Tag Archives: emotions

Watch for more personal appeals from home sellers

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Personal appeals from home sellers may be the next big thing in real estate:

Watch for this to take off in home listings: Sometimes, in a bidding war, you hear about homebuyers writing love letters about themselves — words that explain what wonderful families they have, how they’re crazy about the house, etc., in order to persuade sellers to choose them over other bidders.

Now comes a vaguely comparable feature for sellers: Coldwell Banker Real Estate recently revised its listings to allow home sellers to post personal stories, photos and videos about their homes, with the aim of making their listings stand out. Among the first to take up the offer were actors William Macy and Felicity Huffman, who explained their affection for the house they’re aiming to sell in Colorado: “Felicity and I love to hike up toward Sopris Mountain, right out the back door. … We put a secret door between the kids’ bedrooms, which has been a huge hit.” The brokerage says that all of its seller-clients can add their own content to their listing pages, although it must be approved by their agents.

Positive emotions seem to be the key to such appeals. If the opposite party is touched, the home can be sold for more or bought for less. It all may seem cheesy but selling and buying a home can be a very emotional process. As economic sociologists and others have found in recent decades, such decisions are not just about dollars and cents but often include complex emotional reactions. Buying and selling certainly counts as an emotionally fraught process from the amount of money involved to the transitions involved (changing communities, jobs, etc.) to the commonly-invoked American ideals of “making it.”

I would love to see some data on this: how much does an effective letter change the price? And, on the flip side, how might a poorly worded letter damage the party who wrote it?

Sociologist argues hidden shame destructive in modern society

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Sociologist Thomas Scheff argues that hidden shame is a large problem in modern society:

According to Scheff a society that fosters individualism (ours, for example) provides a ripe breeding ground for the emotion of shame because people are encouraged to “go it alone, no matter the cost to relationships,” he said. “People learn to act as if they were complete in themselves and independent of others. This feature has constructive and creative sides, but it has at least two other implications: alienation and the hiding of shame.”

Scheff noted that while shame is no less prevalent now than in previous years or decades or generations, it is more hidden. “Shame is a biological entity like other emotions, but people are more ashamed of it than they are of the others,” he said. “The hiding of emotions is more widespread in modern societies than in traditional ones.”…

The problem with that kind of thinking, however, is that shame is, in reality, a very useful emotion. “Shame is the basis of morality,” Scheff said. “You can’t have a moral society without shame. It provides the weight for morality. There are a hundred things in your head about what you should or shouldn’t do, but the one that hits you is the one that has shame behind it.”

Scheff suggests that shame — or the reaction to it — can manifest itself in larger acts of aggression, such as wars and other military conflicts. “Especially for leaders, both shame and anger are carefully hidden behind a veil of rationality,” he writes in the article. “The Bush administration may have been deeply embarrassed by the 9/11 attack during their watch and their helplessness to punish the attackers. The invasion of Iraq on the basis of false premises might have served to hide their shame behind anger and aggression.”

I remember reading Scheff’s work in a microsociology course in grad school where he was cited as a key example of the growing body of research in the subfield of the sociology of emotions. While we tend to chalk up emotions to an individual’s psychological and physiological state, emotions that we feel and how we can express them are also dependent on social forces. Thus, if individualism is a key feature of early 21st century life, particularly for younger adults/millennials, displaying feelings of shame contradicts this individualistic approach. For example, one of the findings about younger adults in the National Study of Youth and Religion (with this particular finding discussed in Souls in Transition) is that they have very few regrets about their past actions. This is indicative of an individualistic approach to life: regrets may be based on the idea that the individual didn’t live up to some standard. But, to have shame or regrets, the individual has to be anchored to a particular moral system.

Scheff’s solution to hidden shame?

The answer, according to Scheff, is to have a good laugh. “That is, laugh at yourself or at the universe or at your circumstances, but not at other people. Most of the laughing we do in comedy is good. No matter the actors, we are really laughing at our own selves that we see in their foolishness.”

