Imagining an Affective Sociology

Abstract

In the following essay, I make the case that sociology is long overdue for an affective “turn,” or a full-scale embrace of emotional dynamics. For most of its history, sociology has had a tenuous relationship with emotions and affect. Sometimes ignored, more often examined as a dependent variable caused by structure, culture, and cognition, a diverse array of research on motivation and action demonstrates affect is a causal force of thinking and doing. I begin by drawing from this research and some corners of sociology already embracing affectivism to make the case for an affective sociology. Once outlined, I point to some possible directions for a systematic, vibrant research agenda.

Introduction

Why and how are people motivated to make the decisions they make, set the course of action they set, and conform or deviate from the expectations and obligations that define social life? Sociologists, for the most part, answer this question with cognitively tinged explanations, emphasizing “thinking, anticipating, planning, deliberating, and calculating” (Campbell 1999:49; see also, Abrutyn and Lizardo 2024; Collins 1981; Turner 2009; Wrong 1961). What about emotions or affects? There is a vibrant subfield on the sociology of emotions (Thoits 1989; Turner and Stets 2005, 2006), and undoubtedly, emotions have crept into myriad subfields, such as social movements (Jasper 2011; Summers-Effler 2009), social psychology (Burke and Stets 2009; Robinson and Smith-Lovin 2006), and more recently, work on joy within and among marginalized communities (Luna et al. 2024; shuster and Westbrook 2024). Yet emotions are often seen as mediating or dependent variables; important, to be sure, but as Weber (1978:25) and many others worried, too subjective and too biologically or psychologically rooted to be sociological. Sociology is not alone. In a recent call to an affective science, an interdisciplinary cadre of scientists observed that the “behavioral and cognitive sciences” have routinely struggled to incorporate “emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes into models of human behavior and mind . . . on the basis that they were irrational, unmeasurable, or simply unenlightening” (Dukes et al. 2021:816).

Sociology, like other behavioral sciences, is ripe for an affective turn. Not because cognitivism is wrong, per se, but because decades of neuroscientific evidence (Berridge 2018; Damasio 1994; Izard 2009; LeDoux 2012; Panksepp et al. 2017) make taking emotions for granted or treating them as less serious or more difficult to study than survey or ethnographic interview responses untenable and incomplete. Indeed, just as the cultural turn (Swidler 1986) was supplemented by the cognitive turn (DiMaggio 1997), a close survey of a wide range of scholarship on aesthetics (Benzecry 2011; Pagis and Summers-Effler 2021; Silver 2022), embodiment (Cerulo 2015; Green 2011; Winchester 2016), and creativity (Brett 2022; Leschziner 2015) and a growing body of ethnographic accounts of diverse activities (Chambliss 1989; Corte 2022; Fine and Corte 2017; Ocejo 2017; Sennett 2008) point toward a sociology ready for affectivism. Perhaps sociology just needs a warrant for leaning into the affective and emotional aspects of motivation, action, and organization and a more comprehensive vocabulary. In either case, just like theorizing culture benefits from thinking about cognition, it can also benefit from considering affect. Relatedly, it may be that affectivism draws cultural and cognitive sociologies closer to social psychology, a subfield that shares natural affinities around the centrality of meaning (Collett and Lizardo 2014; Fine 2010; Rawlings and Childress 2021) yet remains at arm’s length. Microsociologists have increasingly considered emotions relevant but have not taken the leap in documenting their causal nature (Stets 2010; Turner 2010a) despite being well positioned to make this jump given that a few sociologists have made great strides toward a more emotional microsociology (Collins 2004; Stets and Turner 2014; Summers-Effler 2022; Turner 2007, 2010b; von Scheve 2012).

In what follows, I first make the case for why affectivism is the logical, necessary next step, and I then sketch out some tentative ideas for a research agenda. At the minimum, I hope I give sympathetic readers pause when designing their own research, perhaps adding some measures of emotions to their models. I begin, however, in the sticky semantic waters by briefly distinguishing between emotion and affect.

Putting the Affect into Affectivism

Sociology has recognized the definitional difficulties surrounding seemingly synonymous terms, such as “emotions,” “affects,” “moods,” and the like (Cottingham and Evans 2025; Thoits 1989; Turner and Stets 2005). For my purposes, there is a simple distinction. Emotions refer to common vernacular words we apply to affective responses (Fiske 2020) that are pregnant with culturally specific schema about stimuli, response (Izard 2007), and meaning. Affect, in contrast, is the evolved embodied tendencies that organize, motivate, and sometimes command or control cognition and action (Berridge 2018; Panksepp 1998). Sociology tends to think in terms of emotions, either the basic or biologically ubiquitous types, such as happiness, sadness, anger, and fear (Ekman 1982); more complex amalgamations of these primary emotions, such as awe (Turner 2007) or joy (Luna et al. 2024); or the self-conscious social emotions, such as shame, guilt, and pride (Scheff 1988). In part, this perspective holds sway because it taps into emotion schema (Izard 2007):

