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Recent research has investigated the emotional underpinnings of support for the political new right. Some of these works focus on the supply-side of support, emphasising specific political styles and discourses, whereas others emphasise the demand-side, highlighting cultural, economic and emotional factors. Lacking from this research, in particular for the European context, is an understanding of how supporters of the new right experience and make sense of pertinent cleavages with regard to emotions. The present study sets out to acquire a more detailed understanding of the emotional narratives of supporters of the new right, in particular with regard to fear and religious cleavages. Using group interviews with supporters of new right parties and movements in Germany, we show that narratives involving fear pertain to the idea of a valued collective ‘We’ that consists of political and cultural elements, and serves as a reference point to collective identity and an antidote to existential insecurities. Further, the collective We is perceived to be threatened by cultural differences and changing majority-minority relations with respect to five domains of social life: demography, liberal democratic order, public majority culture, security and welfare.

Although affect and emotion are often discussed in institutional and organizational research, they are rarely studied systematically and in accordance with their overall relevance. To investigate the decisive but subtle, sometimes barely noticeable or taken-for-granted power of institutions, we need to achieve a better understanding of the close intertwining of institutional rules, operations, and spaces with complex affective dynamics. In this article, we therefore develop an analytical framework that allows to investigate the countless affective dynamics that characterize institutions. First, this framework can help to come to terms with the multidimensionality of institutional affect and thus inform empirical studies of institutions. Second, our approach allows scholars and researchers to make visible those developments and modes of agency that run counter to the official functions and self-understandings of institutions. As a an initial step, we propose a conceptual clarification of „institution“ and „organization“ that incorporates various references to social theory which already foreshadow some dynamics of institutional affect. Further detailing this perspective, we develop an analytical grid that focuses, first, on what we call the „guiding affects“ of institutions and, second, on the internal affective dynamics of institutions. The proposed framework provides a variety of links to discussions of institutions in cultural studies and the social sciences.

The political debate over the inclusion of refugees frequently revolves around cultural differences, in particular differences pertaining to values, which are suspected to hamper social integration. Sociological accounts of values in principle warrant the assumption that different values promote conflict over sensitive social issues. However, only little is known about the actual values of refugees who recently arrived in many European countries. Comparative values research suggests that immigrants from culturally distant countries increase value heterogeneity. In contrast, acculturation and assimilation theories argue that values are not static constructs, but subject to change and transformation. Using data from the IAB-BAMF-SOEP survey, a representative panel of refugees in Germany, and from the World Values Survey, the present study investigates differences in liberal democratic and gender equality values between refugees and German citizens. Results indicate that refugees from almost all countries investigated show higher levels of agreement to these values, except secularism, than Germans.

How do actors on financial markets transform the plethora of informational signals into concrete valuations of traded assets? How do they make decisions in an environment characterized by fundamental uncertainty? Although there is a rich tradition in economic sociology suggesting that emotions and other subjective factors play a decisive role in this regard, empirical studies of their relevance for economic action have remained rare. The present study seeks to fill this void. It investigates the emotional underpinnings of the practices of financial valuation in the German financial sector. Drawing on in-depth interviews with, and ethnographic observations of day traders and fund managers, the study shows that emotions are essential ingredients of their collective calculative practices. Results of the present study yield three empirically grounded key concepts that advance understanding of emotions in financial valuation: First, subjectively experienced market feelings enable traders and managers to imagine imminent market futures. Second, market sentiments reflect traders’ attributions of specific emotional qualities to financial markets and facilitate their understanding of market behaviour. Third, floor emotions are collective emotions in which traders become involved in organizations and on trading floors that help mitigate situational uncertainty.

Als eine der fruhesten dezidiert soziologischen Emotionstheorien kann sicher Theodore D. Kempers Social Interactional Theory of Emotions, erstmals publiziert 1978, bezeichnet werden. Kemper, der bis zu seiner Emeritierung an der St. John’s University in New York lehrte, gilt damit als einer der Pioniere der modernen Emotionssoziologie und hat bis heute eine der wenigen eigenstandigen Emotionstheorien mit eindeutig soziologischen Erklarungsanspruch vorgelegt.

