Turner J. H. (2010), The Stratification of Emotions - Some Preliminary

The Stratification of Emotions: Some Preliminary
Generalizations*
Jonathan H. Turner, University of California
Like all valued resources, positive and negative emotions are unequally distributed
in a society and constitute an important basis of social stratification. In this article, a
general conceptual scheme and a more specific theory of emotions are employed to
offer a preliminary explanation of the dynamics of emotional stratification. This theory
attempts to explain which specific positive and negative emotions will be aroused and
distributed across the social class system as well as among members of differentially
evaluated social categories. The theory emphasizes the importance of repression and
subsequent attribution processes as central to understanding the nature, intensity, and
distribution of negative emotions among individuals in lower social classes and deva-
lued social categories. By viewing emotions as not just reactions to the unequal distri-
bution of other resources but, rather, as a valued or punishing resource in their own
right, it becomes possible to better understand how micro-level dynamics occurring in
face-to-face encounters are affected by, and have effects on, meso-level and macro-
level social structures and their respective cultures. In particular, the distribution of
emotions can help account for both the processes of legitimatization of macrostructures
and, at the same time, de-legitimization of, and collective action against, macrostruc-
tures. This analysis of emotions questions much recent theorizing and commentary,
often within postmodern analysis, about the authenticity of people’s emotions in con-
temporary society. The stratification of emotions is as real as inequality in money and
power, and it has significant effects on the dynamics of human societies.
For most of the history of sociological theorizing, the dynamics of emo-

tions were virtually ignored by sociological theorists. With the exception of
Charles Horton Cooley’s (1902) analysis of pride and shame, Vilfredo Pareto’s
([1935] 1963) portrayal of sentiments and derivations, and perhaps Marx’s
views on the anger-arousing potential of alienation (Ollman 1976), the topic
of emotions was given short shrift. There are, of course, hints of underlying
emotions in Geog Simmel’s ([1907] 1990) portrayal of conflict and marginal-
ity, Émile Durkheim’s ([1897] 1997) concern with egoism and anomie as well
as emotional effervescence ([1912] 1965) or Weber’s ([1922] 1968) portrayal
of affective action, but still, the early sociological canon remains rather silent
on what emotions are, how they are aroused, where they are distributed, and
what their consequences for people and sociocultural arrangements are. By the
Sociological Inquiry, Vol. 80, No. 2, May 2010, 168–199

2010 Alpha Kappa Delta
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-682X.2010.00326.x
STRATIFICATION OF EMOTIONS 169
mid-1970s, however, the study of emotions entered sociological theory, pri-

marily through the works of Erving Goffman (1967), Theodore Kemper
(1978), David Heise (1979), Arlie Hochschild (1979, 1983), Thomas Scheff
(1979, 1988), and Randall Collins (1975). And since this time, a number of
vibrant theoretically informed research traditions in emotions has emerged (for
a review, see Turner and Stets 2005). Much of this work on emotions is decid-
edly micro-level in focus, but there have been several lines of work examining
the macro-level consequences of emotional arousal (e.g., Barbalet 1998). Sur-
prisingly, even the literature on social movements abandoned, until recently,
theorizing on the emotions that drive these movements and, instead, shifted
focus to resource mobilization (Tilly 1978; Zald and McCarthy 1977), seem-
ingly forgetting that one of the critical resources for mobilization is emotional
arousal. Similarly, postmodern theorizing has evidenced a clear tendency to
view emotions as inauthentic and as mere guises that adorn the overly reflex-
ive self. Indeed, even when intense emotions have been examined within the
postmodern tradition, they have been analyzed under the curious rubric of
‘‘post-emotional’’ society (e.g., Mestrovi’c 1997).
Yet, if we look at the real world, we can see authentic emotions every-
where, pushing people into both individual and collective actions. On the neg-
ative side, genocide, terrorism, spousal abuse, murder, warfare, gang
shootings, street protests, and many other volatile events are fueled by intense
negative emotions. People do not seem to have adopted the blasé attitude of
Simmel’s marginal person or the hyperreflexive self of postmodernism. They
have real anger, hatred, humiliated fury, fear, high anxiety, and sadness; and
they are prepared to act on these emotions under specifiable sociocultural con-
ditions. More positive emotions, at times mixed with negative emotions, are
often the motive force behind commitments to political and religious ideolo-
gies as well as to a variety of social causes such as movements devoted to
reaffirming human rights or mitigating environmental degradation. The obvi-
ous point here is that these emotional states are not trivial; they are not arti-
fices of an overly reflexive self; and they are not fleeting and transitory.
Rather, they have powerful effects on people’s thoughts and actions, and on
their reactions to more meso- and macro-level sociocultural formations. The
dynamics of emotions, therefore, must be at the center of sociological inquiry
because they are, ultimately, the motive force behind forces that build up and
sustain social structures and their attendant cultures, as well as the force that
tears sociocultural formations down. How, then, could sociology ignore the
study of emotions for over a century? And, how can some present-day sociolo-
gies see emotions as ephemeral and as not quite ‘‘real.’’ Sociology cannot, I
argue, fully understand human cognition, behavior, interaction, and social
organization without a theory of the emotions that drive all social processes.
170 JONATHAN H. TURNER
In this article, I will briefly lay out the theory of emotions that I have
been developing over the last decade (Turner 1988, 1996a, 1996b, 1997,
1999a, 1999b, 2000a, 2000b, 2002, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2008), but I will
turn to a topic that I have not explored before: the stratification of emotions.
Like any other resource, emotions are distributed unequally across social
strata; and the relative distribution of positive and negative emotions has sig-
nificant consequences for not only the dynamics of stratification but also for
all other social processes in societies. The distribution of emotion is generated
by the same institutional dynamics that distribute unequally other resources
such as material wealth, power, and prestige. People’s experiences within
institutional domains generate a legacy of emotions, just as they determine
how much money, power, prestige, health care, or any other valued resource
they come to possess. Moreover, part of this emotional legacy is individuals’
reactions to their ability or inability to gain material well-being, power, or
prestige; and so, emotions are not only directly distributed to individuals play-
ing in roles within institutional domains, they are also generated by their reac-
tions to the kinds and amounts of other resources that they receive from these
domains. A theory of human stratification must thus incorporate a view of
emotions as a critical resource that, like all other resources, is stratified.
A Simple Conceptual Scheme of Human Social Organization
Figure 1 outlines my view on human social organization as unfolding at
three fundamental levels: micro, meso, and macro. These three levels are, of
course, analytical distinctions but they are much more: they denote the reality
of social organization itself. They are not an analytical fiction but, in fact, a
representation of actual social reality. At the micro-level are focused face-
to-face encounters as well as unfocused encounters (Goffman 1961, 1963,
1971); at the meso level are corporate units (revealing a division of labor
organized to pursue goals, however vaguely defined) and categoric units
(social distinctions, such as those denoting class, ethnicity, or gender, that people
make and use in evaluating and responding to others who are placed into a
social category); at the macro-level are institutional domains, stratification
systems, societies, and systems of societies. As the arrows connecting the boxes
in Figure 1 emphasize, these levels of reality have causal effects on each other.
An important property of social reality is embedding, whereby micro-
units are embedded in the structure and culture of meso-level units; in turn,
meso-level units are embedded in institutional domains and stratification sys-
tems lodged inside a society and, often, systems of societies. Another way to
look at embedding is to recognize that smaller units are constrained by the
structure and culture of larger social units. But, we should not forget that, ulti-
mately, meso structures and their cultures are constructed from micro-level
Figure 1
A Simple Conceptual Scheme.
encounters; institutional domains are built from meso-level corporate units

