A sociologist analyzes emotions by taking a close look at how
anger, laughter, shame, and crying emerge and decline in everyday
situations. Katz (sociology, UCLA) has selected what would seem to
be fruitful situations for his exploration of emotions. His study
of anger is based on some 150 detailed reports of adult drivers who
were asked to recount their enraging experiences while driving in
Los Angeles. To examine laughter, he uses an equally dramatic
technique, videotaping 187 episodes of individuals and families in
a fun house equipped with distorting mirrors. His work on shame
draws largely on statements and videotapes of eight-year-old boys
striking out in Little League baseball games and persons involved
in white collar crime investigations, as well as on the extensive
literature on shame. Crying is studied through two disparate
situations, the persistent whining of a preschool child and the
breakdown of a criminal being questioned by the police. However,
the prose in which the research and analysis is couched is
unfortunately clotted with the professional jargon of social
psychology. Learning that emotions are "dialectical tensions
between doing and being done by interactions with others," that
"the socioaesthetic properties of laughter appear to be a universal
feature of socialized competence throughout Western civilization,"
or that someone's crying is a response to a crisis in "the
corporeal authentication of his narration" is unlikely to enthrall
the general reader curious about the phenomenon of road rage or
wondering why tears may signal both great joy and great sadness -
even when illustrative liine drawings and stills from the
videotapes supplement the text, and excerpts of annotated tape
transcriptions offer a glimpse of a sociological researcher's
extraordinarily detailed observations of subjects. While the title
is appealing in its simplicity and directness, inside the cover
this clarity quickly gives way to a dismaying density that will
burden and frustrate readers outside the circle of
social-psychological research. (Kirkus Reviews)
How can it be that rational adults suddenly find themselves making
obscene gestures at drivers who just cut them off? Why do people
react with tears to events as disparate as winning a sports
championship and the death of a parent? How can a child cry
continuously in a cunningly strategic manner for five minutes, and
then speak with no trace of the tears that were just shed? Jack
Katz develops methods for unravelling these mysteries. His book
undertakes to answer the fundamental questions at the heart of our
emotional life. Katz fills the book with real-life emotions -
crying under the pressure of police interrogation, road rage on
California freeways, laughter in a funhouse, 8-year-olds
shamefacedly striking out at baseball games - where their rise and
fall can be observed without the artificial influence of the
research process. By using videotapes, interviews, ethnographic
description, participant observation and the insights of novelists,
Katz studies emotions as physical and embodied - vibrantly, "under
the radar" of a person's perceptual reach - rather than as
remembered and recounted. Katz illustrates his methods with
photographs and video stills that demonstrate the embodiment of
emotion. The portrait that emerges is one in which people are much
more sensually, intimately and aesthetically bound up in the
landscapes of their lives than previous scientific studies would
suggest. The text seeks to reveal the poetic and coherent logic of
emotional experience and revolutionize the study of this enigmatic
and essential aspect of human life.
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