It would then be interesting to study who using humor laughs more than themselves than at others. Is most of our humor/comedy today compared to the past directed at others rather than exploring our own shame and embarrassing moments?

Sociologist who studies fear at and collects stats for a haunted house

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Here is one way to put sociological training into practice: working for a haunted house.

Ms. Kerr’s equivalent of a coffee break was the ScareHouse in Etna, which bills itself as “Pittsburgh’s ultimate haunted house” and has earned accolades from national publications, trade magazines, horror movie directors and other outlets to buttress the claim…

A part-time professor at Pitt and Robert Morris University, Ms. Kerr’s appreciation for the macabre also led to a job at ScareHouse, where she’s worked since 2008 as an administrator, statistician and resident sociologist…

Though the ScareHouse, which opened in 1999, had long taken customer surveys, Ms. Kerr added a new dimension, he says, polling not just on what aspects of the haunted house worked but what customers’ fear most deeply…

Ms. Kerr’s book, based on her haunted house experiences, deals with “the real benefits of experiencing thrilling or scary materials.” Those can range from the endorphin and adrenaline rush and confidence boost of surviving a dicey encounter to the stronger bonds formed in social groups that experience a scary situation together. Of course, there’s an important caveat.

“To really enjoy thrilling situations, you have to know that you’re safe,” she added.

“Thanks for experiencing our haunted house – now please take our exit survey.” Yet, it sounds like an interesting place to collect data. It would be interesting to hear how generalizable the findings about fear at a haunted house might be to other situations.

I often tell my statistics and research methods students that all sorts of organizations, from NGOs to corporations to religious groups to governments, are looking to collect and analyze data. Here is another example I can use that might prove more interesting than some other options…

Mapping England’s emotional mood in real-time

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A group of researchers have developed a real-time map of England’s emotions based on Twitter:

The team, from Loughborough University, say it can scan up to 2,000 tweets a second and rate them for expressions of one of eight human emotions…

The team, from the university’s new Centre for Information Management, say the system can extract a direct expression of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, shame and confusion from each tweet.

The academics said that using the Emotive software to geographically evaluate any mass mood could help police to track potential criminal behaviour or threats to public safety.

It may be able to guide national policy on the best way to react to major incidents, they added.

There have been several projects like this in recent years. The algorithms to sort out all of the language must be intricate. But, I’m skeptical about two things. One is a sampling issue. Just how many people in England are using Twitter? In the United States, the figures about regular Twitter users are still quite low. You can map the moods of Twitter users but this doesn’t necessarily represent the larger population. The Twitter population probably trends younger. At the same time, responding to vocal responses on the web or on Twitter might be effective for public relations. A second issue is how exactly tracking moods could be used to help police. So police will be sent to places that show high concentrations of disgust or anger and pay less attention to places experiencing happiness? Or, such a system might alert police to trouble spots? I suspect it is more complicated than this yet I imagine such talk could make Twitter users nervous about how exactly their moods will be analyzed.

The similarities between opera and sports fans

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People can be fans of a lot of things including sports and opera:

The sociologist Claudio Benzecry spent years studying opera fans in Buenos Aires and observed that their love of opera happened just the way other forms of love do — through an experience that made them want to keep going back for more. Not through reading up on it or going to lectures about it. I discuss Benzecry’s book along with a well-meaning tome called “Opera” that’s designed to deepen opera-lovers’ love, and conclude that Benzecry is right. Opera fans are like sports fans; you get into it, and you start to learn about it, and pretty soon you’re reeling off stats with the rest of them.

More from the review of Benzecry’s book on opera fans:

Benzecry’s book doesn’t try to communicate a love of opera: It simply depicts how that love happens. His subjects, none of them wealthy, attend the opera several times a week (often in standing room or the upper balconies, where tickets are not prohibitively expensive). They are not intellectuals; they are certainly not elitist; and they were not drawn to opera by any sense of social obligation. Secretaries and sports writers and blue-collar retirees, they argue passionately about singers, productions and composers, drawing on their own experience and on a wealth of information passed on orally by older and more experienced devotees.