(and, to a lesser degree, categoric units); stratification systems from categoric
units; societies from institutional domains and stratification systems; and sys-
tems of societies from societies. These more bottom-up features of social real-
ity, where larger structures are built from (and often changed by) forces
operating at a lower level of reality, can be important in understanding the
dynamics of societies, especially since emotions generated in micro-level
encounters are often the fuel for either change of, or commitment to, meso
and macrostructures and their respective cultures. However, most of the time,
meso processes are constrained by the culture and structure of the macro-level
of reality, while micro-encounters are restricted by meso structures and cul-
ture. I will not elaborate upon this simple model here (see Turner 2002, 2003,
2007a for more extensive treatments) since the critical elements of this model
will be revealed in trying to understand the stratification of human emotions.
The Institutional Basis of Societal Stratification
Institutional domains are congeries of corporate units (groups, organiza-
tions, and communities) devoted to resolving basic problems confronting
members of a population. Functional theory was not wrong in viewing institu-
tions as meeting ‘‘survival requisites’’ but this approach was not the best way
to conceptualize these domains. Institutions arise from selection pressures
(problems of adjustment and adaptation) confronting populations, but once
they exist, they reveal dynamics that often have little to do with adaptation
(indeed, often just the opposite). For our purposes, the most essential feature
of institutions is that they evidence a structure and culture oriented to meeting
selection pressures. Thus, an economy is composed of meso-level units, linked
together in dynamic ways, to deal with problems of gathering, producing, and
distributing resources; a kinship system is structured around reproduction of
persons; a polity emerges to deal with problems of coordination and control;
and so on for all institutional systems. The culture of an institutional domain
always reveals an ideology about what ought and should occur in a domain,
with this ideology representing an application of more general societal and
inter societal values. Institutional domains also evidence general norms that
most people in a society come to understand. And, the corporate and categoric
units from which a domain is constructed also evidence ideologies and norms
that reflect the ideologies and norms of more inclusive institutional domains
and stratification systems. An under theorized feature of all institutional
domains is that they utilize a generalized symbolic medium of exchange for
transaction within a domain and for exchanges with corporate units in other
domains. Table 1 lists, in rough form, some of the key generalized media for
a number of institutional domains. I am re-introducing this old idea from
Simmel ([1907] 1990); later Talcott Parsons (1963a, 1963b), and most
recently, Niklas Luhmann (1982, 1988), because it is important in understand-
ing the dynamics of any institutional domain. Moreover, generalized media
are employed as the terms of discourse by actors within a domain and efforts
to ‘‘thematize’’ actions in a domain (Luhmann 1982); and from these uses of
generalized media come the moral themes contained in the ideology specify-
ing what is right and proper in an institutional domain. For example, money is
the generalized medium of an economy, and it is also the symbolic medium
structuring discourse and thematicizing that, in turn, leads to the formation of
an ideology in the economic domain. Love is the symbolic medium of the
family, while being the symbolic basis for constructing themes and ideologies
about family life. And so it goes for each domain.
Table 1
Generalized Symbolic Media of Institutional Domains
1. Economy Money and other metrics of value that can be converted into
money
2. Polity Power or the capacity to control the actions of other actors
3. Law Influence or the capacity to define what is just and right for
actors as well as the ability to adjudicate social relations
among actors
4. Religion Sacred ⁄ Supernatural or the ability to explain events in terms
of the power and influence of non-observable forces
5. Education Transmission of knowledge or the capacity to impart
knowledge to actors
6. Kinship Love ⁄ Loyalty or the use of strong affective states to engender
strong attachments and commitments among kin
7. Science Verifiable Knowledge ⁄ Truth or the search for knowledge in
the empirical world revealing truths about the operation of
this world
8. Medicine Health or the ability to sustain the normal functioning of the
human body
Generalized symbolic media are more than symbols, however. They can
also be resources, often highly valued resources that form the basis of the
stratification system. Thus, money, power, influence, love, knowledge, truth,
and other media are valuable resources in their own right; and they are often
directly involved in stratification. For example, money and power are the med-
ium, respectively, for economy and polity, but these symbolic media are
highly valued resources that form the basis of any stratification system. At
times, symbolic media work indirectly, as is the case where education, knowl-
edge, and truth can allow persons to claim honor and prestige at a minimum
and perhaps money and power at a maximum. Hence, either as resources
themselves or as resources that allow access to other kinds of resources strati-
fying a population, generalized symbolic media are the basis for the unequal
distribution of what is valued in a society. Moreover, the pattern of resource
distribution (from each institutional domain) forming stratification of a society
is legitimated by a composite of the ideologies from each resource-distributing
institutional domain. Symbolic media are, therefore, both the resource that
is distributed unequally and the basis for the ideologies that legitimate
inequality.
Institutional domains use generalized symbolic media not only for trans-
actions, but, as noted above, these media are the foundation for ideologies that
proclaim social worth (another valued resource). Inherent in this dynamic is
the potential for stratification because resources can possess value in what they
allow people to do—for example, to use wealth to purchase desirable goods
and services or to use power to tell others what to do. Symbolic media can
also be inherently rewarding and valued—as is the case with having power or
money, with feeling loved, with possessing knowledge or influence. Often this
reward value is enhanced because possessing one kind of resource allows peo-
ple to gain access to others, as is the case when money is used to buy power,
when educational credentials marking knowledge are used to garner money in
high-paying jobs or to claim prestige, or when love generates confidence that
enables individuals to secure money, power, or prestige. There is, then, a kind
of compounding of resources, with those having one set of resources being
able to secure other valued resources. This aspect of stratification has often
been emphasized by sociologists from Marx to present-day scholars, but there
is a more complex and nuanced dynamic here. Typically, theories recognize
that money, power, and prestige have interaction effects, with possession of
one of these basic resources allowing access to the others; almost all resources
have this same effect, although perhaps to a somewhat lesser degree. For
instance, knowledge can be used to garner wealth, power, and prestige; love
and the more general experience of positive emotions can be used to do the
same thing, as can influence and possession of truth.
This compounding occurs because each symbolic medium is valuable in
its own right and because each symbolic medium is the basis for an ideology
that establishes what is good, bad, worthy, or unworthy within an institutional
domain. As a result, possession of a generalized symbolic medium allows
access to feelings of worth as defined by the ideology of a domain, and this
feeling leads to the arousal of emotions which are yet another resource that
can be added to the mix of resources made possible by generalized symbolic
media. As people learn the culture of each domain, they also internalize the
standards and criteria of worth contained in institutional ideologies and use
these to evaluate self, others, members of categoric units, and those playing
roles of corporate units, with the result that stratification is more than material
resources but the distribution of worth and value as well as the emotions that
these generate.
Emotions are, then, another valued resource distributed by institutional
domains. Some domains like the family are organized around a symbolic
medium that is also an emotion: love. This emotion is inherently valuable and,
at the same time, often generates a more complex set of positive emotions that
give people confidence to secure other resources in diverse institutional
domains. More typically, people’s experiences in those institutional domains

