The present contribution provides a constructive criticism of Brian Parkinson’s “Heart to Heart: A Relation-Alignment Approach to Emotion’s Social Effects.” I outline a number of points in Parkinson’s approach that I find particularly useful from a sociological perspective on emotions and provide suggestions for further extending his account. In doing so, I concentrate on issues regarding the social ontology of emotion, the proposition of emotional adjacency pairs in verbal and facial communication, the importance of social appraisals in intergroup contexts, and the relevance of social institutions for understanding how some emotions come to dominate certain social relations.
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