A fear schema, for example, would include factual information (semantic memories) about harmful objects and situations, and about behavioral and body responses that occur in such situations. Thus, if you find yourself in a situation in which a harmful stimulus is present (a threat), and notice, through self-monitoring, that you are freezing and your heart is racing, these factors will likely match facts associated with fear in the fear schema and, through pattern completion, activate the fear schema. The schema will also include factual memories about how to cope with danger, and episodic memories about how you cope with such situations, which will bias the particular thoughts and actions used to cope. Emotion schema are learned in childhood and used to categorize situations as one goes through life. As one becomes more emotionally experienced, the states become more differentiated: fright comes to be distinguished from startle, panic, dread, and anxiety. (LeDoux and Brown 2017:E2022)

Emotion schemas are obviously sociological in really important ways (Wierzbicka 1994). Hochschild’s (1979) notion of feeling and framing rules is one aspect of emotion schemas, as are the structural conditions identified by Kemper (2006) that pattern certain emotions or labels. Sociology should continue to dig into emotions because they matter for understanding social life (e.g., Cottingham and Evans 2025; Stets and Turner 2014; Turner and Stets 2006).

Affects, on the other hand, are intimately tied to motivation, action, decision-making, memory, perception, attention, and, as I argue, social organization. Affect drives cognition and behavior as well as structure and culture in ways that emotions do not. This is not a radical argument, although sociologists generally do not distinguish between emotions and affects. The interaction ritual perspective, for example, has long seen emotional energy—as different from emotional vernacular—as a causal force (Collins 2004; Summers-Effler 2009). Notably, the argument that emotions are resources that motivate people and shape thinking and doing is not monopolized by the ritual tradition (Cottingham 2022; Turner 2010a), but it remains less popular than the emotions-as-constructions approach. Thus, by referring to some things as affect and other things as emotions, it is possible to elevate the importance of one without taking wind from the sails of the other.

So, what are affects? For my purposes, affect is the biophysical (adaptive) response to environments, objects, and other stimuli that simultaneously signals the relationship between the person/body/mind and environment and acts as a primary form of consciousness or sentience. It is often preconscious, but affect and cognition often get wrapped up in each other through feedback loops predicated on the former coordinating with, commanding, and sometimes controlling the latter. Most centrally, affect is more convincingly tied to motivation than, say, emotions such as happy or sad, which are cognitive and cultural labels applied to affective responses. Parsons and Shils (1951:110–114) help us understand affective motivation more clearly. First, they distinguish between “drive” and “drives,” with the former referring to the “amount of energy” impelling an organism toward (or away from) whatever object, activity, or environment it is pursuing, desires, wants, and so forth. The latter refers “to a set of tendencies on the part of the organism to acquire certain goal objects (or really, certain relationships to goal objects)” (Parsons and Shils 1951:110–111). We can dispense with the notion of goals in the rational choice sense of the term and simply accept that certain tendencies compel or push people forward, particularly as Parsons and Shils are clear that cathexis, or the construction, maintenance, or expansion of affective attachment to objects, is at the heart of motivation, whether innate or learned (see also Kurakin 2025).

Affect, more concrete examples of which follow shortly, are core evolved adaptive tendencies or dispositions that were selected for based on challenges and recurring novelties mammals faced in their environment. To be sure, a key point of distinction between most mammals and primates—especially apes and, of course, humans—is that selection was not working purely or, perhaps more accurately, from the biotic environment but became increasingly ramified from the complex social environment hominins became inseparable from (Bowles and Gintis 2011; Turner 2007). The advantage of adopting an affectivist perspective is the ontological grounded nature of these affective tendencies or dispositions. Parsons and Shils (1951) and so many sociologists attempting to explain action (see critiques by Martin 2011; Wrong 1961) continue to scour externalities that are only tangentially or weakly tied to action, such as values, interests, beliefs, and other classic sociological mechanisms (Vaisey 2008).

For instance, some affects are homeostatic (e.g., hunger) or sensorimotor (e.g., pain) responses that feel instinctual, reactive, and unreflexive; responses sociologists are wary escape sociological inquiry. Yet their embodied, often prereflexivity does not mean they hold no value. Hunger is not a social construct, to be sure, but it is a fact that has social consequences (Hastrup 1993). Likewise, sociologists long ignored or marginalized pain because of how intrapersonal, subjective, and difficult to study pain is, and yet there are good reasons to pay closer attention to physical (Zajacova, Grol-Prokopczyk, and Zimmer 2021) and social (Abrutyn 2023) pain.

Another set of tendencies, suggested by mammalian studies (Davies 2011), is neither homeostatic nor sensorimotor and, in fact, appears to be the sorts of “impulsions » Martin (2011:19) argued we should be invested in studying. They are primary, according to Panksepp (1998), like our digestive system: evolved to deal with certain recurring environmental challenges. Unlike these bodily systems designed to regulate the physical body, affective systems appear to have been selected to allow mammals to navigate both changing biotic environments and the increasingly complex social environments they inhabit.