distributing resources have large effects on the emotions that are experienced.
Individuals who are consistently successful across institutional domains will
not only garner the resources of domains, they will also experience a range of
positive emotions that, themselves, are highly valuable and that also provide
the confidence to secure additional resources across domains. Conversely, indi-
viduals who are less successful in securing the resources of one or more insti-
tutional domain(s) will experience an even larger array of negative emotions
that are inherently punishing and that often work against their capacity to
secure resources in other institutional domains. Indeed, negative emotional
energy aroused in one domain generally reduces not only the chances of get-
ting more resources in this domain, but this negative emotional energy also
has spill-over effects and can operate against securing resources in other
domains. And, as this inability to garner resources across domains cascades,
persons will experience even more negative emotional arousal. Such is not
always the case, of course, as the person who has been shamed in the family
uses the anger that comes from repressed shame to be successful in business
or sports as distinctive institutional domains, thus securing at least money and
perhaps prestige.
Just like all resources distributed by institutional domains, emotions have
this tendency to compound their effects: positive emotions provide the energy
to gather resources in many domains, whereas negative emotions in one
domain will often work against securing resources in others. The end result is
for emotions to become stratified; and the distribution of positive and negative
emotional energies among members of a population will generally correspond
to the distribution of other resources such as money, power, prestige, influ-
ence, and love. Moreover, as emotions become stratified, especially the distri-
bution of negative emotions, they have a potential that other resources do not
reveal: the capacity to mobilize individuals into collective action in an effort
to gain access to those resources that they have been denied. Collective protest
and revolt do not arise from inequalities in material resources; for individuals
to be sufficiently dissatisfied and to incur the risks of protest and revolt, pow-
erful negative emotions need to have been aroused over a long period of time,
collectively shared, and express through de-legitimating ideologies that chal-
lenge the ideologies of key institutional domains.
The emotional dynamics that ensue from the stratification of emotions
are, however, complex. At times negative emotions can push individuals to
actions that allow them to secure resources in institutional domains, as is the
case when a person who has experienced shame in games at school becomes a
star academic or political leader. Conversely, experiencing positive emotions
increases the chances but does not guarantee that individuals will secure
resources across institutional domains; and if they do not, they may suffer a
loss in positive emotional energy that perpetuates their diminished position in
the stratification system.
Perhaps the most difficult analytical and empirical problem in understand-
ing the distribution of emotions and their effects on individual and collective
action stems from the fact that negative emotions are painful and, hence, will
often be repressed. And, once defense mechanisms are activated, the repressed
emotion will often transmute into a new emotion or set of emotions that
change people’s perceptions and propensities for action. Thus, a theory seek-
ing to explain the stratification of emotions must take account of the effects of
defense mechanisms. Moreover, it is also critical that we develop a more
robust conception of emotions beyond crude polarities like positive and nega-
tive emotional energy; for, while emotions can be valenced along a positive–
negative continuum, the specific emotions aroused have varying effects on the
potential for repression and for the actions of individuals.
I must, therefore, backtrack a bit and lay out the general theory of
emotions that I have been developing over the last decade. Then, I hope to
pull together the general conceptual scheme, the view that emotions are strati-
fied like any other valued resource, the dynamics of specific emotional states
that become stratified, and the potential of various patterns of emotional strati-
fication for changing institutional domains and ⁄ or stratification systems in a
society.
A General Theory of Emotions
The Palate of Human Emotions
Table 2 presents my overview of the human emotional repertoire (Turner
1994, 1999b, 2000a, 2000b, 2002, 2007a). There are, of course, other such
summaries within sociology (e.g., Kemper 1987; Thamm 1992, 2004, 2006)
and in psychology (e.g., Plutchik 1980). In my view there are, at a minimum,
four primary emotions: satisfaction-happiness, aversion-fear, assertion-anger,
disappointment-sadness. Primary emotions are hard wired in the human neuro-
anatomy and, hence, are invariant across all humans, although like language,
they often reveal wide variations in just how they are expressed. There are
other candidates for primary emotions such as disgust, expectancy, surprise,
and a handful of others, but all researchers would agree that the four listed in
Table 2 are primary. (See Turner [2000a:68–69] as well as Turner and Stets
[2005:14–15] for lists of hypothesized primary emotions.) Columns 2, 3, and 4
of Table 1 delineate variations in these primary emotions from their
low- through moderate- to high-intensity manifestations. Column 5 summa-
rizes what I term first-order elaborations of primary emotions, which represent
Table 2
Variant and Elaborations of Primary Emotions
Variations
Low Moderate High First-order Second-order

Emotion intensity intensity intensity emotions emotions
Satisfaction- Content Cheerful Joy +Fear: wonder, hopeful,

Happiness Sanguine Buoyant Bliss gratitude, prided
Serenity Friendly Rapture +Anger: vengeance,
Gratified Amiable Jubilant appeased, calmed soothed,
Enjoyment Gaiety relish, triumphant, bemused
Elation +Sadness: nostalgia,
Delight yearning, hopefulness
Thrilled
Exhilarated
Aversion-Fear Concern Misgivings Terror +Happiness: awe, reverence,
Hesitant Trepidation Horror veneration
Reluctance Anxiety High +Anger: revulsed, repulsed,
Shyness Scared anxiety dislike, envy, antagonism
Alarmed +Sadness: dread, wariness
Unnerved
Panic
STRATIFICATION OF EMOTIONS
(Continued)
177
178
Table 2
(Continued)
Variations

JONATHAN H. TURNER
Assertion-Anger Annoyed Displeased Dislike +Happiness: snubbing,

Agitated Frustrated Loathing mollified, rudeness,
Irritated Belligerent Disgust placated, righteousness
Vexed Contentious Hate +Fear: abhorrence,
Perturbed Hostility Despise jealousy, suspicion
Nettled Ire Detest +Sadness: bitterness,
Rankled Animosity Hatred depression, betrayed
Piqued Offended Seething
Consternation Wrath
Furious
Inflamed
Incensed
Outrage
(Continued)
Table 2
(Continued)
Variations

Disappointment- Discouraged Dismayed Sorrow +Happiness: acceptance, +Fear, anger:

Sadness Downcast Disheartened Heartsick moroseness, solace, guilt
Dispirited Glum Despondent melancholy +Anger, fear:
Resigned Anguished +Fear: forlornness, shame
Gloomy Crestfallen remorsefulness, misery +Anger, fear:
Woeful +Anger: aggrieved, alienation
Pained discontent, dissatisfied,
Dejected unfulfilled, boredom,
grief, envy, sullenness
STRATIFICATION OF EMOTIONS
179
a greater amount of one primary emotion ‘‘mixed’’ (to be metaphorical) with a

lesser amount of another primary emotion. And the last column at the lower
right presents three second-order elaborations, which are mixes among three
primary emotions, and in the case summarized in Table 2, the three negative
primary emotions.
Others have also developed schemes like that represented in Table 2; the
key point is that humans possess a repertoire of about 100 emotional states to
communicate their emotional states. These emotions are easily read, once role-
takers have a sense for the context in which the gestures marking these emo-
tions are known. Moreover, these emotions are ascertained primarily through
body language rather than speech, although intonations and other speech acts
can also be employed to discover others’ emotional states. As I have argued,
body language is more primal than spoken language, having evolved millions
of years before auditory-based languages in the hominine line (see Turner
1996a, 1997, 1999a, 2000a, 2007a; Turner and Maryanski 2005, for a review
of the evolutionary biology behind human emotions).
The most dramatic feature of Table 2 is that three of the four primary
emotions are negative; they are not by themselves likely to promote social
bonding and solidarity. Thus, to the degree that emotions are the ‘‘glue’’ that
holds society together, the list of primary emotions suggests that there is
more likelihood that the negative emotions will be aroused, will breach
encounters and, over time, will break societies apart. Anger, fear, and sadness
do not promote solidarity; they can work to make negative sanctions effec-
tive, but only if negative sanctions are experienced by persons, will social
solidarity be low.
In the human emotional repertoire, then, the hard-wired emotions (i.e.,
primary emotions that are part of our mammalian heritage) are decidedly
biased toward the negative. First-order and second-order elaborations of emo-
tions were, I have argued (Turner 2000a), one way that natural selection got
around this negative bias. By combining negative emotions with each other or
with positive emotions, a larger repertoire of positively valenced emotions
could be produced, while the impact of the negative emotions can be
mitigated. For example, when satisfaction-happiness is combined with fear,
emotions like wonder, gratitude, relief, pride, and reverence are generated
(although the neurology involved in this generation is not well understood);
and these emotions are more likely to promote solidarity than would fear
alone. Or, when satisfaction-happiness is combined with anger, emotions like
bemused, triumphant, and appeased are generated—all of which reduce the
power of anger. Still, emotions such as vengeance are also produced with this
combination; and when more assertion-anger is combined with lesser amounts
of satisfaction-happiness, emotions such as righteousness and righteous anger
Table 3
The Structure of Second-order Elaborations of Primary Emotions:
Shame, Guilt, and Alienation
Rank-ordering of constituent primary emotions
Emotion 1 2 3
Shame Disappointment-Sadness Assertion-Anger Aversion-Fear

