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This chapter uses an analysis of nurses' accounts of cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to reflect upon the increasing literature on emotions and embodiment in nursing, and the emotions which CPR aroused in retrospect, of which laughter was the most notable. The process of cardiopulmonary resuscitation and nurses' accounts of their experiences of participating in such events have been used as a vehicle to explore the existence of some fundamental dualisms. The seemingly tenuous relationship between taught CPR theory and the reality of practice has been highlighted. It is a situation in which the skills, knowledge and experience of the nurse are rigorously and publicly tested since a positive performance and outcome are highly prized. The responsibilities of the nurse are significant and the assumption of appropriate emotions is all-important. The difficulties in achieving these may be compounded by bigger questions regarding the appropriateness of the procedure itself. Not surprisingly the role of anxiety in inhibiting performance is considerable and the reactions afterwards vary from sadness to laughter, from emotional outpourings to tight-lipped professional control. The difficulties, dangers and draining nature of this emotional work are submerged beneath the business of body work and practicalities of getting the job done. The unpredictability of the event and the proximity of death result in unique tensions classified in terms of good or bad, success or failure, desirable versus undesirable.

This chapter moves the sociological analysis and understanding of emotions to considerations of processual and structural issues, located in the context of a discussion of U.S. health care settings and organizations. These, the authors argue, represent prime cases of substantial ongoing change, especially increasing rationalization, in contexts where emotions are significantly embedded in the work, thus generating a theoretically intriguing tension between demands for affective neutrality and desires for particularity. Transitions in these health care systems bring forth new structures where expectations, deeply ingrained in professional care-givers and related to important emotional and social issues, are no longer appropriate and new emotional responses have not yet been sufficiently developed or are fragmented. In opening up these questions of emotions in cultural, social and economic change, a topic thus far little explored in the growing literature on emotions, the authors therefore move the analysis of emotions from point in time issues to a more dynamic view. In doing so, they draw on previously developed concepts and positions such as emotional labour, feeling rules, the sentimental order, and the relationship of structure to emotions and evocative transformations, concluding with an agenda for future research utilizing comparisons of other settings such as business and industry.

This chapter develops and refines earlier observations on what the author has called dramaturgical stress. The author shall develop these observations through the use of spatial metaphors, viewing dramaturgical activities in the context of psychosomatic space and social-physical spaces. Spatial metaphors can help to incorporate into theorizing such diverse elements as movement, activities of extension-withdrawal, boundaries and informational flow. They also provide a way of linking mind, body and society, enabling us to analyse embodied actors, their activities and the relational contexts in which they occur. He begins by examining the use of spatial metaphors in some of Erving Goffman's work and conceptualize the maintenance of individual and/or group identity and informational preserves as involving the building and maintenance of boundaries and the regulation of informational flow across such boundaries--in a sense, a geography of emotions and emotional relationships. Dramaturgical stress emanates from threats to self-other or group boundaries, or to the security of informational preserves--threats, in short, to ontological security. He then turns to the embodied aspect of emotions and social relationships. This is followed by a discussion of emotional communication, psychosomatic space as well as dramaturgical stress in intra-psychosomatic space. Finally, he examines dramaturgically stressful encounters in social-physical space and their relationships to an actor's social space and the forms of social control imposed on him or her. The chapter concludes by addressing issues involved in linking dramaturgical stress to health.

This chapter examines the role of emotions and feelings in pain perception and explores how mind/body dualisms impinge on conceptualizations of pain. An embodied approach to pain as an ongoing structure of lived experience is, the authors suggest, able to transcend many former dichotomous modes of western thought, thereby reconciling mind with body, biology with culture, reason with emotion, and championing the (biographical) voice of the lifeworld over the dominant (dispassionate) voice of medicine. People in pain need to find meaning for their symptoms, however inappropriate or anti-therapeutic this may seem from an orthodox biomedical viewpoint. This biographical search for meaning, in turn, calls for the development of ever more sensitive qualitative methodologies which, in contrast to so-called objective measures, capture the emotional and cultural significance of pain in complex, subtle and sophisticated ways through a commitment to lived experience and the mindful body. Whilst all the interviewees acknowledged the existence in some form or other of emotional pain, physical pain, in the form of acute, readily observable symptoms, elicited more legitimacy, sympathy and respect. Men, however, were more likely to separate out these definitions, to ascribe a hierarchy of respectability to different types of pain, and were more reluctant to consider emotional pain as real pain. Women, in contrast, although making similar distinctions, tended to operate with more holistic, integrated notions of pain, meanings which, again, were difficult to access using anything other than qualitative methods. To conclude, the authors suggest that, despite the so-called natural assumptions made about female biology, the attribution to men and women of differential capacities for experiencing, expressing, understanding and responding to pain is primarily linked to gender-differentiated processes of socialization and emotion management.

This chapter examines the changes in the lust balance of sex and love since the sexual revolution in the Netherlands. Although in the twentieth century a sexualization of love and an erotization of sex have continued, until the second half of this century the dominant social code regarding the sexuality of women and men continued to represent a lust-dominated sexuality for men and a complementary (romantic) love or relationship-dominated sexuality for women. This traditional lust balance was attacked in the 1950s, when the topic of female sexual pleasure and gratification gained considerable importance in sexual advice literature. Especially from the 1960s on, the sexual longings of all women, including the respectable and the unmarried, could openly be acknowledged and discussed. The sexual revolution was a breakthrough in the emancipation of female sexuality even though many women throughout these years continued to think of sex in terms of duty, sometimes worsened by the new duty to achieve orgasm. Due to the pill and an increase in mutually expected self-restraint (mutual consent) in interactions, the dangers and fears connected with sex diminished to such a degree that there was an acceleration in the emancipation of sexual emotions and impulses. Empirical evidence is drawn from a study of changes in the popular Dutch feminist monthly magazine Opzij3 (Aside/Out of the Way!), established in 1973, and from sexual advice books. In addition, reference is made to data resulting from sociological and sexological research, as well as from the experience of these decades. Some of these data refer to changes in actual behaviour but most of them refer to changes in codes and ideals of behaviour and feeling.

This chapter attempts to clarify some of the confusion now surrounding the term emotion work, which has been adopted, adapted or criticized to such an extent that it is in danger of becoming a catch-all cliché. As the authors argue, the exploration of socially regulated or managed gender divisions in intimate emotional behaviour entails two interrelated, yet distinct, questions. Are men and women equally susceptible to emotions or discourse of love and intimacy? and Do they handle such emotions in similar ways in the context of these close personal relationships? Using evidence from a variety of recent research, the authors begin by trying to find empirical examples of the kinds of emotion work that women and men do in heterosexual couple relationships. This evidence indeed appears to conform to gender stereotypes of Stepford wives and hollow men. However, as the authors argue, this is partly a product of the conceptual and methodological problems involved in researching men's and women's performance of emotion work. In raising these issues, they then proceed to use recent theories of gender pluralism and doing gender in order to discuss Hochschild's work and psychodynamic theory, which suggests that doing emotion work may lead to a loss of authenticity. Finally, drawing upon their own research on couples, they show how attempts by individual men and women to preserve their sense of authenticity may vary, depending on what the authors term their core identities. In doing so, they attempt to clarify some of the conceptual confusion that surrounds the term emotion work, a concept, they suggest, which has been adopted, adapted or criticized to such an extent that it is in danger of becoming a catch-all cliché.