And how did they fall in love with opera? Certainly not through academic introductions, or books, though many of them, Benzecry shows, do attend music appreciation lectures to augment their knowledge. But the initial spark is more likely to have been a powerful “aha” moment at the opera, when first taken by a parent, or a friend: an experience of falling in love that awakens in them a thirst to go back, and back, and back.

Benzecry’s book depicts a world that’s familiar to any frequent opera-goer. Such fandom is a long-standing part of opera tradition. Nineteenth-century opera was a populist art; most audiences experienced it viscerally, singing Verdi’s tunes on the street or swooning in titillated delight after hearing Wagner. You can still get dizzy listening to Wagner — I remember experiencing the “Tannhäuser” overture, at an early encounter, as a kind of psychedelic drug trip — and you can still get passionate about the opera singers who bring these works to life.

Yet few opera guides touch on these aspects of opera. This is partly because even the hardest-core opera fans tend to put opera on a pedestal, subscribing to the notion of it as something better, something higher, something that gives color and meaning to life. This worshipful attitude toward opera, through which even the drollest opera buffa is seen through a more rarefied lens than much more serious but populist contemporary art, is part of what makes the form so off-putting to first-timers, who see it as something that involves unfamiliar rituals, special clothes, expense and jargon, and that is probably boring.

Two things I like here:

1. Sports fans are sometimes used as examples of people who have irrational emotions about something that is just a game. How could they get so worked up over something so trivial? But, lots of people have deep interests and emotions wrapped up in all sorts of activities and hobbies. Indeed, I’ve thought over the last few years that one true sign of being part of the American middle upper class or above is that a person has to have some “irrational” interest to show that they not only enjoy something but they are wholeheartedly devoted to it and are willing to spend a lot of time and money on it. Perhaps it is physical activity, perhaps it is woodworking, perhaps it is sports, perhaps it is indie music, perhaps it is snowboarding. Perhaps this is all driven by the need to feel like an individual?

2. I bet there is some fascinating sociological material here. When people start talking about “falling in love” with opera, there have to be some underlying processes behind this. This reminds me of sociological research in certain areas like fashion or stock trading where employees talk about having “intuition” but there is actually a long process by which someone acquires this “intuition.”  I bet there is something similar going on here: opera fans have developed ways of talking about their interest but there are some common themes across them as they moved from an initial exposure to a full-fledged fandom.

Paris’ transit authority has new campaign asking local residents to be less rude

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The transit authority in Paris has a new campaign aimed at getting users to show more etiquette:

Likening Parisians to animals, it shows a variety of them horrifying onlookers with their selfish behaviour.

A hen is shown screaming into a mobile phone while sitting on a packed bus, a buffalo shoves his way on to a commuter train, and other shameless beasts are shown annoying people…

Sociologist Julien Damon, who helped carry out the RATP survey, said: ‘These types of bad behaviour have always existed, but what has changed is that we are less prepared to tolerate them.

‘Our behaviour is more and more geared towards cleanliness and hygiene, like spitting on the ground or smoking in a restaurant now both very frowned upon, and less about common courtesies like simply being polite and nice to each other.’…

The study comes two years after a separate survey of foreigners visiting Paris voted them the rudest people in Europe...

Cecile Ernst, French author of the sociological and etiquette essay ‘Bonjour Madame, Merci Monsieur’ argues that the shockingly loutish behaviour of France’s football team during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, when the players went on strike, was a symptom of a broader social trend.

Two quick thoughts:

1. This seems to be motivated in part by perceptions of tourists. Since Paris is one of the top tourist destinations in the world, this is no small matter.

