Society & Animals Journal of Human-Animal Studies
Logo - Society and Animals Journal
Volume 10, Number 1, 2002

Animal Problems/People Skills: Emotional and Interactional Strategies in Humane Education

Leslie Irvine 1

Abstract

Recent changes in the organizational culture of nonhuman animal sheltering, coupled with attitudes that are more progressive toward companion animals, have made shelters into resources rather than last resorts. Consequently, shelter workers need the "people skills" to communicate to a public that urgently needs accurate information about animal behavior and training. This poses a difficulty for workers drawn to working with animals but who find themselves working with people. Based on participant observation and informed by social psychology and the sociology of emotions, this study articulates three primary dimensions of shelter workers' interactions with clients: (a) Narrative Knowing, (b) Emotion Management, and (c) Deference. From the analysis of these dimensions, the paper then draws conclusions about the individual costs of shelter work and suggests practical steps that workers and animal care organizations could take to recognize and reduce these costs.
One of the most appealing aspects of working with nonhuman animals is that it is emotionally rewarding. Animals accept us as we are, requiring no masks and having no hidden agendas. They express their emotions freely, showing their feelings with their entire bodies. In contrast, one of the least appealing aspects of working with people is that it can be emotionally demanding. Human interaction requires an intricate process of interpreting emotional and mental states, adapting behavior and feelings to smooth out interaction, and coping with the inevitable misalignment. Most of the time, people take these complex interactional skills for granted. They constitute a version of what Illich (1981) called "shadow" labor. This refers to unseen effort that does not qualify as "real" work, but is still vital to getting things done. Housework is a good example of shadow labor. To do it well is to leave no sign of the effort involved. Likewise, in service jobs in which workers deal with large numbers of people usually unknown to one another, employers use their employees' interactional skills as resources that enhance the status of clients and customers. The ability, however, to enhance another's status is rarely included in the job description and seldom given remuneration. Researchers such as Hochschild (1983) and Pierce (1995) have examined the human costs of such jobs as well as the ways that social institutions such as class and the family prepare some people better than others for "emotional labor" (Macdonald & Sirianni, 1996; Steinberg & Figard, 1999).

People who work in animal shelters, whether as volunteers or paid staff, are usually drawn to working with animals. Although this is an important component of shelter work, shelter workers usually spend far more time with the public. Whether the tasks pertain to adoption, relinquishment, licensing, or any of the other services that shelters provide, time spent with people far outweighs time spent with companion animals. Moreover, animal problems are, after all, people problems. People hold numerous misunderstandings about animal behavior and care; consequently, animals frequently suffer. Shelter interaction provides a window of educational opportunity that may open only briefly. The work, therefore, involves complex interactional skills that draw on resources far beyond the simple qualification of wanting to work with animals.

Currently, simultaneous changes in two overlapping cultures demand that shelter workers' interactional skills must be more versatile than ever. One set of changes is in the organizational culture of animal sheltering (McHugh, 1999; Lawson, 2000). Initially, and until recently, humane organizations focused on controlling overpopulation through sterilization and euthanasia - and justifiably so. After all, sheltering began as an effort to save stray and unwanted animals from cruel deaths at the hands of pound workers or vivisectionists2. In the United States., increased spaying and neutering campaigns during the 1980s and 1990s reduced the overpopulation problem considerably. However, many sheltering organizations have found that sterilization is only part of the solution. As one shelter director puts it, something else had to be done "to stop the flow of animals into the building" (Lawson, p. 10). That "something else" includes increasing the likelihood that people will keep their dogs and cats for life. Because even one visit to a veterinarian, or, in the case of dogs, one training class, will go a long way toward this goal, shelters are becoming animal behavior resource centers and not just last resorts. This transformation entails communicating information about behavior and training to the public. Shelter workers need new interactional skills to meet this challenge.

The change in shelter culture has occurred along with - or, perhaps, because of - a new culture of animal companionship. Just some of the manifestations of this include the use of the terms "companion animal" instead of "pet" and "guardian" or "caretaker" instead of "owner"; non-violent dog training techniques that use positive reinforcement; new knowledge about canine and feline nutritional requirements; and microchip identification to reunite stray dogs and cats with their families. The new culture of animal companionship coupled with the shifting organizational culture has changed the nature of shelter work. When shelters direct their efforts primarily at controlling overpopulation, as indeed remains the case in many areas, shelter workers must struggle with the inevitability and frequency of euthanasia. Along this line, Arluke (1991) and Arluke and Sanders (1996) have examined how shelter workers develop a set of on-the-job feelings to cope with euthanizing animals. However, when the organizational culture focuses on retention of animals in their new homes, shelter work requires knowledge of animal behavior and training as well as the interactional skills to communicate that knowledge tactfully.

Clearly, the public needs accurate information about the animals who share our world. As shelters dedicate resources to providing it, workers must marshal new interactional and emotional skills. In this paper, I analyze common types of shelter interaction through the lens of social psychology and the sociology of emotions. I begin by discussing the methods I used in this research. I then consider several aspects of these interactions and the strategies they elicited. I conclude by discussing the sociological and practical significance of these findings for animal care workers and organizations.

Method

This paper draws on information collected through participant observation in two roles at a humane shelter. One of these entailed more than 150 hours of observation on what I will call the Adoption Mobile, a 30-foot-long recreational vehicle that serves as a traveling branch of a humane society in a western U.S. city (hereafter, The Shelter). Five days a week, a volunteer (such as myself) and J., who administrates and drives the Adoption Mobile, take a selection of adoptable cats, rabbits, small mammals, rodents, and a dog to various sites throughout the county. Shopping centers - especially those with supermarkets or national chain stores - libraries, local festivals, and fund-raising dog washes are some of the locations at which the Adoption Mobile regularly appears. On board, people may adopt animals, donate food, toys, or money, and obtain a wealth of information about companion animal care and behavior.

The Adoption Mobile spends four hours at a given site. During this time, an average of 100 people come on board. For many of these visitors, the Adoption Mobile is their only exposure to The Shelter. Therefore, the work entails a high degree of public relations. My role on the Adoption Mobile involved, in addition to caring for the animals, welcoming and talking with clients. This meant discussing a particular animal, or animals, in general, asking for donations, handling adoptions, and answering questions about Shelter services or animal behavior. Over the course of three years of volunteering at The Shelter, I have received training in many relevant areas, including adoption counseling, animal behavior, and dog training. In interacting with clients, I also draw on a lifetime of experience with cats and, more recently, dogs.

