface and deep acting. How these three distinct sets of emotional labor strategies are specifically related to effort – and thus to outcomes of interest – is discussed and propositions are made. The implications of, and avenues for future research afforded by this new categorization of emotional labor are discussed.

This chapter examines how structural factors related to gender, managerial level, and economic sector could impact the level of experienced person/role conflict in management based on a representative survey conducted among managers in Norway. Person/role conflict appears relevant for understanding emotions in organizations and is linked with emotional dissonance and emotional labor through theoretical and empirical considerations. Our findings reveal that the effect of gender remains significant when controlled for economic sector and managerial level. This indicates that experienced person/role conflict can be partially caused by perceived incongruity between internalized and gender role-related expectations as well as managerial role-related expectations.

Purpose – In recent decades, some sociologists have turned to evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science to support, modify, and reconfigure existing social psychological theory. In this chapter, we build on this momentum by considering the relevance of current work in affective and cognitive neuroscience for understanding emotions and the self. Our principal aim is to enlarge the range of phenomena currently considered by sociologists who study emotion while showing how affective dynamics play an important role across most outcomes and processes of interest to social scientists.

Approach – We focus on the ways external social objects become essential to, and emotionally significant for, the self. To that end, we draw on ideas from phenomenology, pragmatism, classic symbolic interactionism, and dramaturgy. We show how basic affective systems graft on, build from, and extend current social psychological usages of emotions as well as the important sociological work being done on self, from both symbolic interactionist (SI) and identity theory (IT) perspectives. Finally, we turn to the promising directions in studying emotional biographies and various aspects related to embodiment.

Findings – Affective systems consist of brain networks whose connections deepen when activated, with interesting variations observable at the neural, individual, and social levels in which one or more system is more salient than others. Affective systems may come to saturate the construction and maintenance of an autobiography or collective biography, with consequences for self-projection, self-other attunement, and embodied action. In turning to embodiment, however, we consider aspects of cognitive neuroscience that can contribute to ongoing work in neurosociology building on symbolic interactionism.

Practical Implications – The focus on affective systems suggests new research agendas in leveraging emerging neurosociological methods in the laboratory, while pushing for novel, naturalistic observational strategies. The latter, in particular, may be key to deepening sociology's contributions to neuroscience, better positioned to bring the full disciplinary toolkit to bear on these questions.

Social Implications – In considering the embodied and projective aspects of the self, we show how work examining convergence and divergence between embodied and linguistic pathways opens up new insights into how the self develops or acquires behavioral repertoires. As such, this chapter points to the need for holistic approach to understanding the social actor and, thereby, how political, economic, historical, and cultural factors shape self as much as biogenetic and psychological.

Originality of the Chapter – Sociologists think of emotions as either dependent or intervening variables: (1) signaling identity or situational incongruence, (2) states to be managed, and (3) structural dimensions of superordinate–subordinate relationships. Our integration of the theory of affective systems emphasizes the causal primacy emotions have over other behavioral and cognitive functions, clarifying how they play into the construction and maintenance of self and social experience.

In this section, we will highlight three overlapping concepts that are currently used in both the motivation and emotion literatures: goals, agency and expectancy. We recognize that there are other potential overlapping constructs (e.g. interest); however, we focus on these three.

Through an analysis of the leaders of the 1960s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) this paper highlights the importance of individual identity work, and argues for an expanded theoretical treatment of social movement identity processes that takes account of partial identity correspondence (a partial alignment between an individual identity and the movement identity) to include degrees of identity congruence. Actors can embrace a movement, but remain in a state of conflict regarding some dimensions of its identity. Extending James Jasper's ((1997). The art of moral protest: Culture, biography, and creativity in social movements. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) identity classifications, the data suggest that participants engage in identity justification work when incongruence among personal identity (biographical), collective identity (ascribed, i.e. race, gender), and movement identities exist. This work may not reflect the organization's efforts to frame or reframe the movement identity. This study finds that individuals manage incongruence with organizational and tactical movement identities by employing three identity justification mechanisms: (1) personal identity modification of the movement's identity; (2) individual amplification of the common cause dimension of collective identity; and (3) individual amplification of the activist identity through pragmatic politics. Rather than dismantling the past, as Snow and McAdam ((2000). In: S. Stryker, T. J. Owens, & R. W. White (Eds), Self, identity, and social movements (pp. 41–67). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) propose, actors incorporate their biographies as a mechanism to achieve feelings of community and belonging. It is not so much an alignment with the organization's proffered movement identity as it is a reordering of the saliency hierarchy of their identities. Unlike Snow and McAdam's conceptualization of identity amplification, the reordering of an identity hierarchy and the amplification of certain identities is precipitated by the actor's, not the organization's, efforts to align her/his personal identity, collective identity, and movement identities.