2. I wonder how successful this campaign will be as it utilizes shame and guilt. The posters shown here basically suggest that some current riders are acting like animals. Could a more positive campaign be more effective or would it not attract people’s attention effectively? Imagine if ads like these went up in a major US city…

The increasing sadness in pop music songs

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A psychologist and sociologist looked at Billboard pop music hits since 1965 and found that the songs have become more sad:

“As the lyrics of popular music became more self-focused and negative over time, the music itself became sadder-sounding and more emotionally ambiguous,” according to psychologist E. Glenn Schellenberg and sociologist Christian von Scheve.

Analyzing Top 40 hits from the mid-1960s through the first decade of the 2000s, they find an increasing percentage of pop songs are written using minor modes, which most listeners—including children—associate with gloom and despair. In what may or may not be a coincidence, they also found the percentage of female artists at the top of the charts rose steadily through the 1990s before retreating a bit in the 2000s…

Strikingly, they found “the proportion of minor songs doubled over five decades.” In the second half of the 1960s, 85 percent of songs that made it to the top of the pop charts were written in a major mode. By the second half of the 2000s, that figure was down to 43.5 percent…

“The present findings have striking parallels to the evolution of classical music from 1600 to 1900,” Schellenberg and von Scheve write. “Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries …. Pieces tended to sound unambiguously happy or sad. By the 1800s, and the middle of the Romantic era, tempo and mode cues were more likely to conflict,” which allowed composers to express a wide range of emotions within a single piece.

I would be interested to hear how they relate these changes to larger social forces: does this line up with a greater sadness in society or perhaps the ability or proclivity to express negative emotions? I also wonder if the data is skewed at all by only looking at Top 40 songs – does all music reflect this or only the most popular songs (which then reflect the influence of musical gatekeepers such as radio stations, journalists, critics, and music labels)?

Also: could we have a period where we return to more major mode music? Can a musical genre, whether classical or pop music, recover from an extended period of “sadness”?

Argument: “Academia is more of a shame culture than a guilt culture”

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In a discussion of reforming PhD. programs, one academic suggests that frequent meetings between students and faculty are needed to speed up the process because shame motivates more than guilt:

David Damrosch, a professor of comparative literature at Harvard University, said that Ph.D. students and professors in his department have been thinking more carefully about coursework. “Very often, students drift for extended periods,” he said. Frequent meetings with dissertation committee members are helpful, he said. “All this result in fewer incompletes in coursework … and more consistent progress in the dissertations,” said Damrosch.

“In anthropological terms, academia is more of a shame culture than a guilt culture: you may feel some private guilt at letting a chapter go unread for two or three months, but a much stronger force would be the public shame you’d feel at coming unprepared to a meeting with two of your colleagues,” he said. “It’s also ultimately a labor-saving device for the faculty as well as the student, as the dissertation can proceed sooner to completion and with less wasted effort for all concerned….” With frequent meetings, the students doesn’t lose time on “unproductive lines of inquiry” or “tangential suggestions tossed out by a single adviser,” Damrosch said.

Neither shame or guilt seem like the best motivation…

I wonder how many Ph.D. students say they feel positively supported by their institution and faculty. This doesn’t necessarily mean that students are the only ones who have a voice in this but I wonder if a lot of these issues are due to a poor match of (unclear?) expectations.

A follow up to a Charles Darwin experiment shows how emotions change over time

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Wired explains how several researchers followed up on an experiment Charles Darwin conducted:

Charles Darwin liked to freak out his friends—for science. Guests visiting the famed naturalist in 1868 were shown a set of “ghoulish” photos of a guy being prodded in the face with an electrical current. Darwin then asked his guests-cum-guinea pigs to describe the emotion displayed in each photo. Was the subject happy? Sorrowful? Cheeky? Darwin hoped to determine what universal core emotions exist (if any) and what culturally modified variations branch from them. The result was Darwin’s book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Interesting, sure, but not the best science: The Victorian-era crowdsourcing experiment lacked consistent materials, a control group, and enough test subjects—he had only 24.