For this research, I took notes about the interaction on the Adoption Mobile in a small notebook. In addition, J. and I had numerous field conversations. On several occasions, other volunteers who were with us also joined these discussions. I did not focus initially on emotional aspects of the interaction but remained open to what the setting offered. As the fieldwork progressed, I examined my notes regularly, coding and analyzing the data in search for emergent patterns. As my data approached saturation, the second research role - that of adoption counselor at The Shelter - came into play. For six months, I recorded my observations after I met with potential dog adopters and visitors to the dog adoption area. My comparisons revealed a consistency across locations. In other words, I found that humane education required the same interactional strategies, regardless of setting.

Results

The interactional and emotional strategies that I recorded fell into three types: Narrative Knowing, Emotion Management, and Deference. Further, Narrative Knowing and Emotion Management have two subcategories. "Hearing what is given" and "Feeling what is given off" constitute the categories of the former. "Surface acting" and "Deep acting" compose the latter. In what follows, I offer illustrative cases and discuss the key features of each strategy.

Narrative Knowing

Each interaction required assessing the person's level of knowledge about animals in order to know what information to convey. This meant ferreting out the details of a narrative, or story, about a particular animal or animals. Even when someone came on board and said, "I've got a quick question for you," the question always elicited or was embedded in a narrative of how the behavior had developed (the animals' alleged motivation), what course it had taken, and what the person had done to change it along the way. Interaction, therefore, involved listening to a narrative with the initial question in mind while also keeping track of what was said along the way, for the latter usually revealed more than the question itself.

But there is still more to it. I take seriously the notion that narrative is "the primary form by which human experience is made meaningful" (Polkinghorne, 1991, p. 1). In using the term "narrative knowing," I mean to include not only the act of listening to the words people said, but also to the process of attending to the range of ways that people give meaning to their words. This involves perceiving the emotional tone with which the speaker delivered the words and the ideology that the words implied. To accomplish this, I have distinguished two processesC which are, in reality, inseparableC using Goffman's (1959) terms of what a person "gives" and those that he or she "gives off.." Thus, in this analysis, what initially sounded like "simple" accounts of "first this happened, then that happened" became capsulated ways of knowing people.

Hearing what is "given." The best examples of how solving an animal problem required parsing it out of a narrative had to do with beliefs about animals' sexual behavior. Most visitors to the Adoption Mobile had little or no knowledge about the reproductive physiology of the animals who shared their homes. The majority had no idea, for example, when and how often dogs and cats experience estrus3. Basic knowledge of sex and reproduction, even in the most rudimentary form, can help people understand their animals' behavior. However, most often, people omitted this information from their narratives of animal problems. They seemed to prefer to see their animals as childlike and asexual. The inability to accept animals' sexuality resulted in an ineffective perspective on animals' motivation. In other words, people's ignorance or fear of seeing animals as sexually driven meant that they attributed normal animal behavior to "bad intentions" or "disobedience." Because these attributions could lead to inept or even harmful treatment of animals, they needed to be deciphered and corrected. An example will help illustrate what I mean.

A late-middle-aged couple came on board and looked at the cats for several minutes. When I engaged them in conversation, they said they wanted a "replacement" cat for one they wanted to "get rid of." They got this particular cat as a companion for their adult male whose longtime friend recently had been euthanized. They described the deceased cat's behavior as "perfect." She played with toys and with the other cat - never with things she wasn't supposed to touch. In short, she behaved just as they thought a cat should behave. In contrast, they were frustrated because the new cat had recently become "destructive." Although she had behaved well all winter, they said, revealing the first key piece of information, now that the weather was nice, she meowed to go outside all the time. She showed little interest in the toys they gave her. Instead, she knocked over their bric-a-brac, meowed at the windows, and became feisty when they tried to pet her. She was especially aggressive toward the husband, who half-jokingly remarked that her behavior was revenge for his having taken the old cat in to be euthanized. "She's getting back at me," he said. The wife's perceptions were harsher. She believed the cat was "just plain nasty."

A series of questions revealed other crucial information. They had obtained their "perfect" cat as an adult. Because she already had been spayed, they had no experience with feline puberty. The new, "destructive" cat was unspayed and about eight months old. Spring was just starting. She had "behaved" all winter , but the increasing daylight hours probably triggered her first heat. She was not behaving out of spite or because of a "nasty" personality. The couple had no clue that they were about to have every tomcat in the neighborhood at their doors and windows. I countered their protests of "But she was fine all winter" with an explanation of how lengthening days determine feline estrus. I advised that they get her spayed right away. When I said, "You have a teenager on your hands," they responded in unison: "But she's only a kitten!" With that, they indicated that they had no sense of what the cat was going through. They both looked skeptical when I said that spaying could change her behavior so significantly that they might decide to keep her. They thought that cats just "came with" personalities that were either "perfect," like their previous cat, or "nasty," like this one.

Additional questions revealed more about this young cat's behavior. While she may have had some sixth sense about the husband's complicity in her predecessor's euthanasia, the far more likely explanation was that she did not like the way he "trained" her by snapping rubber bands at her when she did things that they found unacceptable. I suggested that instead of snapping the rubber bands, which could hurt, they try squirting her with water, a technique endorsed by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. I reiterated that they would most likely notice a change after the spaying. I added that if the spaying did not improve her behavior enough for their liking they could bring her to The Shelter. We would find her another home, and they could adopt another cat.

In this situation, listening and simple probes brought considerable ignorance to light. The story, as the couple told it, revealed their beliefs about feline behavioral motivation. For them, animals were just "good" or "bad" and they doubted that anything could change that. The answer, for them, was to get a new cat, that is, a "good" one. Although I do not mean to suggest listening to everyone with an ear to the hidden agenda, I want to call attention to how effective humane education requires deciphering the clues contained in the stories people tell. The clues reveal the kind of "people problems" that occur along with, and often create or aggravate, "animal problems."

