Business of Emotions, Essay Example

Unit One:  Response to Jennifer

Initial response:

It must be very difficult to be in a profession like police work where so much of your training and your daily experiences condition you to react in an unemotional way.  I can see where it would be helpful, in the heat of the moment, to not let your emotions overwhelm you, but that must often leave you (and your fellow officers) with few outlets to express your personal reactions to the traumas that you witness every day.  Ben-Ze’ev writes about using cognitive means to deal with stressful situations in the workplace, stating that “in modern service work, one cannot use behavioural escape devices such as avoiding clients” to regulate emotions (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001, pg. 238).  It strikes me that you must encounter this in your work all the time–it isn’t as if you can just go and hide out somewhere quiet when your emotions are running overtime.  It’s no wonder that you find yourself compartmentalizing your emotions and reacting with less compassion than you might’ve in the past–it sounds like a survival strategy to me.

Ben-Ze’ev, A. (2001).  The Subtlety of Emotions.  Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press.

Final response:

The process of developing a response to Jennifer’s post was very challenging as I had to  straddle the line between my personal feelings and a more critical, academic reaction to her post.  I greatly appreciated that she shared sensitive information from her professional life, and I wanted to demonstrate that her situation had moved me.  At the same time, I wanted to bring Ben-Ze’ev’s work into the posting in a manner that might bring Jennifer further insight into her predicament.  To do so, I tried to synthesize his discussion regarding the behavioural and cognitive ways in which men and women try to deal with their negative emotions and tie that into the gender-based expectations Jennifer has encountered in her mostly-male workplace.

This process helped me to explore the ways in which our professional choices echo into our personal lives.  I believe it is impossible to wholly separate our work life from our home life, and even more difficult for those who work in high-stress jobs like police work (as was Jennifer’s case).  This resonated on a personal level for me, as well, because I work as a clinical nurse and am quite aware of how gender bias and expectations can often impact on how my colleagues and myself express our emotions.  The interactive process of my discussion with Jennifer was an important aspect of the course, namely because it forced me to consider opinions other than my own.  As well, her experience as a police officer, where she is a lone female amongst many men, contrasted greatly with my own professional experiences as a nurse, where there are few men.  Jennifer is expected to constrain her emotions whereas I am expected (up to a point) to be warm, motherly, and emotional.  Our dialogue demonstrated the complexity of emotions when you attempt to interpret/understand them through the lens of gender.

Unit Two:  Response to Jian Jhu

Initial Response:

I also found that Ben-Ze’ev’s distinction between schematic and deliberative evaluations to be a useful way to better understand the thought process that is involved in the experiencing of various emotional states.  It is rather empowering to learn that there are ways in which we can control our emotions, to a certain extent.  This also raises interesting issues in terms of the gender discussion we had in the previous unit, since women are often accused of being ruled by their emotions.  Emotions can be powerful sources of strength for an individual, and I sometimes think (especially after reading about Hilary Clinton’s tearing up and the controversy it caused) that men in power are intimidated by the ways in which women seem to find it easier to access these emotions.  However, as our study guide states “emotions are processes, not fixed states” (Unit 2), which raises interesting questions about how we’re conditioned to repress our emotions in public, depending on the situation.  But since schematic evaluations are largely unconscious, there are obviously other elements at work which assist us in concealing our internal responses to external situations.

Ben-Ze’ev, A. (2001).  The Subtlety of Emotions.  Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press.

Final Post:

In this section we were expected to discuss the effectiveness of Unit 2 and the most beneficial learning that we received from it.  In responding to Jian Jhu, I went back to Ben-Ze’ev’s text to go over his discussion of schematic and deliberative evaluations.  On my first reading of the text, I had particular difficulty with these distinctions and I must confess that at times I found Ben-Ze’ev’s writing to be overly philosophical and very dense.  However, it was great to return to the text after some time and I felt like I was ready to approach it with a fresh perspective and fewer biases.  Jian Jhu’s response to Unit 2 allowed me to revisit the Unit and realize the connection between evaluative processes and the gendering of emotions we discussed in Unit 1.

Through synthesizing information from Unit 2 and various chapters of the Ben-Ze’ev text, I was able to gain a better understanding of how both men and women are ruled, to a certain extent, by their emotions.  This seems to me to be a huge contradiction in the study of emotions:  how to we reconcile the unconscious/subconscious nature of some emotional functions with our own individuality and conscious response to ours and others’ emotions?  I found the discussion with Jian Jhu to be helpful in working out some of these issues.  Although neither of us were able to address this contradiction conclusively, I was reassured to find that I wasn’t the only person who encountered difficulty in trying to understand the complexity of our emotional makeup.  I’ve found it quite daunting at times to wrap my brain around the myriad of ways that an individual constructs/experiences emotion, both at a subconscious and conscious level.  Thus Jian Jhu (as well as all the other ‘conversations’ I’ve had with fellow students) have helped a great deal in simplifying the text and assisting me in drawing real-world parallels to the writings of Ben-Ze’ev and others that we’ve studied during the course.

Unit Four:  Response to Elisabeth

Initial Post:

I definitely understand where you’re coming from with your ‘rant’ about those who seem to have so much in North American society and those who do not.  However, I think we need to be careful when we evaluate the emotions/motivations of people who are perhaps less privileged financially than ourselves.  It could be that the janitorial staff and other service workers you encountered at Caesar’s Palace like their jobs; maybe they’re happy to have any job at all in this economy.  I think that without speaking directly to these workers, it is impossible to make judgements about their motivations and experiences.  Your statement that you “felt so sad for them” brought to mind Ben-Ze’ev’s comments on the difference between pity and compassion:   “Pity is more spectator-like than compassion; we can pity people while maintaining a safe emotional distance from them.  While pity involves the belief in the inferiority of the object, compassion assumes equality in common humanity” (2003, p. 328).  I think that you’re coming from a very compassionate place in writing about such workers, but I also think we all need to be careful when we view others through our own.

Ben-Ze’ev, A. (2000).  The subtlety of emotions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Final Post:

I experienced a very strong reaction to Elizabeth’s anecdote about her vacation to Las Vegas and the hotel janitorial staff she saw at work.  I initially was going to refrain from responding at all because I didn’t want to let my personal feelings about judging others based on their profession to interfere with the construction of an academic response.  However, perhaps Ben-Ze’ev’s discussion of emotions has had a greater effect on me than I first thought, because I instead took this as an opportunity to analyze my own emotional response to class issues while also synthesizing information about the differences between pity and compassion to try and get my point across in a non-judgemental unemotional manner.

This process was eye-opening, to say the least. I dislike confrontation, even when it isn’t the least bit aggressive. Thus, I took a lot of time to craft an argument that distanced my own personal feelings from my arguments about the text. It was very important for me to acknowledge Elisabeth’s perspective in a way that was supportive and nonthreatening. I suppose that may be a female trait (whether innate or learned), as Ben-Ze’ev suggests that gender affects the ways in which an individual approaches confrontation. Of all the postings I’ve made during the course, this was perhaps the most instructive one for me as it required me to critically examine my own reaction and respond in a way that was very professional (even if my emotions were arguing for a different kind of reaction). This is a skill that I would like to cultivate in my working life as I think it leads to less conflict and more constructive personal interactions.