Emotional Expression at Work and at Home: Domain, Status, or Individual Characteristics?*

Under what conditions do individuals feel free to express their emotions? To what degree are actors constrained by the social domain in which their emotions are activat-ed? To what extent are they bound by the hierarchical position that they occupy or by their status as a function of their gender, race, or class? Questions such as these are central to the sociology of emotion and illustrate how core sociological concepts undergird the study of emotion. These core questions have remained largely unanswered despite recent gains in both theory and research that have led sociologists as far afield as demography, social movements, and stratification to increasingly appreciate the nexus between the study of emotion and other areas of sociological research (Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001; Massey 2002). To date, three chief strategies have been employed in the sociological study of emotional expression. The first, with a focus on cultural constraints, emphasizes how norms govern emotional expression within particu-The third more recent empirical approach, in keeping with social epidemiology, documents the activation , experience, and expression of emotion as a function of sociodemographic Using the emotions module of the 1996 General Social Survey, we examine strategies that individuals use to express emotion. We focus on anger, one of the emotions most problematic or potentially disruptive to human interaction. Relying on insights from three theoretical approaches to emotion—the cultural perspective, the structural perspective , and affect control theory—we explore not only whether the expression of anger is affected by the social domain in which anger occurs (home or work) and the status difference between the individual experiencing anger and the actor triggering the emotion, but also the degree to which these effects are independent of individual characteristics such as gender, race, and education. Analyses indicate that social domain and status differences are such powerful predictors of emotional expression that they eclipse the influence of other individual characteristics, most notably the gender of both the individual and the target of the anger. Moreover, the status mechanism governing emotional expression does not vary across work and family settings.This study supplements previous research by disentangling the relative effects of domain, relative status, and individual characteristics. It also suggests that a more complementary approach, which integrates different theoretical paradigms, may be necessary for a fuller appreciation of the social constraints governing emotional expression. Although each of these approaches has helped to advance our sociological understanding of emotion, …