(at self) (at self) (at consequences
for self)
Guilt Disappointment-Sadness Aversion-Fear Assertion-Anger
(at self) (at self) (at consequences
for self)
Alienation Disappointment-Sadness Assertion-Anger Aversion-fear
(at others, situation) (at consequences (at self, others,
for self) situation)
are produced. Thus, first-order elaborations increase the range of positive

emotions, but they are a double-edged sword and generate some of the
most volatile emotions that any animal can experience; and coupled with the
high-intensity end of variations in primary emotions (column 4 in Table 2),
we can see the potential for emotions to make humans very violent or,
alternatively, to lead humans to withdraw commitments to others and social
structures.
The second-order emotions listed at the bottom of the last column in
Table 2 represent (Turner 2000a, 2007a, 2008) a way to reduce the power of
the three negative primary emotions into emotions that can promote social sol-
idarity and social control. Table 3 outlines what I believe is the emotional
structure of shame, guilt, and alienation. Sadness is the dominant emotion in
all three, but the respective order and focus of anger and fear determine which
of the three emotions is experienced. As Table 3 documents, all of these emo-
tions—shame, guilt, and alienation—are primarily sadness combined with
varying amounts of anger and fear. Shame is sadness (about acts by self), cou-
pled with a lesser amount of anger (at self) and an even lesser amount of fear
(about the consequences to self); this is perhaps humans’ most powerful emo-
tion because to experience shame (and variants ranging from embarrassment
to humiliation) means that a person sees self as having behaved incompetently

in the eyes of others and from the expectations of norms. Guilt reverses the
order of the anger and fear components to produce an emotion that makes a
person feel that they have violated the moral codes of the group. Both shame
and guilt are the emotions of social control because people will monitor and
sanction self in interactions. Because these are very painful emotions, they
will often be repressed which changes the emotional dynamics significantly—a
point to which I will return shortly. Alienation reveals the same profile as
shame, but the anger component of alienation is stronger and is focused on
the situation more than on self (as is the case with shame); and while alien-
ation does not promote social control to the same extent as do shame and
guilt, it nonetheless alerts others to the need to deal with another’s disaffec-
tion, while mitigating the effects of anger, fear, and sadness alone on social
relations.
I realize that the above is highly speculative, but if sociology is to
develop a more robust theory of emotions, we must move beyond crude por-
trayals of emotions as either positive or negative. These portrayals of emotions
as positive or negative are not wrong, of course; rather, they are incomplete
and limit theorizing about more specific emotional dynamics and their connec-
tion to social structure and culture. Moreover, we need to come to grips with
the fact that, at a neurological level, humans are much more hard wired for
negative than positive emotions; and we can see the work of natural selection
to overcome this neurological bias through rewiring the brain to produce first-
order and second-order elaborations of primary emotions that can be used to
forge social bonds and promote social control, while generating commitments
to encounters as well as to meso-level and macro-level social structures. A
theory of emotional stratification will need to indicate how various types of
negative and positive emotions are differentially distributed across a popula-
tion and, at the same time, suggest some of the potentially volatile conse-
quences of extreme emotional stratification. But before we can get to this part
of the theory, we need to add yet one more complication: the activation of
defense mechanisms.
The Activation of Defense Mechanisms
Negative emotions are painful, especially emotions such as shame and
guilt that attack self. For shame in particular, this emotion is so devastating to
self that it is often repressed (to varying degrees); and when emotions are
repressed they are transmuted to new emotions or, as I see the process, to one
or more of their constituent primary emotions. For example, shame is mostly
sadness, followed by anger and fear in relative intensity; and when shame
is repressed, it often emerges as anger, often very intense anger and, to a
lesser degree, sadness or fear. Repression thus protects self but it breaks the
connection between the real emotions that were originally aroused and the
sources of this arousal; and as the painful emotion is kept out of conscious-
ness, it often transmutes into a new emotion (or component of first-order or
second-order emotion) that is more acceptable to the cognitive sensors of
persons.
When emotions are repressed, they are not only transmuted but they also
become more intense; and the longer the emotion is repressed, the more likely
will it surface either in transmuted form (e.g., chronically repressed shame
emerges as anger and violence) or in very intense spikes of the emotion
repressed (e.g., sudden spikes of repressed shame, guilt, anxiety, or other emo-
tions that have been pushed below cognitive awareness, at least for a time).
The transmutation and intensification of emotions generate an entirely new
and complicated set of emotional dynamics that must be part of a general
sociological theory of emotions because repressed, transmuted and intense
emotions break social bonds and, at times, can have significant effects on
meso and macrostructures. Scheff (1994) alone and in collaboration with Scheff
and Retzinger (1991) have long made this point about shame, viewing the
anger that can sometime emerge from repressed shame as a force behind
forms of collective violence ranging from feuds through genocide to war.
Visualizing emotions as stratified can add, I hope, a new way to examine these
macrostructural consequences of emotional arousal.
Table 4 summarizes my views on the activation of defense mechanisms. I
see repression as a kind of master defense mechanism that pushes negative
emotions below the level of consciousness, but once repressed the nature of
the repression can vary, as is summarized in Table 4. Column 1 in Table 4
lists the emotions that are most likely to be repressed, generally (1) intense
variants of anger, sadness and fear, (2) first-order elaborations where anger,
sadness, and fear are the dominant emotion, and most importantly, (3) shame
and, to a lesser extent, chronic guilt. Column 2 lists the relevant defense
mechanisms: displacement, projection, sublimation, reaction formation, and
attribution. I could add denial as a mechanism, but I am grouping it with
repression as a master mechanism that sets into motion those defense mecha-
nisms listed in Column 2. The transmutation of the repressed emotion is very
much affected by the nature of the specific defense mechanism activated, as is
delineated in Column 3. Finally, once repressed and transmuted, the emerging
emotion will target a limited range of potential objects: others, micro-encoun-
ter, corporate units, or categoric units (self is excluded because of the nature
of repression). As we will see, sometimes the more macro-level institutional
domain within which a corporate unit is embedded will be targeted and, at
other times, the target will be the macro-level stratification system within
Table 4
Repression, Defense, Transmutation, and Targeting Emotions
Repressed Defense Transmutation