Fortunately, the University of Cambridge’s Darwin Correspondence Project picks up where Darwin left off. It has re-created his study online using the same images, taken by French physiologist Benjamin Duchenne. Yes, they look like yearbook portraits from a sanitorium. But more than 18,000 participants’ evaluations have now been tallied, and the project may actually yield defendable results. And they include a dimension Darwin didn’t intend. “There are different emotional vocabularies and repertoires in different periods,” says Cambridge research associate Paul White. For example, whereas Darwin’s posse perceived the conveyed emotion in one image as “hardness,” today’s majority describes it as “bored”—a word that in the 1800s only described what you might have done to a piece of wood. Emotions, it turns out, vary not only cross-culturally but also cross-historically. You might say they’ve evolved.

This makes me wonder about the research of Paul Ekman, the inspiration behind the TV show Lie To Me and the author of the interesting book Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage. Ekman can identify micro-expressions, the almost instantaneous emotional reactions we have and display on our face before we try to cover them up (within a few tenths of a second). Are Ekman’s understandings of these expressions cultural and historically informed, meaning that his reading of micro-expressions 100 years ago or 100 years into the future would be less accurate?

This article hints at a fascinating topic: how are our own reading and naming of our emotions and those of others influenced by different social, cultural, and historical factors? Take the example above of boredom: did the concept simply not exist several centuries ago before individualism? This is related to but different from current debates about questions like what counts as addiction or what should be included in the new DSV-V manual.

Fighting the “artificial positivity” on Facebook with EnemyGraph

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A new Facebook app called EnemyGraph allows users to openly mark their “enemies” on Facebook:

EnemyGraph, a new app for Facebook, allows users to do just that: Declare their enemies on the world’s most popular social network.

It may sound sinister, but the motivation is more sociological, say the developers, a group from the Emerging Media + Communications program at the University of Texas at Dallas.

“Facebook has this artificial positivity kind of forced upon it,” said Harrison Massey, a student at UT Dallas who, along with Dean Terry, the director of the program, and Bradley Griffith, a graduate student, collaborated to develop the app. “We believe that there is a certain amount of health in saying that you don’t like something, that something is your enemy, because you can create conversations about that. You can bond with people over that.”

Massey said, for example, that users could bond over the common dislike of a company or a political party…

“We are misusing the word ‘enemy’ the same way that Facebook misuses the word ‘friend,”‘ Terry, the UT professor behind the project, told HuffPost. “It’s totally inaccurate. It’s not about individuals. It’s really about things in popular culture.”

Several thoughts about this:

1. I think Facebook is pretty smart by limiting the negativity within the software itself. Of course, users can make negative statements on walls but even these can be deleted. Since Facebook is about connecting people, formal negativity could detract from this. Let’s say that you don’t like someone’s posts: Facebook’s easiest answer these days is to simply block them from showing up on your news feed. The genius is that the other person doesn’t know this so the negative interaction between the two people is limited and life goes on.

2. EnemyGraph seems to be channeling the sort of sentiment sometimes expressed by users asking for a “dislike” button to balance the “like” button. Isn’t it more “balanced” to have both options?

3. Perhaps in EnemyGraph’s favor, social interactions, particularly group interactions, are often reliant on clearly labeling who is “in” and who is “out.” Without the easy ability to mark who is “out” in Facebook, marking symbolic and moral boundaries becomes more difficult. Developing deeper relationships through having common enemies could be more difficult. Of course, drawing strong subgroup boundaries can lead to other issues such as antagonism between groups.

4. I bet Facebook would argue (and perhaps could even prove) that their current system actually increases social interaction and introducing more negative capabilities would limit social interaction. Think about other areas of web interaction (comment sections or pages like Digg) and see how the ability to formally report negative feelings leads to a different kind of environment.

5. I’m amused about broadly defining “enemy” just as Facebook broadly defines “friend.”