Although beyond the scope of this essay, mammalian affective systems are neurobiologically and chemically discrete (Davis and Montag 2019; von der Westhuizen and Solms 2015). Although there is less direct neurophysiological evidence from humans on these systems, there are compelling reasons why they would have been conserved over the course of evolution (Davies 2011). Cognition, and especially language, evolved rather late, and evidence-based arguments that these later capacities supersede affect have been largely abandoned in the face of overwhelming neuroscientific evidence to the contrary (Damasio 1994; Izard 2007; LeDoux 2012; Turner 2007). The neural pathways going “up” from our subcortical emotion regions (e.g., amygdala) are more plentiful and dense than those going “down” from our neocortex, which explains why affect and emotion are faster responses to events, people, environments, experiences, and so forth. These responses are sometimes so fast that they elude cognitive awareness despite their neurophysiological, chemical, behavioral, and subjective consequences (Izard 2007). We are, to paraphrase Turner (2007), the most emotional creature on Earth, and the extensive research on our closest relatives (chimpanzees) reveals that we share far more affectively than we do not (de Waal 2019; Tomasello 2019). Our enhanced cognitive abilities amplify and expand our mammalian affective capacities, not dampen them (Decety and Howard 2013; Tomasello and Vaish 2013).

Again, affect serves both as a signal about the relationship between the body/mind/self and the environment and as a form of sentience (Asma and Gabriel 2019) that affords mammals a unique set of survival responses, including the capacity to care intensely about their young, handicap themselves so that play between conspecifics is fair and fun, and form enduring relationships with others (Lents 2016). Like reptiles, we (meaning mammals) have dispositions to rage and fear as defined by embodied, cognitive, and behavioral responses to threats to cherished objects and to our physical (and social) self, respectively. Seeking is the “goad without a goal” (Panksepp 1998) that rewards mammals for anticipating, desiring, pursuing, and learning about their environment and objects that can be rewarding (Berridge 2023). Panic/grief is the affective response to the loss—temporary or forever—of objects we cherish and see as extensions of the self.

Finally, lust, care, play, and dominance are the affective dispositions and subsequent classes of activities that undergird the diverse array of mammalian bonding. ¹ Each of these dispositions, as forms of sentience, act as motivational impulsions, serving as “frames” for perceiving and attending to our body/mind/self in different environments and as pathways to learning, adapting, and changing. As we will see, our enlarged neocortex enhances these basic functions. For example, although any neophyte mammal will panic when it loses sight of its primary caretaker, like a child who cannot see her parents in a busy market, humans are capable of imagining, anticipating, or inventing these losses such that they respond in equivalent ways as if they were actually losing something. This extended capacity for imagination does not negate the affective basis of the tendency but rather begins to point to why and how affect shapes organization beyond the physical and mental sphere of the individual human organism. This capacity may also point to the underlying affective mechanics by which instrumental relationships are transformed into cohesive, affective types (Lawler 2006) and, in some cases, why both these types of relationships become coercive in some organizations (Kanter 1968).

Finally, beyond the affective neuroscientific evidence, I think there is one more set of affects that sociologists are already interested in and are the only other emotions that seem to have causal efficacy. These are the “social” affects of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and humiliation (Garfinkel 1956; Goffman 1956; Scheff 1988) and their “positive” counterparts, pride, honor, and dignity (Abrutyn and Zhang 2024), all of which fit the definition of affect sketched out earlier. They are signals, perhaps the most intense signals, available to humans about their current relationship to the social environment (Boehm 2012)—real, imagined, or anticipated. As with all affects, they are forms of sentience, enabling self-regulation (Cooley [1902] 1964) and providing a sense of understanding and sense-making across a range of situations.

At this point, I would prefer to make a more explicit case for why affectivism matters to sociology. The fact that affect evolved with and is intimately tied to survival, even if the conditions under which they evolved are no longer relevant to human life, is one reason, but it carries less sociological currency. Thus, I would like to lay out some key micro-, meso-, and macro-level aspects of affectivism that matter to sociological thought and research. Then, with those points laid out, I can return to these tendencies and posit some tentative directions for an affective sociological agenda.

Why Affectivism?