Emotions Mechanism to Target of
Anger, sadness, fear Displacement Anger Others, corporate

shame, guilt, and unitsa and
alienation categoric unitsb
Anger, sadness, Projection Little, but Imputation of anger,
fear, shame, guilt, some sadness, fear, shame
and alienation anger or guilt to dispositional
states of others
Anger, sadness, fear, Reaction Positive Others, corporate
shame, guilt, and formation emotions units, categoric
alienation units
Anger, sadness, fear Sublimation Positive Tasks in corporate
shame, guilt, and emotions units
alienation
Anger, sadness, fear Attribution Anger Others, corporate
shame, guilt, and units, or categoric
alienation units
Notes: aCorporate units are structures revealing a division of labor geared

toward achieving goals.
b
Categoric units are social categories which are differentially evaluated and to
which differential responses are given. Members of categoric units often hold
a social identity.
which categoric units are embedded. And, once more macrostructures are
targeted, societies and systems of societies can become potential targets of the
negative emotions, particularly anger but, at times, other types of negative
emotions as well as positive emotions (from sublimation and reaction forma-
tion).
At the bottom of Table 4, I list attribution as a defense mechanism;
and in my view, this is the most important mechanism from a sociological
perspective. There is, of course, a large literature on attribution dynamics
emanating mostly from the cognitive revolution in psychology. Justice
research, which overlaps with similar work in sociology, suggests that

attribution becomes a critical dynamic when individuals are trying to make
sense of injustice (Jasso 1993; Weiner 1986, 2006); under these conditions,
they will make a causal attribution to who or to what is responsible for
their negative feelings (typically anger at injustice). There is a more general
dynamic involved here. As the large literature on attribution documents,
individuals are always making causal attributions for their experiences and
the experiences of others; and they are particularly likely, I believe, to make
such attributions for repressed emotions that have been transmuted and
intensified because they are unconsciously trying to avoid making self-attri-
butions. Moreover, in my view, attribution dynamics are the most likely of
all defense mechanisms to move the emotional response beyond ‘‘blaming’’
others in local encounters and meso-level structures (corporate and categoric
units) to macrostructures and culture, if the emotions aroused are sufficiently
intense and if they cannot be expressed in local encounters embedded in
corporate and categoric units. Attribution operates like the guidance system
of a heat-seeking missile, pushing negative emotions away from self (to pro-
tect self) and the local encounter (where others can negatively sanction a
person with their anger) toward mesostructures and macrostructures. More-
over, micro-encounters are the place where people receive most of their
positive sanctions; and so, they are doubly careful to avoid breaching these
situations, if they can, so as to be assured of a flow of positive emotions
from others, even if they must also experience periodic arousal of negative
emotions in such encounters.
It is the severing of the connection between self and local situations, on
the one side, and the source of the emotions (which is almost always the local
micro-level encounter), on the other, that makes emotions highly volatile.
These emotions are, in essence, free floating and ready to target objects that
deflect attention from self and that, at the same time, do not disrupt local
encounters where positive emotions are most likely to be aroused. As Lawler
(2001) has emphasized, positive emotions tend to have a proximal bias, circu-
lating around self and others in encounters, whereas negative emotions have a
distal bias, moving away from self and others in the local encounter. Attribu-
tion is both a normal cognitive mechanism and a defense mechanism at the
same time. People are always making causal attributions for interpersonal out-
comes and their emotional states (the cognitive part) but they are also
engaged in protecting themselves from negative feelings about self (the defen-
sive part); as they do so, they will tend to perceive (cognitively) that they
were responsible for success in encounters generating positive emotions,
whereas they will tend to make external attributions for negative emotional
experiences.
Conditions of Emotional Arousal

