Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The relationship between the social and affective processes is a two-way street: society shapes its members’ affective life which, in turn, affects society’s basic processes. Democracy pays a heavy price when its members are emotionally illiterate, where emotional littering is rampant. This paper explores the interfaces between affective life and social processes. After discussing different ways of measuring emotional intelligence and its impact on democratic polity, the paper introduces the Emotional Template Matrix (ETM) analysis, a self-assessment tool designed to track emotional wellness, and describes the ETM Survey based on this methodology. The last section of this paper summarizes preliminary results of the ETM Survey.

Publication Type: PAPER
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Addresses maternal emotion socialization and children’s emotion understanding in relation to acculturation within Latino families. By using developmental, sociological, and feminist perspectives, and both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, this study makes an important contribution to the literature on children’s development of emotion understanding and the importance of the cultural context.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Under contemporary capitalism, demands for emotion work have intensified for corporate managerial employees for a variety of reasons. We should therefore include their experiences in the debate on the increasing significance of emotion management skills in contemporary work. Because managerial employees are required to mobilize their emotion management capacities on the job, these capacities are sought by potential employers during the recruitment and selection processes. Emotion management skills are not dependent on “personality,” as suggested by popular business discourses, but, rather, accumulated and polished through training and practice. They have, as such, become a form of cultural capital. Business schools in the United States get their students to accumulate this capital through their intensive activities focusing on the job search and the job interview. I detail the ways in which students are trained in conducting job searches and job interviews by drawing upon 20 weeks of fieldwork in a business school in the United States and contextualize this data by use of responses to an e-mail survey including 21 top-ranked business schools in the country. The job search is construed as a strategic act that at once demands and, in demanding constantly, further develops the emotion management abilities and emotional stamina of the job seekers. The job interview is a critically privileged moment in the larger process of the job search and is an instance where impression management skills are put on display for prospective employers.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The concept of ‘emotional intelligence’ (EI) has been embraced in the last decade by academics and practitioners alike. Considered by many to be a necessary attribute for success in the American workplace (Cherniss & Goleman, 2001; Goleman, 1995, 1998), much research has been devoted to the development of scales to assess one’s EI level and thus identify deficiencies that can be improved through training. Recently, this body of work has drawn criticism regarding the assumptions upon which the theory of EI is based; namely, the over-psychologized nature of emotion and the use of positivistic methods for its study (Fineman, 2000; 2004, 2005). In this paper, I review the existing debates over EI, and offer an interpretive framework for its study, which draws on the symbolic interactionist tradition. I conclude by discussing the implications that this new framework might hold for the workplace, in particular, the benefits for today’s employee, who is expected to be ‘emotionally intelligent’.

Publication Type: Extended Abstract
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The study is designed to examine how variations in the mediated presentation of emotional faces influences the activation of brain regions associated with face processing. Emotional faces used in this study are varied in two ways commonly used in media, the first, called type varies whether the face is a human face or an animal face and the second, called form, varies whether the face is photographic or cartoon like. To date there has been little comparative study of whether these different types of faces elicit the same or different patterns of neural activation. For the experiment, each subject’s FFA, Amygdala, and STS were indentified on the functional localizer scan. The FFA was defined as the set of all continuous voxels in the fusiform gyrus that showed significant difference in activity comparing faces to houses. Because the localizer data were used to independently define the FFA region of interest for experimental fMRI scans, no correction for multiple voxel-wise comparisons was made. The same procedure was made to define Amygdala and STS. Each subject’s predefined FFA, Amygdala, and STS were then used to extract the time course of the magnetic resonance (MR) signal intensity during the experimental fMRI scans.
Preliminary results showed that there was a significant difference of BOLD activation in FFA, Amygdala, and STS found among valence levels of facial expressions. In addition, amygdala and STS activated differently to different types (animal and human) and forms (cartoon and real photographic) of faces.