What Is Emotion Regulation?

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Emotions reflect an internalization of the outer world.

Angry protests often begin with a perceived injury against an individual.

Shame depends on norms established by other people and institutions.

Review of Explosive Emotions: How Modern Society Shapes What We Feel, by Eva Illouz (Princeton University Press), 261 pp., $29.95.

Emotions are often regarded as the products of unique experiences and our biological and psychological makeup. Nonetheless, Eva Illouz points out, as they externalize our inner world, emotions also reflect an internalization of the outer world.

In Explosive Emotions, Illouz (a professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, and author of 18 books) argues that with their therapeutic techniques and lucrative industry of self-improvement, psychologists have “obfuscated the ways in which modern life makes us implode within the echo chamber of our interiority.”

Drawing on psychology, philosophy, sociology, and literary classics, including The Odyssey, Othello, Madame Bovary, The Scarlet Letter, and Remembrance of Things Past, Illouz provides an in-depth examination of 12 emotions. Explosive motions, she argues, respond to key features of modernity, individualism, equality, meritocracy, democracy, capitalism, consumer culture, nationalism, and immigration, which often conflict with each other, and to an assumption that we “are entitled to an emotionally pain-free life.” Located at “the seamline between the collective and personal,” they enact and illustrate “the distinct malaise” of our times.

Informative and insightful, Explosive Emotions will compel readers to reconsider what we thought we knew about a familiar subject.

By replacing Christian ideas of original sin and innate depravity with notions of progress and perfectibility, Illouz indicates, the Enlightenment institutionalized hope for individual happiness and a better world “on a vast scale.” Aspiration, ambition, and achievement became its vocabulary. Hope undergirds The American Dream, capitalism, and consumer culture, which teach that talent, hard work, and even competitive envy can produce results. Hope was a foundational precept for Martin Luther King Jr., Václav Havel, and Barack Obama and other Democrats.

Illouz reminds us that the hopes of many people never come true, often through no fault of their own. Disappointment sometimes follows, “a small vaguely bitter feeling,” as do deaths of despair, by individuals who see no prospect that their lot will improve. More often, hope springs eternal. These days, Illouz writes, hope is an “ambiguous emotion, poised between action and illusion, changing the world and accepting it, resistance and quietism.”

Angry protests often begin with a perceived injury against an individual. They “travel fast” when there is a perception that public officials have violated a legal or moral principle. A 2018 survey found that Americans are the angriest people in the world. After quoting U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham—“we’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term”—Illouz points out that some of them appear to be motivated by a desire to preserve their status and privileges. Anger, she asserts, is “an expression of a culture of equality,” particularly when it is contained within ethnic, rational, national, and politically partisan frameworks. Without anger, there might well be resignation to injustice and oppression. But when anger emanates from vengeful people obsessed with compensation for alleged wrongs, marches “of marionettes, manipulated from outside, wooden inside,” are likely to follow.

Liberals, according to Illouz, promised that the state would protect citizens from cruelty and fear. Liberal governments, it turns out, often use fear to manipulate and subdue perceived, potential, or actual internal and external enemies. Because “fear has a biological basis,” it tends to override other emotions and dominate the public sphere.

What Is Emotion Regulation?

Take our Emotional Intelligence Test

Find a therapist near me

Before the modern era, few people left the land on which they were born. With the emigration of tens of millions of people in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, the “stranger” became a new social type, embodying freedom and mobility, nostalgia for the home left behind, and nativist critics of their willingness and ability to assimilate.

Some people who have stayed put—German-Jews when Nazis assumed power; Russians when the Soviet Union collapsed, and MAGA zealots, who idealize what life was really like before the United States went “woke”—are nostalgic for the world they had. Nostalgia and homelessness, Illouz notes, generate “political practices that can be reactionary or constitutive of new temporal communities.”

Interpersonal Intimacy

Explosive Emotions ends with four emotions related to interpersonal intimacy.

Jealousy, Illouz suggests, was redefined with the emergence of companionate, monogamous marriage within a patriarchal system.

Shame depends on norms established by other people and institutions. The shame experienced by many female victims of rape, for example, is “anchored in an ideology of sexual purity” that women were taught to guard. The American Dream has meant that “poverty would be lived as a form of shame.” Access to social media, moreover, has strengthened an “entitlement” to shame one’s peers and elites.

Pride is an important antidote to shame. Pride marches moved gays “from the closets to the streets, from feeling shameful to public and proud.” But pride has a downside: It can “live in the shadow of past shame,” rigidify individual and group identity, and nurture resentment. Therefore, Illouz makes a recommendation for groups struggling for equal recognition that’s certain to be controversial: “quieter and more short-lived pride.”

Finally, Illouz claims that romantic love straddles two logics of modernity: the right of individuals to conduct their lives according to their own preferences and marriage as a tool for social mobility. The former principle led the Supreme Court to overturn Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute; the latter has led many women and men to choose a mate from a similar socioeconomic class as well as one with congenial tastes and values.

Our emotions “are fundamentally social,” Illouz concludes, but they can sometimes “burst out, evade and exceed our social roles” and “generate revolutions, private or collective.”

Explosive emotions, then, are, indeed, suitable subjects for sociologists and political scientists as well as psychologists.

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