Emotion regime
The term emotion regime refers to the particular set of shared expectations that guide how people ought to feel and express themselves in particular social settings. The differing structures of these social norms shape the expectations that guide everyday conduct and vary across historical periods and communities. Reddy defines an emotional regime as a configuration of prescribed “emotives”, which are expressions that both describe and help produce feelings, together with the rituals and practices through which they are inculcated. By emphasizing the ways such norms channel expression, authorize some feelings, and suppress others, the concept highlights how feelings are organized within specific social groups.
The term was introduced and elaborated by Reddy in The Navigation of Feeling, where he analysed shifts in dominant emotion regimes during the French Revolution. Subsequent analysis in the history of emotions, sociology, and cultural theory has used the concept to examine how communities and institutions cultivate characteristic repertoires of feeling. It is often discussed alongside Barbara Rosenwein’s framework of emotional communities are groups that share norms, valuations, and styles of expression and offers a complementary emphasis on plural emotional formations within a given society. Historians have also situated emotion regimes within broader historiographical debates about how community expectations of proper or acceptable behavior are formed and how they change over time.
As an analytic tool, the concept of an emotion regime allows researchers to describe how emotional norms are organized, maintained, and contested. It draws attention to the relationship between feeling and power, showing how political, religious, professional, or familial settings can cultivate expectations that shape conduct and constrain autonomy. Analysts have used the framework to investigate institutions, identity groups, political movements, and digital cultures, analysing how they enforce standards of affective expression and how individuals navigate, adapt to or resist them.
Major definitions and scholarly debates on emotion regimes are presented alongside accounts of adjacent mechanisms through which they operate, historical and contemporary cases in which they appear, and their application across institutional, social, political, and digital contexts. The coverage also situates the concept in relation to adjacent analytic frameworks, including emotives, emotional communities, feeling rules, and emotional practices.Emotion Regimes: An Overview
Patterns of expected feelings and displays shape many everyday environments, even if people rarely name them explicitly. Writers in the field use the term emotion regime to describe the shared expectations that prescribe how individuals ought to feel and express themselves in particular settings. These arrangements are historically situated and shaped by social power, a point emphasised in analysis arguing that emotions are not merely private states but structured responses shaped by cultural environments.Everyday Settings Where Emotion Expectations Are Visible
People routinely navigate settings in which expectations about appropriate feelings are clearly marked. In schools, students may learn that enthusiasm is welcomed while frustration must be carefully controlled, reflecting the broader insight that social groups develop distinct patterns of feeling and expression which is a dynamic that writers have described as "emotional communities", meaning groups bound together through shared norms for interpreting and valuing feelings. Workplaces likewise cultivate expectations about demeanour; for instance, studies of service labour show how organisations encourage workers to display cheerfulness as part of professional conduct, thereby shaping the feelings considered suitable for the job. Online platforms also foster recurring affective patterns as users learn which styles of expression are rewarded, which discouraged, and how circulating feelings come to organise participation.Relevance of the Concept
Identifying such patterned expectations is the core contribution of the concept of emotion regimes. The term highlights how norms guide what people ought to feel and how they ought to communicate those feelings, underscoring that these expectations are historically contingent rather than universal. Examination of group-specific feeling norms shows that institutions and communities cultivate shared repertoires of valued and disvalued feelings, shaping how members understand situations and each other. The hypothesis proposed is that cultural formations organise emotions in ways that reinforce or challenge social power, making the analysis of these arrangements an important tool for examining how norms, authority, and affective conduct intersect across different contexts. These insights prepare readers for the sections that follow, which examine how regimes operate through rules, sanctions, and symbolic forms embedded in institutional and social life.Defining the Concept
Understanding the term “emotion regime” requires both an accessible point of entry and a clear account of how writers in the field use the concept. Historians employ the term to describe patterned structures that shape how feelings may be expressed, interpreted, and regulated in specific settings. This section introduces the idea in everyday terms before outlining its canonical academic definition and distinguishing it from related concepts.Simple Definition
An emotion regime can be understood as the patterned environment of emotional expectations that surrounds people in a particular setting. It refers to the ways social groups, institutions, or societies signal which feelings should be expressed, which should be muted, and how individuals are expected to display those feelings in everyday interactions. These expectations may be conveyed through routines, rituals, or informal cues about what counts as an appropriate response in a given situation.Canonical Academic Definition
In the historical study of emotions, the concept takes on a more precise meaning. Rosenwein summarizes William Reddy's definition as “the set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them.” In Reddy's framework, regimes prescribe which feelings count as legitimate, how they should be articulated, and how individuals are expected to orient themselves toward those norms. Because emotive expressions both describe and alter a speaker's feelings, the norms governing them become a powerful means through which institutions or authorities shape emotional life.Conceptual Elements of an Emotion Regime
Emotion regimes consist of several interconnected elements. First, they articulate norms that define which feelings and expressions are valued, discouraged, or prohibited. Second, regimes rely on rituals and practices that reinforce these norms in daily life with examples being commemorations, public declarations, gestures, or forms of address. Third, they establish mechanisms for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate feelings, whether through praise, censure, or more formal sanctions. Finally, emotion regimes are historically and culturally specific: they emerge in response to particular social conditions, and shifts in regimes often occur when their norms generate significant emotional strain or conflict.Distinguishing “Emotion Regimes” from Related Concepts
Although related to several neighboring terms, “emotion regime” has a distinct analytical focus. Rosenwein's concept of emotional communities describe groups bound together by shared norms, values, and styles of emotional expression focusing on the affective cohesion of a community rather than the externally imposed standards enforced by authorities. An emotion regime, by contrast, highlights regulation, prescription, and the power-laden processes by which emotional norms are maintained. Reddy's concept also intersects with sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s idea of feeling rules, which identify micro-level expectations guiding individual emotional expression, but emotion regimes encompass broader institutional and political structures that set and enforce those rules. Together, these distinctions clarify what the term contributes to the historical and social analysis of patterned feeling.How Emotion Regimes Work
Emotion regimes operate through interlocking patterns of customary behavior that guide how people are expected to feel, express themselves, and interpret social situations. Prescriptive rules, interpretive frames, sanctions, ritual forms, and possibilities for change are examples of several mechanisms that writers in the field highlight as shaping patterned emotional conduct within specific settings.Feeling Rules
Hochschild introduced the concept of “feeling rules,” defining them as shared standards that specify what one “ought to feel” in particular situations and how those feelings should be expressed in order to sustain proper social relations. These norms help determine whether individuals should induce, suppress, or modify feelings, and they are central to workplace settings where interaction with clients or passengers requires managing one's affective display. Hochschild argues that individuals engage in “emotion management” to meet these rules, a process that may involve either surface acting or deep acting when the emotional expectations built into a job demand sustained forms of cheerfulness, patience, or calm. Feeling rules thus provide the shared expectations that emotion regimes rely on to indicate what counts as appropriate conduct.Expectations and Interpretive Frames
Beyond explicit feeling rules, people learn to interpret situations through culturally shared frames that guide the emotions they take to be appropriate. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s account of the interaction order, analysts emphasize that social encounters rely on tacit definitions of the situation that structure alignments, obligations, and expectations. In face-to-face encounters, participants continuously manage “face” by orienting to cues that signal respect, deference, or involvement. These frames help organize emotional expectations by indicating whether embarrassment, reassurance, restraint, or warmth is situationally appropriate. In collective settings, shared ways of understanding situations also shape the feelings people learn to use, helping them identify what counts as a grievance, which emotions are seen as acceptable, and which responses are socially approved..