Jonathan H. Turner, der an der University of California, Riverside, lehrt und forscht, kann als einer der produktivsten Emotionssoziologen der Gegenwart bezeichnet werden. Er befasst sich seit Ende der 1980er Jahre ausfuhrlich mit der Rolle von Emotionen in der soziologischen Theorie und hat eine Vielzahl von Artikel und Monographien zur Soziologie der Emotionen veroffentlicht. Sein Zugang zu Emotionen ist stark gepragt durch seine nicht minder umfangreichen Beitrage zur allgemeinen soziologischen Theorie (vgl. Turner 2003b/2006), hier vor allem durch die Auseinandersetzung mit zwei klassischen soziologischen Untersuchungsfeldern: zum einen der sozialen Interaktion in Face-to-Face-Situationen, die Turner vorwiegend in Anlehnung an symbolisch-interaktionistische Theorien konzeptualisiert (vgl. Turner 1988b/1994/2002), zum anderen der sozialen Strukturation, deren Entstehung und Reproduktion er insbesondere aus der Dynamik sozialer Interaktionen zu erklaren versucht (vgl. Turner 1988a/2003a/2010; Turner/ Collins 1989).

The present contribution provides a constructive criticism of Brian Parkinson’s “Heart to Heart: A Relation-Alignment Approach to Emotion’s Social Effects.” I outline a number of points in Parkinson’s approach that I find particularly useful from a sociological perspective on emotions and provide suggestions for further extending his account. In doing so, I concentrate on issues regarding the social ontology of emotion, the proposition of emotional adjacency pairs in verbal and facial communication, the importance of social appraisals in intergroup contexts, and the relevance of social institutions for understanding how some emotions come to dominate certain social relations.

This article expands on the discussion of social and cultural factors for refugees’ feelings of belonging in the receiving society and assesses democratic, civic, and moral values as predictors of belonging. On the one hand, existing research considers shared values between refugees and the receiving society as hallmarks of integration. From this perspective, shared values (or value consensus) are considered predictors of refugees’ feelings of belonging and the formation of social bonds with host-country citizens. On the other hand, values are seen as part of refugees’ cultural capital. From this perspective, liberal and civic value contents, in particular, may promote feelings of belonging, irrespective of whether these values are widely shared with citizens of the host society. This article investigates these contrasting hypotheses, using data from a representative panel of refugees in Germany. Results show that refugees holding liberal democratic values are more likely to experience feelings of welcome in the receiving society. When operationalizing belonging also in terms of refugees spending time with host-country citizens, shared democratic and secular values become more important. Finally, this article suggests that the effect of value consensus on refugees’ feelings of welcome is mediated by how much time refugees spend with host-country citizens members. Taken together, our findings emphasize that in the context of international migration, values are important hallmarks of social integration, although this should not be reduced to popular calls for shared values between immigrants and host-country citizens.

Informed by the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse, the current study explores how employee empowerment is discursively constructed as a management technique. Combing insights from labour process theory, Foucauldian approaches to governmentality and neo-Weberian interpretations of the ideological basis of capitalism, we develop an empirically informed theoretical framework that accounts for the multifaceted character of employee empowerment. Results show, first, that discourse justifies the necessity of this technique by presenting it as an efficient answer to perceived increases in competitive pressures and an ever-changing economic environment since the beginning of the 1990s. The discourse promotes advanced liberal modes of (self-)governance, which are created and maintained through a complex set of means for the control of labour. Second, although the ideological structure of the empowerment discourse is in accordance with the third spirit of capitalism, as identified by Boltanski and Chiapello, it also introduces changes by removing the neo-manager and granting the empowered employee a central role. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that empowerment is associated with strategies for reducing labour costs, such as de-layering and work intensification.

Neurocognitive studies on the emotion-language relation report a significant influence of affective content on the level of single words. However, it is rather difficult to investigate such influence on the sentence level – partly due to a missing theoretical approach to integrate multiple affective meanings. In a previous EEG study, we used impression formation equations based on Affect Control Theory to calculate affective congruency of sentences describing social interactions to successfully predict ERP effects. The current study was crucially motivated by the assumption that the reported early effect of affective incongruency was related to automatic conflict detection associated with activation in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). To test this hypothesis, we replicated the study as an event-related fMRI design: we visually presented the same sentences to 23 participants (12 f, 11 m) in a silent reading reading task while measuring differences in the hemodynamic response in two conditions of affective congruency. The ROI analysis results showed expected enhancement of neural activity for affectively incongruent sentences in left ACC, supporting the assumption that affective language content influences meaning making already at basic semantic processing stages. The reported results represent a replication of neuroscientific evidence for ACT's mathematical model of impression formation.