Another example indicates how ideological trappings make it difficult to get the spaying and neutering message across. In this case, a man applied his sense of what he thought was right for humans to his dog and would surely introduce unwanted puppies into the world as a result. This particular man came to the Adoption Mobile and asked if we had any male puppies. J. and I said that we get them frequently. Then he asked if he could get one who was not yet neutered. J. explained that The Shelter spayed or neutered all animals before adoption. The man said that he wanted his dog to have "just one litter" before he had her spayed. Working in tandem, J. and I gave him all the reasons not to breed his dog. We explained the increased likelihood of mammary cancer as well as the difficulty he would have finding homes for the pups, who probably would end up in shelters. When I asked why he wanted to breed the dog, I assumed that this dog had some special talent or bloodlines that he wanted to reproduce. I learned that it really had nothing to do with her bloodlines or abilities. She was a "basic" mixed-breed dog. This man's motives were different. He projected his notions about the value of motherhood onto his dog. He wanted to breed her so she could fulfill the dreams he imagined she had about having pups. He said he "just knew" she wanted the experience because "she sniffed around male dogs." Then, he said, "You know what happens to women who don't have babies. They just want to die!" Because he believed so strongly in maternal instinct among humans, he assumed that, in order to be a "true" female, his dog would have to reproduce. No amount of logic would persuade him, but I learned this after I had wasted my breath and risked alienating the client. In contrast, J.'s experience told him to quit talking earlier, reflecting a skill in deference that I examine further in this paper.

Feeling what is "given off." In lived experience, the distinction between hearing what a person says and gauging the emotions we feel toward them is difficult, if not impossible, to draw. For analytic purposes, however, the distinction is illuminating. Hochschild (1983) describes using "feeling as clue," which refers to how "emotion, like seeing and hearing, is a way of knowing about the world" (p. 29). Emotions provide what Freud called a "signal function," giving us a sense of our (often unconscious) perspective on a situation. We acknowledge feelings as clues when we attend to a "gut reaction" or "know" something "in our heart." All social interaction relies heavily on feeling as clue, and the process of sending and receiving clues is sometimes obvious and intentional; more often, it is not. Each person's demeanor sends a message to others that, for better or worse, determines how those others see him or her.

On the Adoption Mobile, I gathered as much information as possible from visitors and potential adopters. However, what a person "gave off" was sometimes a more reliable source of information than the scant clues I was "given." Consider this example from my fieldnotes:


A couple just adopted Sunny, the dog we brought with us today. We are at a plaza with a Wal-Mart and a grocery store, and the woman said she was drawn to Sunny from across the parking lot. She said she had never had a dog before, but fell in love at first sight. I had a good feeling about her right away.
In most cases, an inexperienced guardian who falls in love at first sight raises a caution flag. The Shelter discourages adoption on impulse. However, in this case, the "good feeling" signaled, "This is a good person. Give her a chance." Fortunately, she was also in a position to give the dog a good home. She and her husband had a large, fenced yard; he had a flexible work schedule; and they had recently started talking about getting a dog. In this case, the feeling pointed to evidence that suggested the feeling was reliable.

Using feeling as clues falls prey to the "halo effect," the social psychological phenomenon in which a positive or negative impression of a person affects our broader expectations of him or her. Here, another volunteer Adoption Mobile worker describes trying to avoid this:


I just got a bad feeling about them [the potential adopters]. At first, I couldn't put my finger on it, but I think it was the way her clothes were all sloppy, and her kids were a mess. I felt terrible about it, and I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, but I figured that if that's the way she keeps herself and her kids, how's she going to treat a dog? I did everything I could to discourage her. I told her how much time dogs take up and how this one needs housebreaking, and I got her to change her mind [about adopting].
In this case, the feeling provided a "caution" signal. Notice, however, that the worker "felt terrible" about respecting that signal. Trying not to judge people by appearances, she questioned her feelings but ultimately honored them. Granted, someone with sloppy clothes and messy children might give a dog a fine home, and this example may say as much about class bias as it does about emotions. Nevertheless, this indicates that emotions function as signals only in conjunction with expectations. Hochschild (1983) explains:

When an emotion signals a message of danger or safety to us, it involves a reality newly grasped on the template of prior expectations. A signal involves a juxtaposition of what we see with what we expect to see...The message "danger" takes on its meaning of "danger" only in relation to what we expect. ( p. 221)
What an emotion signals depends on one's understanding of the context in which it occurs4. In the above example, the worker's emotions - the "bad feelings" - were mediated by her expectations that the woman would give a dog the same level of care as she gave her children, which the worker deemed inadequate. Simultaneously, the worker responded to the signal function of emotion with another emotion: She "felt terrible" about making a judgment. For better or worse, however, everyday interaction relies heavily on such judgmental heuristics (Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Sherman & Corty, 1984; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). This especially is the case when the issues at stake are important or when we lack all the information we might need to make a fully informed decision. When counseling for adoption, for example, we make decisions heuristically because we do not see the home in which the animal will live, and our decisions will directly affect the animal's quality of life. Emotional clues offer a heuristic that streamlines the process.

In many cases, "feeling as clue" (what was "given off"), combined with the person's level of knowledge about animals (what was "given"), provided a sense of a readiness to learn. I came to think of windows of opportunity as open, unlocked, or painted shut. For example, one day, a late middle-aged woman visiting the Adoption Mobile spent some time with the cats, talking to them softly and petting them through the kennels. She asked many questions about each cat, such as how he or she ended up at the shelter, how old each was, and what I knew about each cat as an individual. She talked about the several cats who shared her house, how they slept on her bed and how she had acquired each one. She said then that she especially liked one particular cat, and would consider adopting her if she were not female. She had always had multiple cats, she said, but always of the same sex because she thought that cats of different sexes couldn't get along.

Here, the woman's demeanor provided clues that, despite her lack of knowledge (or perhaps because of it), she wanted to learn. I explained that feline dynamics have more to do with how many cats there are in a house, with the personalities of the individual cats, the number and cleanliness of litter boxes, and other things, than with the sex of the animals. J. supported what I said, explaining that he has had as many as nine cats at once. In this case, we convinced her. She said, "Gee, I wonder what else I don't know about cats!"

Social psychological research on persuasion reveals that people are most likely to change their views when they receive messages that are close to their own position. In contrast, views that are extremely discrepant from their own fall outside their "latitude of acceptance" (Hovland, Harvey, & Sherif, 1957). In the above example, the woman already liked cats a great deal and had experience with a multi-cat household, so changing her mind about the sexual composition of that household was a small leap. In other instances, however, the information we offered fell so far outside the visitor's latitude of acceptance that he or she ignored or resisted it.