Memory, Attention, Perception

What makes humans human? If anything, it must be that human nature is inseparable from the groups in which it is nurtured. Of course, this is true of all mammals. One might say it is morality, but most mammals display some form of empathy, attachment to kin (and grief at their death [King 2013]), a sense of fairness, and some norms of reciprocity (Lents 2016). These traits are amplified in primates, especially chimps (de Waal 2019). Perhaps it is the capacity to take the role of the other (Mead 1934) and, consequently, coordinate our behavior in the present, reflect on the past, and anticipate the future (Tomasello 2019). All these traits, and most others, are predicated on affect because affect rests at the core of attention, perception, and memory. That is, a self, a moral self, and an empathic self requires affect because affect tags all information—before we think about that information—with affective valences (Turner 2007), thereby heightening all of our mammalian traits. Thus, what interests us (Martin and Lembo 2020), what we value, and what we desire are affectively coordinated (Abrutyn 2025) and predicated on dopaminergic rewards that feel good (Berridge and Kringelbach 2008; Di Domenico and Ryan 2017). Objects and their affordances pull our attention as they resonate (McDonnell, Bail, and Tavory 2017). But it is an affective gravitational pull because dopamine is continuously but subtly released until an object, environment, or other stimulus causes dopamine to pulse, which narrows our attention and moves us toward it (Schulz 2016).

None of this is to suggest language and cognition are irrelevant, but it is a subtle reminder that the self emerges in doing and in feeling (Shalin 1986). The unique capacity of autobiographical memory transforms events and the association between stimuli and responses from purely conditioned pairings to meaningful, selected sequences or episodes (Tulving 2002) about the “specific what, where, and when of an experience” (Fivush 2011:560), which, in turn, is highly dependent on affective tagging. Importantly, autobiographical memory, a special form of episodic memory, evolved in humans (and perhaps other hominins) and is predicated on “autonoetic consciousness [or] the awareness of self having experienced the event in the past, which involves mental time travel” (Fivush 2011:560). Unlike general episodic memories, the self is included in the event, usually from the perspective of the person. Autobiographical memory rests at the seat of self-classification because it generates representations that move beyond the event—“the play button turns on a movie”—to ones that implicate the person and their feelings and thoughts—“I pushed the play button and was excited to watch my favorite movie.” Thus, autobiographical memories patch together a sense of continuity (Conway 2005), but the “past we recall often consists primarily of moments imbued with emotions; these are occasions we seem to remember most vividly and durably” (Holland and Kensinger 2010:93).

Our attention is shaped by affective responses and the internalization of memories, and the durability, speed, and likelihood of retrieval and frequency of remembrance are all affectively determined. Importantly, positive affective tags create memories that are highly generalized and diffuse, with details often sacrificed for broader gestalt understandings. Conversely, negative emotions tend to elevate certain elements of a memory over others, which makes traumatized victims terrible witnesses for police and prosecutors. These affective dynamics have broad implications for meaning and morality in addition to the social psychology of self.

Meaning and Morality

Cultural sociology and microsociology center on meaning and meaning-making (Rawlings and Childress 2021). Affectivism, in turn, shines a light on certain meaning-making processes and their obvious outcome: morality. If memory, for instance, is an affective process, then so are the acquisition, mobilization, and deployment of knowledge, schemas, and other cultural mechanisms of action, such as scripts or frames. The recent call to revisit socialization (Guhin, McCrory Calarco, and Miller-Idriss 2021) or enculturation (Lizardo 2017) is, in fact, a call to study affective and emotional socialization. The former points us toward the study of child and adolescent development (Lignier 2021), something sociologists used to care a lot more about but have largely ceded to psychologists. Thinking about how affect contributes to how we become attached to objects (Gordon 1981; Kurakin 2025) or how our self “expands” to include those objects—especially individual or collective others (Summers-Effler 2004)—is something we need to pay more attention to. It is not just a matter of understanding the stratification of socialization but also how affective tendencies are channeled or constrained in learning curiosity, skill acquisition, and participation in activities in both homes and schools.

Play—which is an independent affective system (Panksepp 1998)—has a unique place in socialization/enculturation. For decades, sociologists have argued for the importance of play (for a review, see Abrutyn forthcoming; see also Fine 1983; Goffman 1961), countered by criticism that it is not as serious as political, economic, or religious behavior. It is in play that people learn to love learning (Chu and Schulz 2020) and, consequently, develop affective-motivational styles that shape how they set goals, pursue them, and deal with success and failure. It is also in the unique intersection of moral ontogeny and socialization that the affective dimensions of prosocial, cooperative, moral behavior are constructed (Abrutyn and Goldman-Hasbun 2023).

Put differently, morality is inseparable from our affective capacities. Every aspect of moral life, such as “shared attention, pretend play, ability to socially organize and be a part of a group, negotiation and mediation, short-term and long-term personal connection, empathy, social analysis, and insight into the feelings and goals of other creatures are embodied . . . and require motivation from affective systems” (Asma and Gabriel 2019:75). As Franks (2006:39–40) argues, it is, “emotion that puts the compelling imperative into social duties, the ought into morality, the feeling into respect, and the sting into conscience.” Values and norms are vital, but focusing on them alone obscures the affective foundation of appraisal, action, and decision-making. We see this clearly in one of humanity’s evolutionary achievements: the capacity to monitor one another’s reputational claims over time (Tomasello 2019). Goffman (1967) recognized that ritual commitment to basic ceremonial rules is the linchpin of morality because it enables actors to maintain their reputational “ledgers” (Abrutyn and Zhang 2024). Such performances are both expressive and obligatory. They are not merely spoken claims to rights and duties (Clark 1990) but embodied commitments we feel, whether through the pride of reputational success or the social pain of humiliation (Abrutyn 2023). Ultimately, affectivism is intimately wrapped up in the construction and maintenance of the social self.