Thorstein Veblens Theorie der feinen Leute bestimmt den „Standort und Wert der musigen Klasse als okonomischen Faktor im modernen Leben“ (S. 19). Diese theoretische Standortbestimmung der „musigen“ Klasse – also einer Klasse, die nicht arbeitet und ihre Zeit ausschlieslich mit „unproduktiven“ Tatigkeiten und hoch spezialisierten Konsumgewohnheiten verbringt – erfolgt als Kombination historischer und sozialevolutionarer Analysen. Veblen geht zunachst davon aus, dass gesellschaftliche Entwicklung evolutionaren Prinzipien folgt und dass zwei grundsatzliche Stadien der Entwicklung voneinander unterschieden werden konnen: „wilde Volker“ und unterschiedliche Stufen einer „barbarischen Kultur“ (S. 25).

Envy is the painful or resentful awareness of another’s advantage combined with a desire to possess that same advantage. Recent neuroscientific research has begun to shed light on the brain regions that process the experience of envy, including regions of the prefrontal cortex involved in emotional processing and social cognition. It is still unclear, however, which regions of the brain are functionally connected during the experience of envy. We recorded functional neuroimaging data while inducing simulated envy in participants, experienced through a perspective-taking hypothetical scenario task. In this task, participants took the perspective of a protagonist portrayed in a written description and compared themselves to either i) a self-similar/superior individual, ii) a self-dissimilar/superior individual, or iii) a self-dissimilar/average individual. During each comparison, participants also reported how much envy they experienced while taking the protagonists perspective. We demonstrate an inverse relationship in the connectivity of the left superior frontal gyrus to both the right supramarginal gyrus and the precuneus with respect to self-reported envy ratings across participants. In other words, we show that the greater the functional connectivity that the left superior frontal gyrus shares with the right supramarginal gyrus and precuneus, the less reported envy a participant experiences. Overall, our results are in line with previous research implicating the superior frontal gyrus in the reappraisal of negative emotions and extend these findings by showing this region is also involved in modulating the simulated experience of the social comparative, negative emotion of envy.

Refugees are at an increased risk of mental health problems and low subjective well-being. Living circumstances in the host country are thought to play a vital role in shaping these health outcomes, which, in turn, are prerequisites for successful integration. Using data from a representative survey of 4325 adult refugees who arrived in Germany between 2013 and 2016, we investigated how different living conditions, especially those subject to integration policies, are associated with psychological distress and life satisfaction using linear regression models. Our findings show that an uncertain legal status, separation from family, and living in refugee housing facilities are related to higher levels of distress and decreased life satisfaction. Being employed, contact to members of the host society, and better host country language skills, by contrast, are related to reduced distress and higher levels of life satisfaction. These associations should inform decision making in a highly contested policy area. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s10903-019-00968-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Diskriminierung aufgrund ethnischer Zugehörigkeit ist zwar mit rechtlichen und sozialen Normen unvereinbar, wird jedoch vielfach empirisch beobachtet. Die vorliegende Studie geht der Frage nach, ob ethnische Diskriminierung Bestandteil des sozialen Miteinanders in einem Kernbereich der Gesellschaft, der Politik, ist. Der Beitrag untersucht ethnische Diskriminierung in der Interaktion zwischen gewählten politischen Repräsentanten*innen, denen gemeinhin ein moralischer Vorbildcharakter zugeschrieben wird, und ihren Wählern*innen. Zudem möchten wir wissen, ob sich das Ausmaß ethnischer Diskriminierung zwischen Vertretern*innen unterschiedlicher Parteien unterscheidet. Dazu haben wir ein Korrespondenztest-Feldexperiment zur Hilfsbereitschaft von Abgeordnetenbüros des Deutschen Bundestags im Vorfeld der Bundestagswahl 2013 durchgeführt. An alle Bundestagsabgeordneten wurden Hilfeersuchen per E-Mail gerichtet, die randomisiert entweder mit einem deutsch oder türkisch klingenden Namen unterzeichnet waren. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen, dass E-Mails mit türkisch klingenden Namen weniger häufig Antworten erhielten. Das ist ein Indiz für ethnische Diskriminierung. Zudem zeigen wir, dass sich das Diskriminierungsverhalten zwischen den Büros der Abgeordneten der im Bundestag vertretenen Parteien unterscheidet. Wir finden eine schwach ausgeprägte Diskriminierungsneigung bei Abgeordnetenbüros der Fraktion CDU/CSU, hingegen keine Anzeichen für Diskriminierung bei Abgeordnetenbüros von SPD, FDP, B90/Die Grünen und Die Linke. Nach Kontrolle des Lebensalters der Abgeordneten, der Bevölkerungsdichte des Wahlkreises, des Ausländeranteils in der Wahlkreisbevölkerung und, ob es sich um einen ost- oder westdeutschen Wahlkreis handelt, zeigen sich in den Modellen jedoch keine signifikanten Unterschiede zwischen den Fraktionen mehr.