Sometimes, people indicated their positions through statements such as "I'm just not a cat person" or "I can't stand big dogs" (or small dogs, or white dogs, or dogs with long hair). A striking example came from an interaction with a woman in her 60s. She boarded the Adoption Mobile, saw the pair of rabbits we had along, and said emphatically, "I don't like rabbits!" I started to explain how these were "houserabbits": wonderful, sociable companions. She interrupted and said, "The only way I like rabbits is in stew. Hasenpfeffer!" In this case, it did not take tremendous sensitivity to see that the window of opportunity was painted shut. I simply said, "We don't mention that around them," nodding in the direction of the rabbits.

These two examples highlight the distinction between opinion and attitude. Since humane education involves both creating informed opinions and changing attitudes, the distinction bears on the interactional skills involved. In the first example, the woman had an opinion, or a belief, about cats. She believed that cats of the opposite sex would not get along. It was not that she liked or disliked one particular sex. When she heard contradictory evidence, she changed her opinion. In the second example, the woman had a negative attitude toward rabbits, which is much harder to change. Attitudes have emotional and evaluative components. Logic will not change the view that the only good rabbit is a dead rabbit. Interactionally, it helps to understand what one is facing.

While everyday interaction of all kinds involves sensitivity, shelter interaction raises the stakes because of the urgency of the message and the limited window of opportunity. In other words, shelters provide unique settings in which to change people's minds about animals. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to the question of how to do this. Advertisers, politicians, and the media - as well as social psychologists - know this well. It is extremely difficult to change people's minds solely with direct information. Because emotions factor so heavily in the process, I turn now to that topic.

Emotion Management

Surface acting. Using emotions as clues is more complicated than it seems. People can - and often do - disguise what they feel. This interferes with what an emotion is supposed to tell us and how we interpret it. People can also pretend not to feel or change their feelings, and they can do this so effectively that they convince even themselves. This "emotion management," which refers to the effort to induce and control certain feelings, is an essential part of all social interaction. Sociologists who study emotion, particularly Hochschild (1983), have delineated two kinds of emotion management. One of these, known as "surface acting," involves managing our physical display of emotions and disguising what we feel, such as when we stifle a laugh during a meeting or put on a serious expression to suit a situation. The intention in surface acting is not to change how one feels but to change one's expression so as to convince the other person to feel a particular way. If we want someone to feel that he or she is being taken seriously, then managing laughter or displaying sadness can help accomplish it.

In this research, surface acting frequently occurred in interactions surrounding "outlaw breeds," especially pit bulls, but also Chows5. On one particular day, for example, we had two four-month-old pit bull mix puppies with us. They were very good-natured dogs who had just begun positive obedience training. Nevertheless, when our visitors heard they were part pit bull, most of them recoiled. Those who had children drew them in close. The negative media attention given to pit bulls has led many people to make what social psychologists call an "illusory correlation" between the breed and viciousness. To counteract this, J and I spent much of the day smiling politely and telling people how training made all the difference, how smaller dogs bite much more often and how pit bulls could make wonderful family dogs. In these instances, I was conscious of keeping my facial expressions relaxed while still making eye contact, not so much to appear sincere but to avoid appearing insincere. Of several instances that "worked," one in particular comes to mind. A man who was killing time while his wife and children shopped came by to see the puppies who were with us. When the man learned that the dogs he was petting were pit bulls, he was stunned and said, "These are pit bulls?!! I've got to go get my wife and kids and show them how nice they are!" He brought his family back, and they all spent a few minutes with the dogs. I had to go through the pit bull "speech" again with his wife, but with him there to substantiate what I said. It was their first experience with pit bulls, and keeping the emotional tone light made it a positive one--for two generations.

Some interactions not only involved misconceptions about animals, but ones that potentially could result in cruelty or improper care. Therefore, it became especially important to find a way to unlock the window of opportunity. For example, a woman came on board and told us that she had always been a "cat lady." Stray cats just come to her, she said, and she feeds them and patches them up. She talked about the one on whom she had spent untold fortunes after a head injury, the one she found at a highway rest stop, and the one who had kittens in her laundry basket. She explained that she tries to find homes for all of them but first gets them vaccinated and spayed or neutered. She also gets them declawed.

Declawing really makes me angry. In this case, I took a breath and reminded myself that she was, in her own way, trying to solve an animal problem by preventing the cats from creating a human problem when they shredded furniture. I resolved not to voice my anger and, instead, smiled and thanked her for the good she was doing. I also probed for her readiness to learning. I asked if she had ever tried getting the cats used to having their claws trimmed or showed them how to use scratching posts. She said she never considered these as alternatives to declawing. Then, since the window of opportunity was unlocked, I explained that declawing was equivalent to amputation. I added that declawing may create more problems than it solves. For example, at The Shelter we have found that cats who are declawed are more often surrendered for "Litter Box Problems" than cats who have their claws. Although no extant studies support this, declawed cats may experience pain when they scratch at their litter. They understandably develop an aversion to using the box and use other surfaces such as carpets or bedding instead. Then, a guardian who thought the problem of scratching the furniture was solved now has a cat who soils the carpets. I gave the woman some literature from animal welfare organizations that criticizes declawing and suggests alternatives so she would see that this was not simply my pet peeve. We ended up trading stories about cats we had known and loved. When she left, I felt like we had become allies.

Deep acting. In surface acting, Hochschild (1983, p. 37) writes, "the body, not the soul, is the main tool of the trade." Deep acting, in contrast, involves the soul. It entails not only a convincing display but also a profound transformation of feelings. Deep acting is emotion management directed at oneself, not just at the other person. We all have engaged in deep acting sometime in our lives, whether we have worked at not feeling in love with someone who has spurned us or dusted ourselves off after a stinging rejection letter.

In my own experience, interactions that required deep acting often involved animals to whom I had become deeply attached. Although part of me loved to see them go home, another part became nervous and possessive; I worried that no home could possibly be good enough. I then scolded myself for feeling that way, and the deep acting began. For example, my work at The Shelter includes a weekly shift at the vet clinic, and one morning when I arrived for my usual shift, a badly injured dog lay on the floor. Animal control officers had brought her in after she had been hit by a car. Her tawny coat was bloody; patches of fur scraped to the skin, and a hind leg looked obviously broken. In addition, an x-ray revealed that her pelvis was broken. Since pelvic surgery is very expensive, the procedure had to wait until the dog's guardian was located. I wanted to comfort her, but the technicians warned me not to touch her because she was probably in a lot of pain and even the nicest dog might bite under these circumstances.

