Paolo Iagulli

Despite the undoubted relevance emotions have for the social action and for society itself, Sociology started to deal with them directly only around the half of Seventies in the last century; the United States, therefore, have up for lost time: the Sociology of emotions has by now earned the statute of an autonomous scientific and academic doctrine. In this article, after a quick introduction to the Sociology of emotions and its main theoretical perspectives (Positivism, Constructionism and Interactionism) I’ll take into consideration the sociological theory of emotions by Arlie Russell Hochschild. She should be certainly considered as one of the main autoritative theorist of the interactionist approach, even deemed by someone as the founder of the Sociology of emotions; by surveying some of the main theoretical assumptions, I’ll try to select those thematic cores (emotional control, emotion labor, feeling rules, emotional devienza, emotional culture) which supply the conceptual and lexical framework for the understanding of the more general sociological reflection about emotions.