The Self, Identity, and Status

Cooley ([1902] 1964) could not have known just how right he was when he declared the self to be as much a product of the affective responses we have to the self and actions as cognitive appraisals. Shame and pride were his “master” emotions (Scheff 1988), but we can imagine the self as built up from any number of affective responses continuously activated. Some responses, such as seeking, have a genetic foundation (Montag, Elhai, and Davis 2021); people who score high on openness to experience tend to also display propensities toward novelty, surprise, and challenge. The self, then, is refracted as much through our modal affective responses as it is through the reflexive activation of the social emotions Cooley preferred. For example, violent felons tend to have similar stories about their childhood: ritual debasement and humiliation (Gilligan 2003). Thus, we might imagine them expressing shame language on surveys and in interviews, but we may use other measures that reflect intense social pain and grief as well as heightened rage. These responses, in turn, may be amplified by cultural directives that value pride and honor for some classes of people or mitigated by other sorts of values that encourage healthy mental and emotional relief through various forms of care.

Either way, the self, whether in the global sense of self-concept or in the situational sense of identity, is experienced in “an immediate emotional response to the face which a contact with others allows him; he cathects his face; his ‘feelings’ become attached to it” (Goffman 1967:6). That is, we not only make sense of the self in Cooley’s ([1902] 1964) terms, but we experience the self and become attached to it through affect. We are compelled to “ensure that a particular expressive order is sustained—an order that regulates the flow of events, large or small, so that anything that appears to be expressed by them will be consistent with his face” (Goffman 1967:9–10). This insight undergirds identity research that shows how lack of identity verification is met with negative affective responses and an effort to receive the “right” appraisals and responses from others (Burke and Stets 2009; Stets and Carter 2012). Goffman (1967:10) reminds us that this affectively accomplished self remains mutually constituted by the situation, real and imagined others, and the abstract community such that we feel morally obligated to conform “because of emotional identification with the others and with their feelings.” That is, the entire interaction order is an affectively constructed and sustained reality (Collins 2004; Summers-Effler 2009). Thus, our identity “is a sacred thing,” and “the expressive order required to sustain it” is an affectively charged moral order (Goffman 1967:19).

Consequently, Goffman emphasized deference and demeanor as key “ceremonial” rules that sustain symmetrical and asymmetrical order. Status, as expressed in the affective response of honor—or the feeling of meeting a cherished group’s expectations or receiving (real or perceived) support from that group or its members (Goffman 1967:10)—is the affective experience of place and being treated “right” (Clark 1990). Status, therefore, is as affective a social phenomenon as identity (Kemper 2006). Affect smooths the tension between order-givers and order-takers (Collins 2000) and builds social bonds where hierarchy and regulation supplant mutual interdependence and integrative mechanisms (Vanzella-Yang and Abrutyn 2022). Over time, as Collins (2004) argues, affect links one encounter to another encounter into a sense of enduring social structure. Lawler’s (2001; Lawler, Thye, and Yoon 2016) extensive life’s work shows that these affective forces can facilitate (or constrain) attachment to specific others and, more importantly, to the group, organization, or even abstract system in ways that reduce social distance and encourage positive healthy outcomes (see also Jaspers 2023). Put differently, affective attachments scale up, binding people to organizations, networks, and even abstract systems synchronically and diachronically. Affective morality thus undergirds both social organization and social motivation as well as the mobilization of humans spontaneously and in coordinated efforts.

Organization and Institutionalization

At various times in its history, sociology has been concerned with social order—or more specifically, how society is possible. Affectivism suggests two contributions to this problem. On the one hand, affects are the sort of things that require ubiquitous management by others and by the self (Katz 1999). As the earlier Goffman (1967) quotes underscore, affect rests at the heart of social structure, and culture is designed to regulate, channel, constrict, and manage affect and emotions (Barbalet 1998; Boehm 2012; Hammond 1983; Hochschild 1979; Kemper 2006; Turner 2007; von Scheve 2013). This, combined with our enhanced autobiographical memory, produces an awareness of our own and others’ behaviors, intentions, motivations, and past consequences—a sort of reputational ledger (Abrutyn and Zhang 2024). We are aware that others are checking the alignment between what we say and do as much as we are, and that means regulating how we feel and using how we feel to regulate our thoughts and actions. Indeed, as we move beyond expressive orders that characterize face-to-face encounters and shift to organizations or institutions, we see that regulation becomes the core problem for collective action and coordinating people (Parsons 1990). Affect must be triggered, harnessed, and manipulated to motivate actors to fulfill their roles daily (Abrutyn and Lizardo 2023).