The dog apparently had been missing for some time, because her guardian had called The Shelter to file a lost report. After The Shelter referred him to the clinic and he identified her as "Charlie," he did something I did not understand but have learned to accept: He surrendered her. I do not know if it was the expense of treating her injuries or if he simply decided he did not want her anymore. Regardless, she was in our hands now.

Later that morning, as Charlie lay on the floor of the x-ray room awaiting surgery, I heard her whimper and went to check on her. I saw that, because she was unable to move, she had defecated on herself. I decided to take a chance and clean her up. She let me do so, and I marveled at her good nature, even in pain.

About a week later, I was at The Shelter to walk dogs and a staff member asked if I would keep an immobile dog company outdoors while he cleaned her kennel. I agreed, and was surprised when he and a co-worker brought Charlie out on a stretcher. In the days that had followed her accident, Charlie had undergone surgery to place pins in her pelvis. As a result, she also had numerous bandages and patches of fur were shaved to the skin to facilitate intravenous fluids and pain medication. The kennel workers set the stretcher down on the grass in the sunshine. I sat next to her. It was a gorgeous, sparkling-clear day. Charlie sniffed the air with her dark muzzle and looked around. She wanted to get up but couldn't - and shouldn't. I performed Tellington Touch6 on her, and she let me touch her all over - again showing her good nature. One of the staff members came out and changed her dressing. Together, we carried her back to her kennel, made her comfortable with blankets, and closed the door.

I visited Charlie as she recuperated, and when she was ready to walk I helped her take her first steps by supporting her belly with a towel. She went to live with a foster family for several weeks until she had recovered sufficiently to come to The Shelter's adoption area. During her stay there, I walked her regularly and brought her special treats and toys. Before long, she had begun to recognize me. Although I could not adopt her myself, I often imagined doing so. She had thoroughly stolen my heart. Then one day, it was Charlie's turn to join J. and me on the Adoption Mobile. I loved the idea of spending the day with her. Within an hour of arriving at our location, a woman came by and was, I could see, also taken with Charlie's sweetness. She asked questions about her history and the injury; She passed the test of "openness." She spent time petting Charlie and talked to her softly, but as I answered her questions about the adoption process I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach. Adopt Charlie? No, I thought. Charlie loves me! How could she go home with anyone when she loves me? Despite my panic, I felt good about this woman. Through surface acting, I hid my jealousy and reluctance. I began educating her about training classes and other resources for dogs, such as the Gentle Leader7 Charlie wore. We also talked about Clicker training and microchipping8, and we discussed how crate training would reinforce housebreaking. Then we talked about the local dog parks and the leash and license laws in the area. Suddenly, she glanced at her watch as though she had forgotten an appointment. She said she had to go, and, as she left, so did my emotional turmoil.

Later that day, she returned, and with her returned my pangs of jealousy and worry. To make matters worse, she had two children with her. They adored Charlie, and Charlie seemed to love them, too. "Wonderful," said half my heart. "It can't be," said the other. Worst of all, they wanted to adopt Charlie! As J. began the adoption paperwork, my heart raced and I scolded myself for what I was feeling. I told myself how great it would be for Charlie to have a home with children. She really did like the children, I reminded myself. I focused on how kind the woman was and on her interest in Charlie's history and needs. I put myself in the woman's place, remembering the fun I had bringing my companion dog, Skipper, home. I consciously tried to "empty" myself of jealousy and insecurity to reach a point of emotional neutrality. Then I filled the neutral space with the delight that I remembered feeling with Skipper. I focused on what a good thing the woman was doing by giving this abandoned dog a family. Gradually, my worries eased. By the time Charlie boarded their minivan for the trip home, good feelings had taken over the bad. A week after the adoption, I telephoned to see how Charlie was doing, and I was thrilled to hear that she was well loved and happy.

I offer this lengthy example because it captures the way that deep acting transformed jealousy and worry into delight and possibility. In contrast to surface acting, in which I simply put on a smile or hid my anger, the deep acting entailed in this interaction involved not only my body but also my imagination, my memory, and my mind. Here, I was not just trying to put on a convincing display; I was engaged in a focused effort genuinely to change the way I felt. I imagined Charlie in a loving home. I pictured her with the children. I envisioned them feeling the joy I had felt with Skipper. Then I made certain that my actions toward the woman and her children conveyed my pleasure in seeing Charlie go to a good home. It took considerable effort, but through deep acting I played a role so convincingly that I convinced even myself.

Emotion Management and Feeling Rules

Given that emotions inform our interaction so heavily, how do we know what to feel and when to feel it? In her pioneering work on the sociology of emotions, Hochschild (1983) poses the matter this way:


Since feeling is a form of pre-action, a script or a moral stance toward it is one of culture's most powerful tools for directing action. How do we sense these scripts or, as I shall call them, feeling rules?" (p. 56)
We become aware of feeling rules when we sense the contrast between what we feel and what we should feel. That we should feel anything at all reveals the extent to which feeling involves an exchange. Feeling is a way of paying respect, of "bowing from the heart" (Hochschild, 1983). For example, in the above case I "owed" the woman respect, in the sense of interactional exchange, because she was genuinely interested in adopting Charlie. She was doing a good thing. When I felt bad about it, I felt the contrast between what I felt and what I owed her and I adjusted my feelings - and my behavior - accordingly.

Feeling rules vary across settings and groups. Individuals' responses to them reflect where they stand in the interaction. Certain groups, such as women and those in service professions, generally are socialized to have greater awareness of the feelings of others than, say, males and those in blue-collar occupations. Moreover, institutions may establish feeling rules, as in this excerpt from The Shelter's training manual for the Adoption Mobile volunteers:


Our goal is to educate and inform the public in a thoughtful manner. [The Shelter] deals daily with animal problems, which in reality are human problems. If we are to successfully solve these problems, we must be able to relate to the people who cause them; therefore, it is vital that we deal professionally with the public at all times. Excessive anger and rude comments are not considered appropriate conduct.
Feeling rules are norms that govern emotional conduct. Like the norms that govern other types of behavior, violations invoke sanctions, and we most often police our own emotional behavior internally. We enforce feeling rules when we remind ourselves that we should not feel this way or that way. I enforced a feeling rule when I felt the "pinch" over my feelings for Charlie. However, sometimes violations of feeling rules are enforced with formal sanctions. For instance, one of the Adoption Mobile volunteers did not follow the feeling rules discouraging anger and rudeness. She was a radical animal rights activist who brought a sense of indignation to almost every interaction. Her attitude was probably very effective in public protests, but it alienated clients. As a result, she was asked to resign.