Emotions are aroused under two general conditions: (1) expectations and
(2) sanctions. In all encounters embedded within mesostructures and macro-
structures, individuals have expectations about what should and will transpire.
When these expectations are realized, individuals will experience satisfaction
and, when exceeded, more intense variants of happiness (Column 4 in Table 1).
Similarly, when individuals receive positive sanctions for their actions, they
will feel satisfaction or perhaps more intense forms of happiness. If, however,
individuals fail to realize expectations and ⁄ or receive negative sanctions, they
will experience negative emotions.
When expectations are not realized and ⁄ or when negative sanctions are
received, a person can experience variants of the three primary emotions of
anger, fear, and sadness as well as first-order elaborations and, most impor-
tantly, second-order elaborations such as shame, guilt, and alienation. When
anger, fear, and sadness are experienced simultaneously, a person will almost
always experience a variant of shame—from embarrassment at the low-inten-
sity end to humiliation at the high-intensity end. If this person evaluated
the situation in moral terms, seeing success in meeting expectations and ⁄ or
receiving positive sanctions as a moral imperative, then this person will also
experience guilt. If individuals consistently fail to meet their expectations
and ⁄ or receive persistent negative sanctions in situations that they cannot
leave, the combination of sadness, anger, and fear will lead to alienation and a
withdrawal response that periodically erupts into the anger component of
alienation (see Table 3).
Emotional arousal is complicated by the activation of defense mechanisms
and attribution processes. If persons make self-attributions, seeing the failure to
meet expectations or the receipt of negative sanctions as their own fault, they
will experience sadness at a minimum but, if individuals also feel anger toward
self and fear of the consequences to self, then a variant of shame will be experi-
enced. And, if the situation was defined in moral terms, individuals will also
feel guilt. If a person makes external attributions and blames others in the situa-
tion for the failure to meet expectations or for the receipt of negative sanctions,
this individual will experience and express anger toward less powerful others.
If others are powerful, however, the individual will evidence a fear response,
often coupled with sadness and anger—all of which will lead to the experience
and expression of alienation. Often the external attributions will jump over
immediate others, either because they are too powerful or because a person still
relies upon these others for positive sanctions, and will target the culture and
structure of the corporate unit in which an encounter is embedded or members
of distinctive categoric units who cannot fight back. In this way, the individual
can sustain what positive emotions can be gleaned from the local encounter and
still vent aggression safely. This aggression generally involves anger at the cul-
ture and structure of corporate units and anger codified into prejudicial beliefs
about members of categoric units who are somehow seen as responsible for
negative emotional arousal.
At some point in these dynamics, attribution as a cognitive process shifts
to attribution as a defense mechanism whereby the actual source of the nega-
tive emotions—self and others in micro-level encounters—is not recognized
and indeed repressed from consciousness and transferred to safer objects like
corporate and categoric units. The reason that negative emotions often jump
over local encounters is, as noted above, because people rely upon these
encounters for routine activities where they still receive some positive sanc-
tions and meet at least some expectations; and rather than lose these sources
of positive emotional energy, it is easier to repress the negative emotions and
vent anger at more remote objects. For, to become angry in face-to-face inter-
action invites counter-anger and negative sanctioning, which assures that at
least some expectations will not be met and that negative sanctions will be
experienced. Thus, in order to protect self and to sustain the viability of face-
to-face relations, it is far easier to repress negative emotions, but once this
step is taken, the emotions become more intense and, in the case of first-order
and second-order emotions, transmute into their anger component that targets
ever-more remote objects such as meso- and macro-level structures.
Indeed, individuals may also target the institutional domain in which a
corporate unit is embedded or the stratification system where a categoric unit
is lodged. In fact, there is a constant pressure for negative emotions to migrate
outward toward meso and macrostructures; and it is for this reason that legiti-
macy of macrostructures is often difficult to sustain in highly stratified socie-
ties. Moreover, since positive emotions reveal a proximal bias and circulate in
local encounters, they often do not radiate out to meso and macrostructures,
thus making legitimization of institutional domains, stratification systems, and
whole societies difficult.
At times, of course, reaction formation and sublimation can work to
transmute negative into positive emotions that can radiate out to meso- and
macrostructures, but the more frequently used defense mechanisms is, I
believe, attribution which pushes negative emotions outward, while keeping
positive emotions local so that they can circulate in solidarity-generating inter-
action rituals (Collins 2004). The end result is that solidarity at the level of
local group and community is much easier to achieve than solidarity of larger-
scale structures. Randall Collins (1975, 2004) adaptation of Durkheim’s and
Goffman’s ideas into a theory of interaction rituals captures these dynamics;
individuals become rhythmically synchronized causing positive emotional
arousal that becomes symbolized. Since these kinds of interaction rituals are
the primary source of positive emotional arousal for persons, it is not surpris-
ing that people will work to sustain them by repressing negative emotions and
pushing these emotions out to safer objects that cannot directly fight back and
directly sanction a person negatively. It is for this reason that legitimacy of
macrostructures is always difficult to create and sustain. Let me now turn to
some of the implications of this brief review of my general theory (see Turner
2007a, for a full review of the theory).
The Dynamics of Emotional Stratification
Each institutional domain uses a distinctive generalized symbolic medium
that is also a valued resource for those interacting within encounters embedded
in the corporate units that make up any given domain. Because corporate units
are generally hierarchical, evidencing systems of authority, resources are
distributed unequally within a corporate unit. Moreover, corporate units them-
selves reveal inequality with the result that individuals in some corporate units
gain more resources than individuals in other corporate units. Corporate
units not only distribute the resources of the domain in which they are embed-
ded, but in complex societies, they also distribute the resources of other
domains. Thus, money is distributed in an economy, but so is power and pres-
tige; power is distributed in polity but, similarly, prestige and money are also
distributed; love and loyalty are distributed in families but families reveal
higher and lower levels of income which affects access to money, prestige,
knowledge, health, and other valued resources. Even though a corporate unit
is typically embedded in a distinctive institutional domain and, therefore, dis-
tributes the resources of this domain, it also has interchanges with other insti-
tutional domains and thus garners resources from these other domains and
distributes them as well.
For each encounter within a corporate unit within an institutional domain,
individuals have expectations for which, and for how much, of any given
resource they are likely to receive; and they will experience a diffuse and gen-
eralized sense of positive and negative sanctions depending upon the degree to
which they have met or failed to meet expectations. Similarly, individuals are
sanctioned directly by specific others in a situation, with positive sanctions
arousing positive emotions and negative sanctions generating negative emo-
tional arousal. Even though the distribution of resources frequently operates as
a sanction, face-to-face interpersonal sanctioning has powerful, immediate,
and direct effects on individuals’ emotions, above and beyond the effects of
realizing or failing to realize expectations.
The biography of any person is a movement through chains of face-
to-face encounters in corporate units lodged in institutional domains where
each individual has met or not met expectations for resources and has received
varying profiles of positive and negative sanctioning. At each and every
encounter, individuals will experience emotional arousal in line with the prin-
ciples on expectations, sanctions, and defense mechanisms enumerated above.
If persons meet expectations and receive positive sanctions, they will experi-
ence positive emotions, whereas if they do not they will experience variants
and elaborations of negative emotions and be more likely to activate defense
mechanisms to protect self.
It is evident, then, just as each institutional domain distributes resources
and the generalized media of a domain, so it also distributes positive and neg-
ative emotions. And just like any other resource, positive emotional arousal is
valued and inherently rewarding, whereas negative emotions carry less value
and, indeed, can be highly punishing. A biography filled with negative emo-
tional arousal will typically limit access to the valued resources of other insti-
tutional domains because negative emotions erode confidence, while reducing
the chances that a person will be successful in encounters. Angry and alien-
ated people will not, for example, generally be able to gain other valued
resources; shamed and humiliated people will not have the confidence to
secure other resources, whether resources like love and affection in family or
money in the economy. Of course, at times anger can lead to securing
resources, as would be the case if diffuse anger was used to garner power and
at times money or even prestige. Yet, on average across a population, those
who have experienced negative emotional arousal will be disadvantaged com-
pared to those who have a reservoir of positive emotional energy because (1)
they will have a reduced share of positive emotions, which are valuable in
their own right, and (2) they will have a legacy of negative emotional arousal
that will limit options for gaining access to the resources and media of other
institutional domains.
When subpopulations of individuals have similar shares of emotional
resources, these resources become yet another basis for stratification. Typi-
cally, a pattern of emotional stratification reinforces class, ethnic, gender,
age, or other categoric units receiving different levels of power, material
wealth, prestige, health, knowledge, and other valued resources of institu-
tional domains. Thus, we should expect that people located at different
points in the class system will reveal different profiles of negative and posi-
tive emotional energy, and we should be able to specify more precisely the
particular emotions that are differentially distributed. Similarly, we can
expect varying shares of emotional resources among members of differen-
tially evaluated categoric units, such as gender and ethnicity, that are also
part of the stratification system organizing a population. How, then, do we
get a conceptual handle on emotion as a valued resource that is distributed
unequally and that, as a consequence, is an integral part of a stratification