On the other hand, a key tradition in sociology stretching from Durkheim ([1912] 1995) onward (Collins 2004; Goffman 1967; Lawler 2006; Turner 2007; von Scheve 2012, 2018) recognizes the centrality of affect and emotions in building up and sustaining social connections. Affectivism is not novel in this regard, but it looks to expand how we think about integration and belongingness. Turner (2007), for instance, focuses on the four (or perhaps five) primary emotions humans have and their capacity to be “mixed” to create higher-order emotions. He reminds the reader there is only one positive emotion (happy) among a bunch of negative ones (sad, fearful, angry, and perhaps disgust) to create positive social bonds.

By moving away from common vernacular, affectivism suggests a set of different foundations for relationships and social organization (von Scheve 2013). Lust, care, and play are the most obvious social affects in that they are not generated by the organism in its effort to deal with the biotic environment but are genuinely rooted in social intercourse with other humans or mammals. Relationships, then, can be characterized by one or more of these affective tendencies, revealing an array of relational forms and their ability to generate joy, pleasure, and satisfaction as well as anger, fear, and grief. Likewise, organizations can be constructed and sustained from any number of affective tendencies, especially seeking but also grief, rage, and fear (more on this shortly). That these are evolved systems for adaptive survival implies that we need not assume that some are positive or negative; even Durkheim ([1912] 1995:392–417) recognized that mourning rituals were powerful reminders of a community’s moral efficacy and one’s deep need for its continued existence. Moreover, affectivism builds on and extends recent efforts to recognize the role pleasure plays in group life (Fine and Corte 2017). Instrumental groups may give way to expressive orders as play cultures emerge, but they may also become centers of caring (Summers-Effler 2009) or lust. ² Conversely, these same tendencies can be the source of group formation, but they can be replaced or supplemented by any number of affective tendencies over time.

The last point I would make shifts to the macro realm, where institutional spheres (Abrutyn 2016)—or what Weber termed “value-spheres,” Parsons called “systems,” and Habermas termed “life worlds”—come to coordinate and control congeries of individuals, collectives, and clusters of collectives (e.g., fields). Structure and culture coevolve with our biological and psychological makeup (Richerson and Boyd 2005), affording affectivism the opportunity to help explain why some institutional spheres are ubiquitous across time and space without resorting to functionalist needs or requisites (Abrutyn and Turner 2022). Instead, we might think of kinship and family as a generic solution for regulating our care and lust tendencies. No societies we know of lack these units of organization, and they are primarily invested in structuring and enculturating love, loyalty, and biological reproduction. Likewise, seeking appears to be constrained by structural and cultural factors in religion, science, and art (Abrutyn and Lizardo 2023; Crane 1976). Each of these spheres manages, channels, facilitates, and regulates how and why people seek as well as what they seek. Seeking also seems to contribute to politics and economics, although these spheres also mix domination, play, and lust.

Institutional spheres are among the primary pathways for thinking about emotions in macrosociology. They harness our individual affective tendencies by imposing a structure and culture on organizations that both regulate and facilitate their realization. As large-scale reward systems, affect plays an intimate role in transforming institutions from abstract concepts sociologists use to real, tangible things we can attach ourselves affectively (Lawler et al. 2016). Differentiating physical, temporal, social, and symbolic space allows for distinct relationships between our bodies/minds/selves and their institutional environment to form and be signified by a unique affective signature and sentience.

Other Implications

In addition to organizations and institutions, affect operates at the community or population level in interesting ways. Because it spreads contagiously (Hatfield, Rapson, and Le 2009), through direct contact and through mediated mechanisms such as traditional or social media, affect has consequences well beyond the realm of localized situations, groups, or organizations (Jasper 2011; Turner 2010b). Several conditions facilitate the diffusion of certain affective states: relational size and density, effective leadership and efficacious framing, and shared experiences. The more people perceive themselves as alike, regardless of objective reality or physical distance, the more vulnerable they are to aligning their affective experiences. Objective reality also matters. For instance, small towns throughout the United States were not insulated from the global economic and geopolitical changes that occurred over the past four or five decades. Individuals and their communities certainly have unique idiosyncratic experiences, but traditional and social media intensify these local problems into seemingly cohesive emotional biographies. In turn, these diffuse messages and stimuli are reinforced through local relationships and where possible, transmitted intergenerationally. Zooming in reveals their discrete effects, and zooming out makes movements like the Tea Party or MAGA appear strikingly homogeneous.