Deference

The volunteer who became angry and rude was unable to defer to clients, which is an interactional skill that can preserve other people's self-concepts and ensure their receptivity in future interactions. A good example occurred when the Adoption Mobile was at one of The Shelter's fund-raising dog washes. While I helped with the washing, I noticed that the next dog in line wore a choke-type collar with metal prongs that dug into the dog's neck when he or she pulled on the leash. To me, it resembled a torture device straight out of the Middle Ages. The Shelter opposes training methods that use pain, violence, and punishment, and I wanted to talk to the dog's guardian about alternatives. When it became the dog's turn for a wash, I began chatting with her guardian, and she praised The Shelter and its philosophy. A few minutes elapsed, and I asked the woman if her dog pulled. Predictably, she answered, "Does she ever! She pulls terribly!" I said that the prong collar might encourage that behavior. Dogs' neck muscles are very strong, I said. They can resist the prong collar, further strengthening the muscles and thereby learning to pull even more. Besides, I explained, prong collars hurt.

Quite suddenly, the woman's cognition of herself as a humane, responsible guardian was dissonant with the cognition that she used a training method regarded as inhumane. Cognitive dissonance poses a threat to one's self-concept, and the variety of dissonance-reducing techniques that people use are designed to rescue the ego (Aronson, 1999). However, the ego is often rescued at the cost of preventing people from learning how to solve problems, such as how to humanely stop a dog from pulling on a leash. In this instance, I hoped to soften the potential blow to her self-esteem by allowing her to change her mind about her approach to training, so I offered a way out and asked if she had tried a headcollar. Unfortunately, she already had, but the dog hated it and pawed frantically to get it off. Anyway, she said, running her fingers under the steel prongs, the collar really didn't hurt the dog.

With this, she engaged in a common attempt to reduce dissonance: She rejected the dissonant information by minimizing the potential harm to her dog. She was clearly committed to her belief that she was right. I offered another way out. I explained that many dogs dislike headcollars at first, but by distracting them with treats, guardians can help their dogs accept them. Moreover, the dogs who need headcollars most are often those who object most strenuously. I told her that, for guardians, it usually requires patiently working through the adjustment period. I realized immediately that was the wrong thing to say. I had unwittingly implied that her failure with the headcollar meant that she was not only inhumane, she was also impatient. At this, she further shut down communication with another common defensive device: She appealed to an authority whom she considered more credible than I. She explained that her veterinarian had recommended the prong collar. If a vet recommended it, this implied, it must be fine. For her, having an animal-care professional on her side confirmed the wisdom of her position.

In this instance, I had to resign myself to the reality that I could not influence this woman. She was not ready to change, and each suggestion I made only put her increasingly on the defensive. In hindsight, I realize I probably probed too far. A bit of surface acting--a cheerful smile, perhaps a shrug, and a statement along the lines of "Oh, well. Some dogs just pull," might have been less threatening to her. In the long run, this would have made her more receptive in future interactions (Goffman, 1959). More precisely, deferring to her would have allowed her to present the image of self she wanted to present. In the way that the interaction unfolded, I had, albeit inadvertently, cast her in a particular roleC that of inhumane guardian. If I had anticipated this, I could have adjusted my behavior to minimize her resistance. Whereas the emotion management techniques of surface acting and deep acting address self-presentation on one's own behalf, deference refers to the effects of one's acts on another person's ability to present a positive image of self. Deference, moreover, acknowledges the presence of power in social interaction. It acknowledges the control of resources; in this case, control over the role of the other person. If one can anticipate the reaction of another to a given act, one can revise the act to assure the best advantage.

A good example of deference at work comes from the way J. interacted with an irate woman. The Adoption Mobile regularly visits a busy neighborhood populated largely, although not entirely, by university students. The long-term residents have watched in horror as the spacious homes in their upper-middle-class neighborhood become rental apartments. The story these residents tell is that soon after this occurs, the properties fall into neglect, the extra cars make parking impossible, and the police make regular appearances to quell loud parties. This account often includes another debatable component: The students abandon their animals when they leave town for the summer. A long-term resident approached the Adoption Mobile on one of its visits to her neighborhood in this context. "How dare you!" she shouted to J. "How dare you bring animals into this neighborhood when these kids aren't even responsible enough to take care of themselves! You know they're just going to let them run when they leave."

J. said that he knew he had two choices. He could have tried to convince the woman that she was wrong about the students. He could have presented her with evidence that she would not have found persuasive, and she would have become more defensive along the way. His other choice, the one he took, was to defer to her. He allowed her to maintain the role she had created for herself. Indeed, he even supported her to an extent by explaining that the Adoption Mobile had come to that neighborhood to work on the very problems she voiced. The Adoption Mobile was there to educate about leash laws, licensing, spaying and neutering, and other aspects of responsible guardianshipC all of which was true. Of course, if a student had wanted to adopt an animalC and passed the screening to do soC that could certainly have happened. However, J.'s main concern was not to alienate the woman. To do this, he allowed her to present the image of self that she valued. Because J. did not put her on the defensive, she was receptive to his explanation of what the Adoption Mobile was doing. Once they had engaged in a civil conversation, J. went on to tell her that, in fact, no inordinate numbers of strays came from that neighborhood when students left for the summer. By deferring, he was able to accomplish much more than if he had attempted to set her straight from the start.

Deference illustrates the extent to which interaction does not always entail presenting accurate information to people who then rationally choose to abandon what they have erroneously held true. Dissonance-reducing behaviors such as those the woman at the dog wash engaged in protect the ego but prevent people from learning and finding solutions to persistent problems. The social psychologist Aronson (1999) suggests that we humans are not so much rational beings as we are rationalizing ones.

Discussion

Humane education, like education in general, requires precisely the right conditions. The "student" should not feel threatened, attacked, or belittled. The "teacher" must therefore "read" the interaction and attempt to make it conducive to learning. Among other things, this involves producing a positive emotional state in the students, even while feeling angry or appalled at the misconceptions they hold. In short, those engaged in education must manage their "true" feelings in order to create a favorable climate for learning.