system?
People in valued categoric units (or people possessing valued diffuse sta-
tus characteristics in the expectation-states literature) will generally meet
expectations and receive positive sanctions; and as a result, they will have
experienced consistent positive emotional arousal which, in turn, will give
them confidence to secure more resources and positive emotions. Thus, the
distribution of positive emotional energy should roughly correlate with the
class system and, to a lesser extent, with valued social categories in a society.
In each institutional sphere, those above the midpoint in the class system are
more likely to secure consistent love in the family, credentials in education
marking knowledge (and the prestige that this brings), higher-paying occupa-
tions in economy, influence in law, power in polity, health in medicine, and
other valued resources; in contrast, those below the midpoint are more likely
to experience conflict within stressed families, fewer prestige-giving educa-
tional credentials, lower-paying occupations, less influence vis-à-vis law, low
levels of power, and probably less health care (at least in societies like the
United States where health is unequally distributed). Those below the midpoint
are far more likely to be in subordinate positions in corporate units of each
institutional domain, with the result that they will often fail to meet expecta-
tions (even as they are lowered from previous failures), while receiving nega-
tive sanctions from superordinates, as well as the diffuse sense of negative
sanctions that come with failing to realize expectations. At a minimum, they
will have experienced more anger in encounters within institutional domains
and will have been forced to devalue their worth in terms of the moral codes
of a domain and the shares of generalized symbolic media that they can claim
in a domain. More likely, they will have experienced sadness, anger, and fear
simultaneously causing them to feel shame and, if they have been committed
to moral codes, guilt as well. Over time, they become alienated, often drop-
ping out of institutional domains (such as school) or playing roles with
minimal energy (e.g., in occupations).
Once individuals experience shame, however, the emotional dynamics are
altered. The more a person has experienced shame, the more likely are they to
repress this shame; and with repression, the underlying emotions intensify and
transmute into the components of shame, most likely the anger component.
Moreover, interaction rituals in micro-encounters within institutional domains
(family, work, church, or informal groups in economy) and communities
(neighborhoods) will often be the primary source of positive sanctioning and
the place where expectations for sociality can be realized; and as a result, the
diffuse anger that has arisen in encounters within corporate units within
domains is pushed outward toward the culture and structure of corporate units
and perhaps the institutional domains in which these units are embedded; or,
alternatively, the diffuse anger is directed at members of devalued categoric
units (Jews, gays, ethnic minorities) and codified into prejudicial beliefs. Thus,
the lower is the class position of individuals, the more likely will a large pro-
portion of these individuals experience shame (and perhaps guilt), with the
result that some will have repressed this shame, and as a consequence, will
reveal diffuse anger at meso and macrostructures. In this way, the shame can
find expression as anger toward safer targets that cannot sanction a person,
while not disrupting the flow of positive emotions in the micro-level inter-
action ritual chains conceptualized by Collins (1975, 2004).
Lower-class individuals are far more likely than those in the middle and
upper classes to play roles in hierarchical corporate units revealing an author-
ity system exercising control over their actions. From monitoring and control
at work to patriarchal relations in the family, corporate units in institutional
domains where the working and lower classes play roles are more likely to be
‘‘authoritarian’’ and hence be shame-generating machines, compared to those
for middle- and upper-class members. While subgroups within these hierarchi-
cal structures can emerge and generate positive emotions through (anti-author-
ity) interaction rituals, it is nonetheless more likely that individuals at lower
levels of these hierarchies will have been negatively sanctioned and made to
experience shame. Moreover, the exercise of authority can also work to
remind individuals that whatever expectations they may have had for success
in these structures have not been fully realized, thus adding an additional level
of insult and emotional injury to self. It should not be surprising, therefore,
that these individuals will repress their shame (and perhaps guilt as well, if
they see doing well in moral terms), leaving them with a reservoir of anger
that will target more remote social structures and their respective cultures. At
times, this anger can be mobilized for collective and violent action against
members of categoric units or institutional domains. External attributions of
this sort thus protect self and sustain those encounters where positive emotions
can be derived, while giving the anger arising from shame safe targets on
which to vent aggression.
In contrast to those in devalued categories below the midpoint in the
stratification system, those above the midpoint will have experienced positive
emotions not only in most local encounters but also within key resource-
distributing institutional domains, thus allowing them to make self-attributions
about their success. They will have avoided experiencing shame and therefore
not engage in anger-generating repression of shame. Of course, individuals in
particular contexts will have experienced shame, but collectively, there will be
far less anger among individuals above the midpoint in the class system. In
each domain, they are more likely to have experienced reliable sources of love
in more stable and less stressed families, to have received prestige-giving edu-
cational credentials, to have prospered in higher-paying occupations, to have
exerted some influence in the legal system, to have exercised their rights to
act politically (if only by their votes or lobbying efforts of their professional
associations), and to have been able to gain access to health through access to
the medical domain.
While positive emotions tend to cycle through interaction rituals in
micro-level encounters and groups, those who consistently experience positive
emotions across a range of resource-distributing institutional domains will tend
to make some external attributions for their success, viewing corporate units
and the institutional domains in which these units are embedded as partially
responsible for their success. They will, therefore, be more likely to bestow
legitimacy on macro-level institutions—economy, polity, law, religion, medi-
cine, and other domains where they have been able to meet expectations and
receive positive sanctions. Thus, as many studies document, those at the mid-
point and above of the stratification system almost always are more conserva-
tive than those below the midpoint and, hence, likely to bestow legitimacy on
existing macrostructures. When inequalities are great, with vast differences in
the resource shares of those high and low in the stratification system or of
those in highly and lowly evaluated categoric units, the positive emotions of
those who have been successful legitimate institutional domains while the neg-
ative emotions of those who have experienced shame, if not humiliation, in
these domains can work to undermine the legitimacy of key institutional
domains. If there are large numbers of individuals in the lower classes, vis-à-
vis, those in the middle and upper classes, then the unequal distribution of
negative emotions to members of the lower classes will be that much more
volatile. And, because repressed shame intensifies all of the emotions involved
and transmutes shame into the most volatile component—high-intensity vari-
ants and first-order elaborations of anger—the existence of a large segment of
the population aroused in this way poses a threat to the institutional order and,
of course, to the classes above the midpoint in the class system. Often, the
anger from below is displaced onto categoric units that cannot fight back,
blinding members of the lower social classes or members of devalued cate-
goric units, to the real source of the anger (shame produced in encounters
lodged in institutional domains rigged against the lower classes). If there is
‘‘false consciousness’’ across the working class and poor, it is more the result
of repression than ideological manipulation, although the latter can facilitate
repression of people’s shame.
When repressed shame generates diffuse anger, this shame and anger can
be passed down across generations as parents shame their children who must
repress their shame and displace their anger on those outside the family and,
later, on their own children. Exacerbating the shame that comes from failure
in non-familial institutional domains is the legacy of family life where the dif-
fuse anger of parents generates shaming behaviors that assure that their chil-
dren will also reveal this anger and, as a result, reduce their chances of
meeting expectations or receiving positive sanctions in non-familial institu-
tional systems. Thus, parents who have few resources or material, intellectual,
cultural, and social capital to pass on to their children as they enter resource-
distributing institutional domains also handicap their offspring by failing to
give them the positive emotional energy that can translate into confidence and
better chances at meeting the expectations of institutional domains and at
receiving positive sanctions from others in these domains. Instead, what often
occurs is that the shame transmutes into episodes of anger and violence, while
also transmuting into a persistent alienation from those domains that distribute
the most valued resources in a society.
At times, middle-class individuals cannot meet expectations or receive
positive sanctions in the corporate units of key institutional domains; the
results are the same for these middle-class persons as they are for those in the
lower social classes or those in devalued categoric units. The shame and
humiliation experienced by those in the middle and upper classes, however,
increase the potential for anger and violence because they had much higher
expectations for success in resource-giving institutional spheres. Moreover,
since the middle classes tend to view success in institutional domains as a
moral imperative, their shame may also be accompanied by persistent guilt
that is also repressed. The likelihood of violence is perhaps even greater
among these middle-class subpopulations when they can organize. For exam-
ple, anecdotal data (Gottschalk and Gottschalk 2004; Gottschalk and Lefebvre
1995) suggest that terrorists are often from middle-class families in repressive
societies where corruption makes it difficult for many individuals to realize
their expectations for success in resource-distributing institutional domains. As
a result, the shame and humiliation, plus guilt, are often repressed, with exter-
nal attributions for their plight often leap-frogging the institutional domains in
their own societies (aided by media, clerics, and the propaganda machine of
polity). This diffuse anger may target rival ethnic subpopulations, but as has
been evident, the anger can be directed toward other societies such as the Uni-
ted States or Israel or to systems of societies (Bergesen and Lizardo 2004),
such as Western capitalist societies. The anger here is so great that people are
willing to kill themselves in order to inflict harm on those in another society.
In this case, the repressed emotions are not only heat-seeking missiles, they
become intercontinental missiles targeting another population often living far
from the society where the negative emotions were originally aroused. Thus, a
society that thwarts its middle classes will evidence even more intense
anger—humiliated anger coupled with first-order emotions like righteous anger