Panics are perhaps the most common examples of macro-level affective motivation. Durkheim (1897 [1951]) notably documented how economic panics (and their alternative periods of ebullience) are tied directly to anomic forms of suicide. Whether we call it despair, resentment, or grief (Hochschild 2016), communities hollowed out by global change share emotional biographies that align their responses to events such as COVID or mask mandates (Abrutyn 2024). Likewise, moral and cultural panics have become routine in the age of social media. One salient example is the panic over declining birth rates, which animates ethnonationalist “replacement theory” among conservatives, particularly on the far right in the United States (Fernandez 2024; Root, Guzzo, and Clark 2025). In such panics, moral justifications for policies and mobilization approach survival-level urgency: Core members panic over threats to cherished objects—sometimes abstract but often attached to tangible proxies. Appeals to reason, fact, or science rarely persuade against the hotter, faster, more ramified affective responses to real, imagined, or generalized threats.

Finally, one further example may demonstrate how the macro-level works. Consider, for instance, the widespread diffusion of grief, framed as an epidemic of depression (Horwitz and Wakefield 2007), and the current salience of anxiety disorders (Haidt 2024), indicating chronic activation of the fear system. The rise of these affective tendencies is organic (for alternative explanations, see Schnittker 2025:7). Members of Haidt’s (2024) “anxious generation” have grown up in precarious times: the Great Recession, growing job insecurity coupled with the gig economy and declining safety nets, COVID, the two Trump administrations, and a worsening climate crisis. They have also lived through the normalization of school shootings, doing lockdown drills from a young age. Unsurprisingly, anxiety has outpaced depression among young women since 2010 (134 percent increase vis-à-vis a 106 percent increase in reported depression; Schnittker 2025:2). Social media amplifies these conditions by diffusing others’ affective experiences, spreading mental health language, and intensifying comparison and attribution biases. Social media also makes distant crises (e.g., a new school shooting) affectively salient and vicariously experienced.

Ultimately, micro or macro, affect is causally efficacious in many ways. The contagion of “anxiety” or panics about markets or morals may seem like outcomes because they are conditioned on external social reality, and yet once established, these affective processes can coordinate, command, or control other outcomes related to health, attitudes, and action. Affect is inextricably looped into cognition, culture, and structure, and yet we can still posit a sociology that takes the emotional basis of these seriously.

An Affective Agenda

A Renewed Call for a Sociology of Motivation

More than anything else, an affective sociology is invested in the sociology of motivation and consequently, action (Abrutyn 2025). Once, the problem of motivation sat alongside the problem of social control as central to sociological theory (Parsons and Shils 1951). Although Parsons foregrounded it, Mills (1940) argued that motivation belonged to psychology, leaving sociologists to study post hoc explanations people drew from their reference groups. This skepticism, that subjective accounts are unreliable or distasteful (Martin 2011), pushed motivation to the margins of sociology. Why sociology struggles to believe that people do things because they like them or pursue things because they want them deserves its own paper. Yet most activities—whether individualist or collectivist in outcome—are determined by people’s enjoyment in the activity as much as their fellowship with others. Competitive swimming (Chambliss 1989), opera fanaticism (Benzecry 2011), thrill seeking (Corte 2022), lower-wage crafts work (Ocejo 2017), and mushroom hunting (Fine 2003) all reveal this basic truth.

Unsurprisingly, the etymology of motivation and emotion makes this connection clear, both deriving from the same Latin word meaning to move, movere. Life is governed less by symbolic content and more by “emotional rather than cognitive [mechanisms]” (Collins 1981:994) or by the “impulsions” (Martin 2011) that move us toward or away from what is “interesting” (Martin and Lembo 2020). Action, social or otherwise, implies emotion, which might explain why pragmatists argued it was in action, not in reflection or thinking per se, that objects became meaningful (Dewey [1934] 2005; Shalin 1986). Consequently, at its simplest, motivation involves approaching or avoiding objects, environments, and situations (Lang and Bradley 2010). People seek or avoid objects, experiences, and interactions; feel anxious about anticipated encounters or activities; and develop likes or dislikes. Some of this is innate (e.g., thirst drawing us to water), some is conditioned, and some emerges from the affective nature of curiosity and the affective arousal learning holds (Litman 2005). We are motivated to scan our environment for interesting things, to seek novelty, challenge, and surprise. Sometimes it is the object we conjure up in our mind that propels us, but often it is the pleasure of anticipation and preparation that moves us (Berridge 2023; Di Domenico and Ryan 2017); hence, the familiar paradox of disappointing vacations or relationships that nonetheless lead us to plan the next trip or return to the pool to find a new mate.