Theories of political emotion suggest that feelings towards an issue or candidate are often better predictors for support than attitudes or preferences. We investigate whether this conjecture also ...

The rise of the radical populist right has been linked to fundamental socioeconomic changes fueled by globalization and economic deregulation. Yet, socioeconomic factors can hardly fully explain the rise of the new right. We suggest that emotional processes that affect people’s identities provide an additional explanation for the current popularity of the new radical right, not only among low- and medium-skilled workers, but also among the middle classes whose insecurities manifest as fears of not being able to live up to salient social identities and their constitutive values, and as shame about this actual or anticipated inability. This link between fear and shame is particularly salient in contemporary capitalist societies where responsibility for success and failure is increasingly individualized, and failure is stigmatized through unemployment, receiving welfare benefits, or labor migration. Under these conditions, we identify two psychological mechanisms behind the rise of the new populist right. The first mechanism of ressentiment explains how negative emotions – fear and insecurity, in particular – transform through repressed shame into anger, resentment and hatred towards perceived ‘enemies’ of the self and associated social groups, such as refugees, immigrants, the long-term unemployed, political and cultural elites, and the ‘mainstream’ media. The second mechanism relates to the emotional distancing from social identities that inflict shame and other negative emotions, and instead promotes seeking meaning and self-esteem from aspects of identity perceived to be stable and to some extent exclusive, such as nationality, ethnicity, religion, language and traditional gender roles.

Although the effects of nationalized mega-events on national identification have been theorized and examined by a number of studies, little is known about the specific mechanisms that bring about changes in people’s attitudes towards their country. The authors hypothesize that during nationwide rituals, in particular sports mega-events, participants experience collective emotional entrainment in the context of national symbols and practices that in turn increases their identification with their nation. The authors present results of a naturalistic quasi-experimental study around the 2012 uefa European Football Championship with participants from Germany, the United Kingdom, and Poland. Using a multidimensional measurement of national identification, the authors show that the experience of emotional entrainment is associated with changes in symbolic, civic, and solidary facets of identification in ways specific to the different national contexts.

Zusammenfassung: Im Gegensatz zu Rache und Vergeltung ist Vergebung als zentrale Bewältigungsstrategie interpersonaler Konflikte bislang nicht zum Gegenstand der soziologischen Forschung geworden. Auf der Grundlage einer qualitativen Fallstudie widmet sich der vorliegende Beitrag daher der Frage, welche sozialen Bedeutungsdimensionen für die Vergebung nicht justiziabler Vergehen konstitutiv sind. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen, dass mögliche Reaktionen auf solche Vergehen durch ambivalente und zum Teil widersprüchliche Verhaltenserwartungen gekennzeichnet sind, die bei Betroffenen deutliche emotionale Irritationen hervorrufen. Aus wissenssoziologischer Perspektive illustrieren wir dann am Beispiel von Interaktionsverläufen, in denen moralische Bewertungen eine zentrale Rolle spielen, dass gelingende Vergebungsakte von der Regulierung und Transformation bestimmter Emotionen abhängen. Diese Emotionen können als Referenzpunkte des Fremdverstehens im Kontext solcher Vergehen verstanden werden und legen ein Verständnis von Vergebung als genuin sozial interaktives Geschehen nahe.

Recent years have witnessed substantial transformations of the public sphere that are driven by processes of transnationalization, migration, and digitalization and in turn significantly fuel social and political change. The public sphere continues to be the most important space where these processes and changes and their implications for social coexistence, belonging, and solidarity are debated and negotiated by various actors. Traditional views have portrayed the public sphere as a locus of language-based communicative rationality, deliberation, and the exchange of different views and arguments. The international conference Public Spheres of Resonance: Constellations of Affect and Language will question these normative conceptions and proposes to conceive of contemporary public spheres as often fragmented spaces of affective resonance that emerge from the power of language to affect and to ascribe and instill collective emotion. This is not a self-evident conjecture because most affect theories suggest to conceive of the social not primarily in terms of language, discourse and conceptual thought, but instead as an assemblage of bodies and their capacities to affect and be affected. Although this is a fruitful correction of existing bias towards overreliance on linguistic categories in the humanities and social sciences, it often oversteps the mark in its disregard for language. Language, in particular in a pragmatic sense and much like affect, is a genuinely relational category in its capacity to convey meaning. However, meaning is not restricted to propositions and denotations but critically involves connotative, associative, and bodily sources. The conference Public Spheres of Resonance: Constellations of Affect and Language therefore assumes that language not only conveys, represents, and attributes emotions, but also has the capacity to affect and to establish affective resonance, in both consonant and dissonant ways. The conference will investigate this power not only for spoken language, but also for different types of texts as the constituencies of different public spheres (including counterpublics) in which the terms and conditions of social coexistence are reflected and negotiated, for instance politics, media, and the arts. The conference focuses on issues of belonging, the recognition and accommodation of difference, equality, and solidarity and investigates how affect and emotion interfere with, undermine, or fortify established and esteemed rules of political engagement.Programme Thursday, April 27, 2017 Venue: ICI Berlin Christinenstr. 18-19, Haus 8, 10119 Berlin 18.15 Welcome and Introduction Anne Fleig & Christian von Scheve 18.30 Keynote Kathrin Röggla (Berlin) Es ist die Sprache, stupid! Affekt im öffentlichen Diskurs with simultaneous interpreting, Public Spheres of Resonance: Constellations of Affect and Language, conference, ICI Berlin, 27 April 2017

