Anxious for the Job Hunt: Feeling Rules and Emotional Positivity in College-to-Career Transitions

Abstract

Research on the college-to-career transition emphasizes structural inequalities in opportunities and outcomes yet gives limited attention to how emotions are socially patterned during this high-stakes passage. This gap matters because emotion cultures and feeling rules shape both how students experience the search and how they are evaluated by others. We analyze survey data from 2,060 undergraduates at a large public university who were asked to provide words describing how they feel about the job search. These responses were standardized using peer-based ratings to construct an emotional positivity score, a measure that blends lexical openness with comparability. Findings show that stress and anxiety dominated students’ first associations and that positivity most often appeared second, producing layered mixtures of apprehension and excitement. Regression models reveal systematic variation in emotional positivity across demographic backgrounds, academic profiles, majors, and career aspirations. Our results highlight the patterned ways students orient to the job search, demonstrating how social location organizes feeling rules in transitional contexts and extending theories of emotion culture to a critical life course passage.