Feeling Rules In the Digital Age: Emotion Norms, Cognition, and Cultural Variation

How do people learn what they ought to feel—and when a feeling is judged inappropriate, excessive, or morally wrong? Across societies, emotional life is structured not only by personal experience but also by shared expectations regarding what one should feel, toward whom, and to what degree.

This session examines emotion norms and feeling rules as cultural-cognitive infrastructures that organize not only emotional experience but also the interpretation, evaluation, and social recognition of emotions. Building on classic work in the sociology of emotions, particularly the contributions of Goffman and Hochschild, we explore how emotional expectations are produced, negotiated, and contested within everyday interaction and broader systems of cultural meaning. Particular attention is paid to how these processes are being reshaped under conditions associated with the digital age. Platformized communication, algorithmic visibility, and affect commodification are transforming the contexts in which emotions are expressed, evaluated, and regulated. At the same time, rapidly changing cultural scripts generate uncertainty about what people should feel and how those feelings ought to be displayed.

We welcome contributions from the sociology of emotions, cultural and cognitive sociology, social psychology, gender studies, migration studies, and comparative sociology. Relevant topics include emotional norms surrounding microaggressions and discrimination, online outrage and moral judgment, gendered feeling rules, emotional labor, migrant experiences across cultural contexts, and cross-national variation in emotional expectations and repertoires. By placing emotion norms at the center of analysis, this session asks how emotions become sites through which social boundaries, moral judgments, and inequalities are produced and contested.