and vengeance—because expectations are higher to begin with and because
guilt is often part of the emotional cocktail, leading individuals to define their
plight in moral terms and, in this way, justify acts of extreme violence (Turner
2007a, 2007c).
Moreover, the terrorist cells that sustain terrorism operate to charge up
positive emotions through the planning of violence and through symbolizing a
cause in positive terms while demonizing an enemy. The cells assure that
positive emotional energy will be charged up through interaction rituals as
described by Collins (2004) but, moreover, anger will be mixed with satisfac-
tion-happiness to produce righteous anger and vengeance (mixes of anger and
happiness). Individuals will take pleasure in venting anger on targets; and they
will see their need to engage in violence in moral terms. The end result is
extreme violence (Turner 2007c, 2007d).
What is true of terrorists can also be evident among subpopulations in
lower social classes. For example, gang violence in the United States can be
seen as the result of diffuse aggression among those who have not been able
to gain resources in key institutional domains—family, schools, economy, for
example—and who charge up their positive emotions through interaction ritu-
als and symbolize these positive emotions with group symbols that are often
juxtaposed to the negative symbols of their enemies. Here again, the original
sources of their anger—shame and humiliation in family, schools, and econ-
omy—are generally not the target of their anger; rather, they focus the anger
on ‘‘enemies’’ and, thereby, charge up their sense of pride (a mixture of happi-
ness and fear) by acts of violence and counter-violence against those enemies.
To the extent that a society’s institutional domains increase rates of failure
among a segment of a population, especially one that is composed of members
in distinctive categoric units (e.g., male, ethnic minority), it is inevitable that
intense negative emotions revolving around anger, hatred, righteous anger, and
vengeance will be distributed among subpopulations who will act on these
emotions. What these subpopulations feel is simply a more intense set of
anger-related emotions that all members of the lower classes experience,
although often the shame transmutes into alienation that decreases the likeli-
hood of violence but generates other pathologies such as substance abuse, wel-
fare dependence, and homelessness.
Conclusion
The generalizations that I have offered above are only preliminary. I have
stated these more formally in forthcoming works (e.g., Turner 2007a, 2007c),
but my goal here is not to review the theory of emotions that I have worked
on for the last decade. Instead, I have sought to use this theory to explain a
topic that has not been extensively examined—the stratification of emotions.

Collins (1975, 1990), Jack Barbalet (1998), and Alex Honneth (1995) have
speculated on the differential distribution of emotions across the class system;
I have tried to take their initial work a step further; and while I could articu-
late the theoretical analysis in formal propositions, the preliminary nature of
my speculations makes such formalism premature. I have examined part of the
argument above—the sources of extreme violence—in a more formal way
(e.g., Turner 2007a, 2007c, 2007d), but this kind of violence is only one of
many outcomes of the differential distribution of positive and negative emo-
tions. Equally often, repressed shame emerges as alienation since the ordering
of emotions is much the same as in shame, with the exception that the anger
is directed at the situations rather than at the person (see Table 3). Here, indi-
viduals reveal role-distance from key institutional domains like economy and
education, while often maintaining positive emotional arousal in family, in
work groups, and in local encounters within a community. The anger emerges
as hostility to corporate units that have dashed hopes and expectations or that
have sanctioned people negatively (e.g., workplaces and schools), but given
that the underlying emotion is shame arising from failure in these corporate
units, the shame is equally likely to morph into alienation and withdrawal,
with periodic spikes of anger emerging.
When we address the topic of emotional stratification, then, new avenues
of theorizing and research emerge. Much of the literature in stratification
research and social movements emphasizes the distribution of material, organi-
zation, and symbolic resources. And, the new-found attention on various forms
of ‘‘capital’’ (e.g., Bourdieu 1984, 1989) only reinforces this bias. But emo-
tions are also distributed unequally; and the unequal distribution of negative
emotions (often combined with positive emotions) can become a high-octane
fuel behind social movements and other forms of restive collective action. The
literature on stratification and social movements can, I believe, be informed by
the view that emotions are like any resource in their distribution; and while
people react emotionally to the distribution of other resources, emotions are a
highly generalized resource that is distributed in all institutional domains, and
hence, the unequal distribution of emotions may be even more primary in
understanding the dynamics of stratification.
Other topics such as extreme violence can also be studied with a new
eye. Violence occurs because people are angry, but the source of their anger
and the emotional dynamics—for example, arousal, repression, transmutation,
attribution, and targeting—all come into play to determine the nature of the
emotions and their potential effects on meso and macrostructures. Genocide,
terrorism, revolt, civil wars, and other manifestations of extreme violence are
connected to the stratification of emotions, and the effects of repressed shame
that are differentially distributed across a population (Volkan 1999, 2004,

2006).
Dynamics such as legitimatization and de-legitimization can also be bet-
ter understood with a theory of emotions. When people are committed to
social structures and their respective cultures, they do so because they experi-
ence positive emotions in encounters embedded in these sociocultural forma-
tions. Conversely, when individuals withdraw commitments from such
formations, the dynamics of a society are significantly altered by the distribu-
tion of the emotions (e.g., the respective amounts of anger, shame, and alien-
ation distributed across the class system and other categoric units).
The sociology of emotions has made dramatic strides in the last four
decades, but it has not developed an adequate theory of emotions that can
explain more macro-level phenomena. One foothold to these phenomena is
to view emotions as not only aroused under certain conditions but also as dis-
tributed and stratified. By studying the distribution of positive and negative
emotions, and the specific emotions involved (as outlined in Tables 2 and 3),
a micro-theory of emotions can be linked to more collective and macro-level
dynamics. Also, by understanding that negative emotions are often repressed,
intensified, and transmuted, better predictions about the outcomes of emotions
on macrostructures and their respective cultures are possible—despite the fact
that repression is a complex and difficult to measure process.
Finally, emotions are far more authentic than is sometimes implied by
postmodern theory; they are very real and can have significant consequences
for individuals and society. Emotions are what bind people together and inte-
grate them into mesostructures and macrostructures while generating commit-
ments to the cultures of these structures. They are also the force behind
alienation from, and rebellion against, these same sociocultural formations.
What is needed is a more mature theory that specifies how emotions are
aroused in varying types of social structures, how they are distributed across
members of a population, and how they lead individuals individually and
collectively to respond to sociocultural formations. The sociology of emo-
tions will thus be at the center of just about any topic of interest to sociolo-
gists; and in fact, the sociology of emotions may be one of the few ways to
make micro–macro connections theoretically and empirically because emo-
tions are the force flowing through the neural circuitry of people, as well as
the network circuitry of micro-level encounters, meso-level corporate and
categoric units, institutional domains, stratification systems, whole societies,
and even systems of societies. What I offer here in this article is simply a
rough road map to how sociologists should conceptualize emotions in order
to realize this goal of connecting levels of social reality with one theory
(Turner 2007a).
ENDNOTE
*Please direct correspondence to Jonathan H. Turner, Department of Sociology, University

of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521 0419, USA; e-mail: jonathan.turner@ucr.edu
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The Stratification of Emotions: Some Preliminary

Jonathan H. Turner, University of California

For most of the history of sociological theorizing, the dynamics of emo-

Sociological Inquiry, Vol. 80, No. 2, May 2010, 168–199

mid-1970s, however, the study of emotions entered sociological theory, pri-

encounters; institutional domains are built from meso-level corporate units

domains. More typically, people’s experiences in those institutional domains

Low Moderate High First-order Second-order

Satisfaction- Content Cheerful Joy +Fear: wonder, hopeful,

Low Moderate High First-order Second-order

Emotion intensity intensity intensity emotions emotions

Assertion-Anger Annoyed Displeased Dislike +Happiness: snubbing,

Low Moderate High First-order Second-order

Disappointment- Discouraged Dismayed Sorrow +Happiness: acceptance, +Fear, anger:

a greater amount of one primary emotion ‘‘mixed’’ (to be metaphorical) with a

Rank-ordering of constituent primary emotions

Shame Disappointment-Sadness Assertion-Anger Aversion-Fear

are produced. Thus, first-order elaborations increase the range of positive

to humiliation) means that a person sees self as having behaved incompetently

Repressed Defense Transmutation

Anger, sadness, fear Displacement Anger Others, corporate

Notes: aCorporate units are structures revealing a division of labor geared

research, which overlaps with similar work in sociology, suggests that

Conditions of Emotional Arousal

unequally and that, as a consequence, is an integral part of a stratification

anger—humiliated anger coupled with first-order emotions like righteous anger

topic that has not been extensively examined—the stratification of emotions.

that are differentially distributed across a population (Volkan 1999, 2004,

*Please direct correspondence to Jonathan H. Turner, Department of Sociology, University

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