When we think of emotions, we
generally think of something private, internal, and purely phenomenal. In his book, How Emotions Work, Jack Katz turns this intuitive view on its
head. Katz believes that emotions are
largely and fundamentally social things. 
We act the ways we do and consequently feel the ways we feel because of
what others are doing (or are not doing) in our surrounds. How
Emotions Work is an extended argument for this perspective.

The sheer originality of Katz’s
view makes his book a fascinating read. 
However, Katz also explores emotions and emotional expressions that are
both extremely familiar to us yet rarely touched in the professional literature
(with the exception of shame). Reading
about unique research also makes Katz’s book very interesting. Katz devotes chapters to road rage, laughter
in a funhouse, shame, whining toddlers, and accused murders breaking down under
interrogation. In each of these
studies, Katz goes to where the phenomena are, instead of trying to reproduce
aspects of it in some artificial laboratory situation, and then tries to tell a
story that weaves together all the people in each scene, a story that explains
how the emotional reactions of those present work off of each other to create
these reactions.

Katz’s main points are these:
first, all emotional expressions are designed to do some important narrative
work in a social situation. An accused
murderer might cry when he shifts from spinning a veil of lies to a moment of
truth. Second, we adjust our emotional
expressions depending upon how others present are responding to our
behavior. We laugh at our reflections
in distorting mirrors if family or friends are there to witness the strange
spectacle; we don’t laugh among strangers or if alone. And third, emotions change our bodies. We hold ourselves differently, we breathe
differently, we sound different, as our feelings change. These changes both inspire and alter our
emotions. A toddler that was just
overcome by sobbing can speak clear as a bell when the crying fit is over. In making these changes, we are also and
simultaneously transforming our own selves. 
We remake ourselves and our life stories through emotional expressions.

He uses each of his studies of
radically different types of emotional interactions to support these
conclusions. He does probably the best
job of this in the very first series of studies he discusses, those concerning
road rage. He begins his analysis with
two very interesting puzzles: why is there so much road rage, but almost no
“sidewalk rage”? What makes the
difference when you navigating a car down a street as opposed to navigating
your body down a walkway? And, why is
it that the driver is always the one who gets angry? Why isn’t there ever passenger-rage, especially for those in the
front seats, whose views are almost exactly the same as the drivers? Good questions. Here, in part, are his good answers.

When we are strolling down a path,
we pay attention to on-coming pedestrians. 
We watch them much more than we watch, say, the back of the person in
front of us. Because we do this, we are
able to notice and appreciate the facial expressions — the emotions — of
those coming towards us. And, because
we are facing each other, they are able to notice our feelings at the same
time.

But in a car, only rarely are we
focused on on-coming traffic. Instead,
we are paying attention to the car in front of us. As a result, we can’t see the emotional expressions of other
drivers, and they can’t see ours. Much
of the extreme emotional reactions we see with drivers comes out of their
frustration at not being able to communicate immediately with those in drivers’
environment. They can’t see what the
other drivers are feeling and so (here some more details need to be filled in)
assume that the other drivers are almost deliberately ignoring their concerns.

Why don’t passengers feel slighted,
since they can’t communicate with the other drivers either? Katz’s research shows that more often than
not, passengers in a car with a driver expressing road rage show great
frustration with the driver of the car they are in, not with the other drivers
on the road. Why is there such a
divergence in reaction? Katz points out
that an additional factor in explaining road rage is that drivers identify with
their cars. Their cars become part of
who they are; the cars get written into the personal on-going narratives of drivers;
the drivers’ sense of personal space extends now from bumper to bumper. Passengers don’t do this; they are simply
being transported from one place to another. 
As a result, their identities stop at the edge of their bodies. So, even though front-seat passengers see
just about the same thing as the drivers do, their reactions are very
different. They don’t feel personally
insulted since they don’t identify with the traveling car and therefore don’t
need to communicate to others about it.

Regardless of whether one agrees
with Katz in the end, no one will be able to claim that he and the members of
his lab have not put in the hours gathering data. Katz and his research group have clearly spent thousands upon thousands
of hours recording social interactions and then analyzing them. One criticism that I do have of the book,
however, is that much of the data remains in the background. Katz will go over particular examples that
support his views in detail, but these are used more as rhetorical devices than
as evidentiary support. Maybe I am just
a data-monger, but I would have preferred to have had more of what he found in
his studies of people so that I could feel as though I were coming to the same
conclusions as he did as we go through the studies together. Or, maybe, I could disagree with his
interpretations of some things, based on the data gathered. But these opportunities for personal
discovery and perhaps future interaction with the author are lost. This lacuna is particularly disappointing in
this book, since its underlying point is that social interaction is everything.

Katz is a very good writer, so it
is very easy to follow his line of reasoning as he tells it. Yet, at the same time, I couldn’t help
feeling upon occasion that I was being sold a bill of goods. His selective choosing of data accounts for
some of this reaction. But even if we
bracket that difficulty, I think Katz overstates or over-interprets his case
from time to time. As a result, he ends
up saying things that really just don’t make a lot of sense. For example, in a chapter in which he
discusses what crying means, he concludes that “joyful crying is the upshot of
a consciousness about the dialectics of
metamorphosis itself” (p. 190, italics his).  Even put into context, I don’t think this quotation is
meaningful, or at least it is not terribly helpful. And while I am the first one to cry at one of my children’s
recitals, I can’t say that I am doing so because I am realizing my children are
growing up, or are otherwise engaged in change, and are themselves showing me
this as they play their violins or whatever. 
Sometimes I think I cry for exactly the opposite reason. I cry because are still children, my
children, and they have so far to go, and I become aware of this as I see them
deeply engaged in their childhood activities.

I have to say that Katz writes in a
tradition in which I normally do not traffic; this fact accounts some my
reactions. His research is largely
ethnographic and highly contextualized; his analysis is largely narrative and
qualitative. He is clearly a master at
both. Yet, coming from a tradition of
quantitative analysis and formula-based theorizing, I find his book vaguely
unsatisfying in the end. I want the
data, so that I can see for myself whether I should change my reactions or work
to change his.

©
2003 Valerie Gray Hardcastle

Valerie Gray Hardcastle,
Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, Science and Technology Studies, Virginia
Tech

Categories: Philosophical