By making civility possible, emotion management has tremendous social benefits. However, it also has considerable social psychological costs, the chief one being its threat to authenticity. Because work in animal shelters elicits some of the highest and lowest of human emotions, workers are especially susceptible to this. On any given day, shelter workers might experience intense joy at seeing an animal placed in a loving home, profound anger at instances of cruelty, deep sadness during euthanasia, and shock or horror at the ignorance people have about animals - all with little opportunity to express or act on their feelings. The emotion management required to educate the public about the humane treatment of animals may leave workers wondering what to make of their "genuine" feelings. Granted, one could act on those feelings, and, like the volunteer who voiced her radical position too insistently, risk losing the chance to educate people at all. Another alternative is to acknowledge that interaction simply feels "phony" at times. However, the worker may then wonder what became of the original appeal of the job, which lay partly in the emotional authenticity of working with animals. This situation raises at least three questions. First, if one has to manage feelings on the job, how does one then recognize a genuine emotional response? Second, how can animal care workers cope with the social psychological burdens of emotion management? Third, how can shelters and other organizations recruit and retain workers who have skills in coping as well as interaction?

The question about genuine feelings highlights the way contemporary American culture depicts emotions. Hochschild (1983, p. 190) claims that "as a culture, we have begun to place an unprecedented value on spontaneous, 'natural' feeling." Although interaction demands an easygoing civility brought about by managing emotions, the emotions are also thought to have a "wild side" that indicates our "natural" desires and intentions. In public, we appreciate the controlled emotional style one scholar calls American Cool (Stearns, 1994; 1989), but in private we look to emotions to tell us what is going on "inside." Thus, the "common-sense" response to emotion management is Why do it at all? Why not get in touch with and act on what you feel?

This response indicates an equating of emotions as instinct, capable of prompting action consistent with an allegedly true self. This represents a paradigm known as the "organismic" model of emotions, generated by the work of Darwin, Freud, and James. From the organismic perspective, social interaction sparks instinctual reactions, but it does not shape them, as I have maintained in this paper that it does. Instead, emotion is considered largely a biological process of elicitation followed by expression. The organismic model is positivistic, in that it assumes that emotions are patterned, constant responses to specific kinds of social stimuli. Emotion thus becomes an entity that exists apart from both the "feeling rules" that pertain to the situation and the introspection of the person experiencing the emotion. Consequently, the organismic model considers emotional experience as a priori more genuine and, therefore, more reliable than feeling rules as cues to interaction. People who strive to get in touch with their feelings presumably would want to act on their impulses, which offer the most trustworthy guides to behavior consistent with who one really is. Being in touch with one's feelings would mean acting quickly on what one felt, wasting little time on reflection that might contaminate the impulse. To do anything else would detract from the value of the emotions as indicators of who one is. By extension, it also would deny the value of the true self.

Discourse about getting in touch with feelings makes a singular claim about authentic selfhood. It suggests that the emotions offer access to what mainstream society has suppressed. In this sense, the organismic approach focuses on the capacity of emotions to serve as signals. Emotions indeed convey information about the world. However, no one has access to raw, uninterpreted emotion. As I argue in this paper, emotions function as signals in conjunction with expectations. Granted, emotions involve a direct, physical experience. Whether a racing pulse and tense stomach signal life-threatening danger or the excitement of a first date depends largely on what one expects from, and knows about, the situation. Thus, the signaling capacity of emotions involves more than the relaying of unprocessed information. Culture and expectations already have mediated the emotion that we feel. What we know about feelings comes through culture, not through direct contact with something "real" called "feeling." In a literal sense, there are no real emotions with which to get in touch.

Consistent with this, the more sociologically informed interactional model (that underlies this study) focuses on the social factors that enable individuals to define and give meaning to the emotions9>. In this perspective, the fundamental biological components of emotion, that is, the nervous system, adrenaline, tears, are recognized as contributing to, but not the source of, emotional experience. Emotions are "primarily dependent on definitions of the situation, emotion vocabularies, and emotional beliefs, which vary across time and location" (Thoits, 1989, p. 319). The interactional model rejects the idea of universal physiological or expressive constituent elements and, instead, maintains that all emotions are the product of culturally or situationally specific factors. In other words, actors must define situations before emotions will be experienced. Social norms - Hochschild's (1983) "feeling rules" - determine and direct the emotions experienced in any situation. The historical and cultural variability of the meaning and expression of emotions offers convincing evidence of this (Irvine, 1997; Sommers, 1984; Stearns, 1989, 1994).

In the interactions analyzed in this paper, the dubious prospect of being in touch with emotions takes a back seat to the necessity of presenting oneself in certain ways in given situations, which entails managing emotions. Assuming the inevitability of emotion management, I turn now to the second question raised above: How can workers cope with the ensuing estrangement from feeling? I offer two suggestions. One of these is to engage in a benign version of the ego-defensive behavior known as the self-serving bias (Aronson, 1999, pp. 173-177). Simply put, this is the tendency to give ourselves credit for the good and deny or minimize our role in the bad. For example, job applicants who receive desired positions attribute the offer to their skills and personality, whereas the rejected applicant blames unfair decisions or bad luck. As long as the self-serving attribution avoids delusional extremes, an optimistic perspective has numerous psychological and even physical benefits (Seligman, 1991). Within the context of shelters, one ego-defensive strategy workers use is to remember the "greater good." Regardless of what else is involved, sheltering ultimately is about helping animals. Perhaps the best example of the kind of optimism I recommend comes from Peterson and Goodall (1993). Goodall explains why she repeatedly subjects herself to the horrors of research labs. "The answer is simple," she writes. "It is time to repay something of the debt I owe the chimpanzees" (p. 281). If considered part of the equivalent debt we owe companion animals, estrangement from emotions might be easier to bear.

A second coping mechanism, which can accompany an optimistic style of thinking, is one I call "decompression." A version of this appears in Goffman (1959). By examining everyday interaction as theatre, Goffman highlights the importance of what takes place "backstage," away from the audience, for sustaining a sincere performance. Anyone who has worked in a restaurant has experienced a striking version of this. Things done and said in the kitchen would never take place in the dining area. Yet the criticizing of customers and managers and general clowning around have an important function. The simple act of getting away from the public with co-workers and talking about clients or the work helps considerably for "team impression management." Along these lines, Hochschild's (1983) study of emotional labor among flight attendants calls attention to how workers benefit from talking with co-workers both on and off the job. Mutual support can go a long way to coping with the job's emotional demands.