Affective Tendencies and Motivation

Proactive, desireful motivation and action rest on the outsized role that seeking plays in mammalian life (Abrutyn 2025). The seeking tendency is predicated on an extensive dopaminergic system spanning the midbrain to the executive cortex and brain stem (Berridge and Kringelbach 2008; Di Domenico and Ryan 2017). At risk of reductionism, affectivism begins with a “goad without a goal” (Berridge 2018, 2023; Panksepp 1998), and the chemicals like dopamine or opioids are the source of affective rewards. Although we do not “feel” dopamine directly, we experience its positive arousal as the push that moves us. Katz’s (1988) classic study of petty theft illustrates this: Theft was not planned rationally; rather,

there is an experience of seduction turning into irrational compulsion, a rush of excitement as contact is made with the item, and another as it is guided across personal boundaries and inserted into a private place, then a physical process of movement in which the body is guided to a point of climax. (Katz 1988:71)

Curiosity, the search for and response to novelty, surprise, and challenge, and the love of learning are all part of seeking (Abrutyn 2025). A sociology of mundane pleasures and how and why we pursue them is tantamount to a sociology of motivation.

So, too, is a more systematic focus on anger, fear, and panic/grief. Although we usually think of these as destructive and negative, I noted that relationships and organizations can harness these feelings for integrative mechanisms. At a more basic level, social pain can be leveraged to evoke commitment and to ensure loyalty is maintained (Abrutyn 2023). Taking for granted that these are negative or suboptimal sources of social glue means avoiding studying them as closely as we should. Conversely, studying the emotional socialization of children (e.g., Gordon 1989; see also Backstrom 2016) and young adults may reveal the ways a society’s feelings and framing rules govern these affective tendencies’ emotional counterparts. In any case, so much more work that goes beyond the social movement literature (Jasper 2011) is suggested by affective tendencies. This includes taking often considered unserious activities related to lust, care, and play more seriously. To be sure, the latter has always had a place in sociology (Fine 1983; Giddens 1964; Goffman 1961) and more recently, has become important to some interactionists (e.g., Corte 2022; Fine and Corte 2017; Jerolmack 2009; Masters 2008). Play, and not just the easily conjured idea of games, humor, and sports, is the central source of information about social interaction, status, and learning to love learning (Chu and Schultz 2020). And when we expand the definition of play, we can extend the analysis into the pursuit of joy that research on marginalized communities has revealed (Ghaziani 2024; Luna et al. 2024).

Lust and care also deserve greater attention. Sexuality remains relatively marginalized for reasons covered in greater detail elsewhere (Jones 2020; Regan 2023), but it is a “Total Social Fact” in Mauss’s sense, or one in which biology, psychology, and sociology intersect (Abrutyn and Lizardo 2025). Its intimate relationship to care, however, is why it demands our attention more. Humans are unique in their capacity to extend their mammalian care tendency from direct kin to a wide assortment of social objects, including abstract groups and classes. But lust and care intermingle in ways that motivate actors, and although we often fall back on simple ideological explanations (e.g., patriarchy), it would serve sociology to get into the granular level of how lust and care—as well as any tendencies or broader affects, such as pain—are learned, rewarded, and motivating.

A Word on Methods

The last point I would make is that although affect and emotions may be studied using more traditional instruments (Stets and Carter 2012), such as surveys or interviews, it would require some degree of learning on the part of sociologists and perhaps adoption of existing measures, such as the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scale (Montag et al. 2021). The study of emotions is vibrant, to be sure, but it remains relatively niche in the discipline. For instance, learning the synonyms people use for social emotions like shame is not readily feasible despite their availability (Scheff and Retzinger [1991] 2001). One promising route might be the use of journals, which offer both longitudinal data and the possibility that the one-off interview’s potential subjective bias melts away as the individual becomes increasingly invested in their own project (Cottingham and Erickson 2020; Wade 2025). Subjective reports, however, are only one of many components that comprise the expression of affect and emotions (Paul et al. 2020).

Observation of body language (Witkower and Tracy 2018), interactions (Summers-Effler 2009), or people in situations more broadly (Summers-Effler, Van Ness, and Hausmann 2015) can be better attuned to how expressive and behavioral responses suggest affect. Triangulating observation or subjective reports with one’s own participation in an activity, such as religious events (Winchester and Pagis 2022), athletic endeavors (Corte 2022; Green 2011), or aesthetic experiences (Benzecry 2011; Hennion 2001), promises to shed light on several components as opposed to homing in on one. And although the gold standard might be the sort of neurosociology that sees sociologists collaborating with neuroscientists and their own instruments, such as MRIs (Firat 2021), there are less expensive and less intrusive instruments. For instance, an array of noninvasive wristbands pair with phone technology and are reasonably accurate measures of minute-to-minute affective responses in daily life (Di Serio, Mori, and Paternò 2025), or what is sometimes called “ecological momentary assessment” (Kwasnicka et al. 2021; Sosa-Hernandez et al. 2024).

Regardless of how we go about studying affect and emotions, it is a frontier brimming with possibilities and, of course, challenges. We cannot afford to take for granted emotions any more than we can ignore affect any longer. This is the moment to strike, to build a more robust sociology of action and motivation, and to finally incorporate emotions and affect in ways that bring sociology into better alignment with a range of disciplines that take emotions and affect as serious as they treat cognition.