JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Journal of Sociology.The authors examine self-reported emotional experiences of individuals in a large probability sample of Americans, using two theories in the sociology of emotions as lenses to apprehend social order in emotional processes. Viewing emotions as indicators of individuals' positions in a three-dimensional affective space (e.g., Heise, Smith-Lovin, MacKinnon), the authors find emotional station correlates with a variety of social structural, circumstantial, and individual-level variables. Viewing emotions as the focus of emotion norms and emotion management efforts (e.g., Hochschild), the authors arrive at new postulates about how transformations of emotions can be achieved in social support groups and other types of social institutions. A further demonstration that emotions reflect multiple sociological realities develops through the examination of sex differences in emotional experience. The authors find that there are concrete though subtle sex differences in the experience, structure, transformation, and contextual significance of emotions. The analyses suggest complementarities between affect control and emotion management that may have been overlooked in other studies.Concluding a review of societal evolution, Douglas Massey said, "Emotionality remains a strong and independent force in human affairs, influ-1 The authors would like to thank Peggy Thoits, Brian Powell, Robert Sokol, and the participants of the social psychology seminar at Indiana University, Bloomington, as well as the participants of the first annual conference on research agendas in affect control theory.

Under what conditions do individuals feel free to express their emotions? To what degree are actors constrained by the social domain in which their emotions are activated? To what extent are they bound by the hierarchical position that they occupy or by their status as a function of their gender, race, or class?Questions such as these are central to the sociology of emotion and illustrate how core sociological concepts undergird the study of emotion. These core questions have remained largely unanswered despite recent gains in both theory and research that have led sociologists as far afield as demography, social movements, and stratification to increasingly appreciate the nexus between the study of emotion and other areas of sociological research (Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001;Massey 2002).To date, three chief strategies have been employed in the sociological study of emotional expression. The first, with a focus on cultural constraints, emphasizes how norms govern emotional expression within particular domains (DeVault 1999;Hochschild 1983;Lively 2000). The second, in contrast, highlights the effects of power and status structures regardless of context or setting (Clark 1990;Kemper 1978;Lovaglia and Houser 1996;Ridgeway and Johnson 1990). The third more recent empirical approach, in keeping with social epidemiology, documents the activation, experience, and expression of emotion as a function of sociodemographic characteristics (

Building upon insights generated by social psychological scholarship on equity, emotions, and identity, we use the General Social Survey (1996) Modules on Emotion and Gender and the National Survey of Family and Households (1992—1994) to investigate the relationship between perceived inequity in the household division of labor and emotion. These surveys enable us to assess the degree to which patterns identified in short-term laboratory studies of relative strangers are generalizable to enduring relationships among intimates. We move beyond existing studies that link inequity in the home with depression by incorporating a broader scope of emotions and further by distinguishing between underbenefiting and overbenefiting—i.e., doing what one considers more or less than one’s fair share—and by examining these processes for women and men. We find general support for principles of equity theory: That is, emotions are closely tied to perceived inequity in the division of household labor. Guided by insights from Kemper’s structural interactional theory of emotion and affect control theory, we show that this pattern differs by specific emotions, the direction of the inequity, and the sex of the perceiver. Implications for understanding emotion, equity theory, and family are then elaborated.