Shelters and other animal care organizations can undertake various measures to ensure that workers have the appropriate interactional skills and to retain those who do. Industry wide, shelters have a high rate of attrition. Entry-level kennel workers typically stay at their jobs only for four to six months. Although there are many reasons for this, including low pay, the emotional burden of the work is surely a significant factor. Two suggestions for retaining workers emerge from the research in this paper. First, shelters and animal care organizations should acknowledge the emotional labor entailed in the work and prepare their employees for it. Shelter work requires not only a deep love for animals but also a willingness to work with people. It would be helpful for shelters to offer training in basic acting skills, especially those required for deep acting. J., for example, who has an acting background, compares it to "verbal Tai Chi." As in physical Tai Chi, in which one person relies on balance and timing to turn another's own strength against him or her, deep acting allows someone in an emotionally weaker position to defuse a volatile "opponent." The shelter worker, for example, might feel angry with a client because of the client's treatment of an animal. Expressing the anger puts the client on the defensive; he or she walks away from the interaction still believing he or she is right and adding to that a bad attitude toward the experience at the organization. Instead, a worker trained for such situations could work toward a state of emotional neutrality while reading the interaction along the way to determine the best course of interaction. Although some people seem temperamentally more gifted in such ways, such people more often are made than born. In short, organizations can, and should, train their employees in emotion management in much the same way they train them to care for animals or use computers.

Second, organizations could create more opportunities for workers to engage in mutual support and "decompression." Scheduling lunches together, providing a lounge area for breaks, and offering opportunities for socializing outside of work all hold promise. Better yet, organizations should actively encourage workers to create their own opportunities for mutual support, since increasing worker control reduces estrangement from the job. Along with this, organizations can recognize employee achievements and milestones. While pay raises are always welcome, organizations with limited budgets cannot necessarily provide rewards commensurate with accomplishments. Research on management suggests that recognition and appreciation are the most valuable rewards an organization can offer.

One of the potential extensions of this research concerns the other participants in shelter interactions: the animals. As stressful as shelter work is for humans, it is doubly so for the animals who must live there, however temporarily. Shelters are full of unfamiliar and frightening sounds, odors, and sights. Dogs and cats must cope with long stretches of boredom interspersed with visits from strangers who poke fingers into kennels. The shelter environment surely has emotional consequences for animals. Fortunately, scholars have begun to take animals' emotions seriously. Related to this paper, the work of trainer Rugaas (1997) indicates that dogs, too, engage in emotion management. Rugaas has identified close to 30 "calming signals" that dogs use to reassure themselves - and other dogs - when they are uneasy. Similarly, behaviorist McConnell (1998) has written about aspects of training that work on dogs' emotions rather than their actions.

The work of Rugaas (1997), McConnell (1998), and others acknowledges that much of animal behavior, like much of human behavior, is motivated by feeling (Bekoff, 2000). Moreover, although emotional responses from humans and nonhumans alike usually appear natural and spontaneous, they are, in both cases, much more complex than appearances indicate. As research sheds light on the expression of emotions in all animals, the lines between human and nonhuman become more difficult to draw. As it turns out, survival in a pack, whether human or nonhuman, requires careful, even artful, interaction.

* Leslie Irvine, University of Colorado

Notes

1Correspondence should be sent to Leslie Irvine, Department of Sociology, 219 Ketchum 327 UCB, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0327. E-mail: irvinel@colorado.edu Acknowledgements: Thanks to Marc Krulewitch and Jackson Galaxy for critiques of earlier drafts.

2Animals who were not sold to vivisectionists were killed, usually by electrocution. In the 1860s, two Philadelphia women, Elizabeth Morris and Annie Waln, began going around the city picking up and sheltering strays. They found homes for some and chloroformed those for whom they could find no homes. Work in animal protection was slowed by the Civil War but continued afterwards; and, in 1874, Morris and Waln started the first Animal Rescue League. In 1888, their organization was incorporated independently as the Morris Refuge Association for Homeless and Suffering Animals. It became a model for many humane shelters and still operates today. Caroline White, another Philadelphia woman and a contemporary of Morris and Waln's, was outraged that the city pound supplied animals in quantity for vivisection. She was the first to contract with a city government to shelter strays.

In the U.S., unclaimed animals were routinely sold for use in research until 1979 (Finsen & Finsen, 1994, p. 61). The practice, called "pound seizure," was required by the Metcalf-Hatch Act. New York, Minnesota, and several other states, as well as municipalities, had pro-pound seizure laws. Individual states began to repeal pound seizure laws in the 1970s, but the turning point was the repeal of Metcalf-Hatch in 1979.

3This lack of knowledge has been found in national surveys (Scarlett, Salman, New, & Kass, 1999; New, Salman, Scarlett, Kass, Vaughn, Scherr, & Kelch, 1999).

4A classic statement on this can be found in Sartre (1948).

5For a study of how guardians of such breeds manage the accompanying stigma, see Twining, Arluke, and Patronek (2000).

6Tellington Touch, or T-touch, is a method of bodywork for all animals. It involves a series of non-habitual touches, unlike petting, massage, or scratching, that can awaken unused neural pathways. It is based on the theory that bad habits and insecurities form in response to tension, fear, and pain. When the body is stimulated in new, non-habitual, ways, new brain cells are stimulated. As a result, T-touch can change patterns of behavior and instill new confidence and ability.

7The Gentle Leader is a brand of canine headcollar that works much like a halter does for a horse. It works on the theory that when you control the dog's head you control the body. It discourages pulling on the leash, allowing opportunity to reward proper leash behavior.

8"Clicker training" is positive reinforcement training that uses a click as a reward marker. Microchipping refers to the implanting of a tiny (about the size of a grain of rice) computer chip in the scruff of an animal's neck. The chip contains a reference number that is stored in a nationwide database. The number is revealed when a lost animal is scanned by a shelter, vet, or animal control officer. It can then be traced, through several national organizations, to guardians' contact information. This technology has reunited thousands of companion animals with their guardians.

9Though George Herbert Mead introduced the interactional perspective, John Dewey, writing in 1922, made the claim that impulse takes shape within a context. Dewey paved the way for Mead's interactional perspective by claiming that instinctive processes are situationally organized and the self interacts with and monitors each situation. For a good overview of this intellectual history, see Hochschild (1983), appendix A.

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