On the basis of a review of positions on the relationship on language/discourse, affect, and emotions as conceived of in social and cultural sciences, the chapter makes a methodological proposal to grasp affective dynamics in discourse. In a case study centering on German news coverage after the Charlie Hebdo attack, “Reading for Affect” is laid out as a perspective in analyzing discourse that is informed by affect theories, approaching (a) the discursive ascription of emotion to bodies, (b) relating discourse bodies with affective means, and (c) bodily material characteristics of discourse itself.

This chapter outlines a concept of emotion according to which emotions are object- or situation-directed affective comportments, sorted into culturally established and linguistically labeled categories, such as fear, anger, or happiness. Emotion categories mirror specific kinds of evaluative world-relations, such as fear in response to imminent danger or indignation to an offense. In line with concepts of emotion in a range of academic disciplines, the proposed concept conceives of emotions as cognitive and affective processes characterized by specific configurations of phenomenal experiences, bodily changes, expressive behaviors, and action tendencies.

Available online 18 January 2019. We compared event-related potentials during sentence reading, using impression formation equations of a model of affective coherence, to investigate the role of affective content processing during meaning making. The model of Affect Control Theory (ACT; Heise, 1979, 2007) predicts and quantifies the degree to which social interactions deflect from prevailing social norms and values – based on the affective meanings of involved concepts. We tested whether this model can predict the amplitude of brain waves traditionally associated with semantic processing. To this end, we visually presented sentences describing basic subject-verb-object social interactions and measured event-related potentials for final words of sentences from three different conditions of affective deflection (low, medium, high) as computed by a variant of the ACT model (Schröder, 2011). Sentence stimuli were closely controlled across conditions for alternate semantic dimensions such as contextual constraints, cloze probabilities, co-occurrences of subject-object and verb-object relations. Personality characteristics (schizotypy, Big Five) were assessed to account for individual differences, assumed to influence emotion-language interactions in information processing. Affective deflection provoked increased negativity of ERP waves during the P2/N2 and N400 components. Our data suggest that affective incoherence is perceived as conflicting information interfering with early semantic processing and that increased respective processing demands – in particular in the case of medium violations of social norms – linger on until the N400 time window classically associated with the integration of concepts into embedding context. We conclude from these results that affective meanings influence basic stages of meaning making. This research was funded by a grant from the Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion” at Freie Universität Berlin to C.v.S, T.S. and M.C. (project #411) as part of the Excellence Initiative (research grant EXC 302) of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG).

Eine grundlegende Annahme soziologischer Auseinandersetzungen mit der Bedeutung menschlicher Emotionalitat fur das Soziale liegt darin, Emotionen als soziale und kulturelle Konstrukte zu verstehen. Das bedeutet zum einen, dass Emotionen nicht vollkommen arbitrar und individuell auftreten, sondern mehr oder weniger systematisch und strukturiert, etwa in Anlehnung an bestehende Machtverhaltnisse, soziale Ungleichheiten oder die Struktur sozialer Netzwerke. Zum anderen bedeutet diese Sicht, dass Emotionen eng verbunden sind mit sozial geteilten Normen, Werten, Uberzeugungen und Praktiken, sowohl in Bezug auf die Situationen, in denen sie entstehen – also wie sie erlebt, kommuniziert und reflektiert werden – als auch hinsichtlich ihrer Kulturbedeutung, beispielsweise ihrer kulturellen Wertschatzung oder Tabuisierung, ihrer Kommodifizierung und politischen Instrumentalisierung (s. Kap. VI.53) oder ihres Stellenwerts als Gegenstand der Wissenschaften.