The Managed Heart summary

When you feel sad, excited or bored, your emotions don’t just reflect your current mood – they’re also powerful signals that reveal what the people and things in our lives mean to us. Let’s illustrate this with an example.

Say, for instance, a university student agrees to host a party with an old friend from high school. Soon, though, they find themselves dreading the thought of it. Why? Because, deep down, they just don’t want to be associated with their old friend anymore.

Have you ever done a favor for a friend and felt like they should have shown a little more gratitude? In our society, feelings are often exchanged as gifts or forms of payments. Let’s explore this with another example.

Say a new intern needs help with a task and seeks advice from a more experienced colleague. Afterward, the intern might “pay” for the expert’s time and wisdom with a comment like “Thanks so much Sarah! I really appreciate it; I know how busy you are right now.” By doing this, he acknowledges that he isn’t really “worth” the expert’s time, and compensates for this by giving them an ego boost. In the end, both parties profit from an exchange like this.

Think back to your childhood. Which of your parents took more responsibility for things like organizing your playdates, purchasing gifts and remembering friends’ and family members’ birthdays? In most cases, the answer is our mother. How come?

In terms of power, status and independent access to money, women are generally less well off. For example, statistics from 1980 show that around 50 percent of American men received an annual salary over $15,000 – as opposed to only 6 percent of women. While the situation has of course improved since then, inequality still exists between men and women.

So far, we’ve looked at the way in which women do more emotional labor than men. But what are the effects of such an imbalance on the women doing this additional labor?

First of all, women find that their opinions are more quickly ignored or rejected than men’s. One reason for this is that the feelings that women carefully manage are taken to be involuntary or uncontrollable – think of the way good actors don’t seem like they’re acting at all.