The term emotion regime (also rendered by William Reddy as emotional regime, and in German published work as Gefühlsregime or "regime of feelings") refers to the particular set of shared expectations that guide how individuals are to feel and express themselves in particular social settings. The differing structures of these social norms influence expectations that guide everyday conduct and vary across historical periods and communities. Reddy defines an emotional regime as a configuration of prescribed "emotives" (expressions involved in the description and production of feelings), together with the rituals and practices they are conveyed through.
The term was introduced and elaborated by Reddy in The Navigation of Feeling, where he analysed shifts in dominant emotion regimes during the French Revolution. The concept is often discussed alongside Barbara Rosenwein's framework of emotional communities; groups that share norms, valuations, and styles of expression. Historians have also situated emotion regimes within broader historiographical debates about how community expectations of proper or acceptable behavior are formed and how they change over time.
As an analytic tool, the concept of an emotion regime can be used to describe how emotional norms are organized, maintained, and contested, and demonstrate how political, religious, professional, or familial settings can result in the formation of expectations that influence conduct and constrain autonomy. Analysts have used the framework to investigate institutions, identity groups, political movements, and digital cultures, analysing how they enforce standards of affective expression and how individuals navigate, adapt to, or resist them.
Major definitions and scholarly debates on emotion regimes are presented alongside accounts of the adjacent mechanisms they operate through, the historical and contemporary cases they appear in, and their application across institutional, social, political, and digital contexts.
Overview
The term emotion regime is used to describe the shared expectations that prescribe how individuals ought to feel and express themselves in particular settings. These arrangements are historically situated and shaped by social power, a point emphasised in analyses in which it is argued that emotions are structured responses shaped by cultural environments, as opposed to merely private states of mind.
Visibility of emotion expectations People routinely navigate settings in which expectations about appropriate feelings are clearly marked. In schools, students may learn that enthusiasm is welcomed while frustration must be carefully controlled. Workplaces likewise cultivate expectations about demeanour; for instance, studies of service labour show how organisations encourage workers to display cheerfulness as part of professional conduct. Online platforms also promote recurring affective patterns as users learn which styles of expression are rewarded, which are discouraged, and how circulating feelings come to organise participation.
Relevance Identifying such patterned expectations is the core contribution of the concept of emotion regimes. Examination of group-specific emotional norms shows that institutions and communities display shared valued and disvalued feelings. The hypothesis proposed is that cultural formations organise emotions in ways that reinforce or challenge social power.
Definition Historians use the term to describe patterned structures that shape how feelings may be expressed, interpreted, and regulated in specific settings.
Simple definition An emotion regime can be understood as the patterned environment of emotional expectations that surrounds people in a particular setting. It refers to the ways that social groups, institutions, or societies indicate which feelings should be expressed, which should be repressed, and how individuals are expected to display those feelings in everyday interactions. These expectations may be conveyed through routines, rituals, or informal cues about what counts as an appropriate response in a given situation.
Canonical academic definition In the historical study of emotions, the concept takes on a more precise meaning. Rosenwein summarizes William Reddy's definition as "the set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them." In Reddy's framework, regimes prescribe which feelings count as legitimate, how they should be articulated, and how individuals are expected to orient themselves toward those norms.
Conceptual elements Emotion regimes consist of several interconnected elements: They articulate norms that define which feelings and expressions are valued, discouraged, or prohibited. Regimes rely on rituals and practices that reinforce these norms in daily life, with examples being commemorations, public declarations, gestures, or forms of address. They establish mechanisms for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate feelings, whether through praise, censure, or more formal sanctions. Emotion regimes are historically and culturally specific: they emerge in response to particular social conditions, and shifts in regimes often occur when their norms generate significant emotional strain or conflict.
Distinction from related concepts
Although related to several neighboring terms, "emotion regime" has a distinct analytical focus. Rosenwein's concept of emotional communities describe groups bound together by shared norms, values, and styles of emotional expression focusing on the affective cohesion of a community rather than the externally-imposed standards enforced by authorities. By contrast, an emotion regime highlights regulation, prescription, and the power-laden processes by which emotional norms are maintained. Reddy's concept also intersects with sociologist Arlie Hochschild's idea of feeling rules, which identify micro-level expectations guiding individual emotional expression, but emotion regimes encompass broader institutional and political structures that set and enforce those rules.
Function Emotion regimes operate through interlocking patterns of customary behavior that guide how people are expected to feel, express themselves, and interpret social situations. Prescriptive rules, interpretive frames, sanctions, ritual forms, and possibilities for change are examples of several mechanisms that writers in the field describe as influencing patterned emotional conduct within specific settings.
Feeling rules
Hochschild introduced the concept of "feeling rules," defining them as shared standards that specify how a person "ought to feel" in particular situations and how those feelings should be expressed in order to sustain proper social relations. These norms help determine whether individuals should induce, suppress, or modify feelings, and they are central to workplace settings, where interaction with clients or passengers requires managing one's affective display. Hochschild argues that individuals engage in "emotion management" to meet these rules, a process that may involve either surface acting or deep acting when the emotional expectations built into a job demand sustained forms of cheerfulness, patience, or calm. Feeling rules thus provide the shared expectations that emotion regimes rely on to indicate what counts as appropriate conduct.
Expectations and interpretive frames Beyond explicit feeling rules, people learn to interpret situations through culturally-shared frameworks that guide the emotions they take to be appropriate on any given occasion. Drawing on Erving Goffman's account of the interaction order, analysts emphasize that social encounters rely on tacit definitions of the situation that structure alignments, obligations, and expectations. In face-to-face encounters, participants continuously manage "face" (their social value) by orienting to cues that signal respect, deference, or involvement. These frames help organize emotional expectations by indicating whether embarrassment, reassurance, restraint, or warmth is situationally appropriate. In collective settings, shared ways of understanding situations also shape the feelings people learn to use, helping them identify what counts as a grievance, which emotions are seen as acceptable, and which responses are socially approved.
Sanctions and social enforcement
Emotion regimes are sustained through formal and informal sanctions that encourage conformity to patterned expectations. Thomas Scheff argues that shame and embarrassment form a central mechanism through which individuals monitor one another's adherence to social bonds and interactional obligations. Even subtle signs of rejection, a missed conversational beat, or withheld acknowledgment, can produce shame and thereby reinforce norms of deference and alignment. Reddy similarly maintains that divergence between personal experience and a dominant regime's prescribed emotives can generate emotional suffering, as individuals struggle to navigate norms that do not correspond to their lived experience.
Symbolic and ritual components Goffman's analysis of ritual elements shows that greetings, partings, honorifics, and other ceremonial gestures help reproduce shared understandings of propriety, thereby embedding the feelings a situation calls for within the fabric of social interaction. Such ritualized practices affirm the value of particular emotional stances, for example, reverence in formal ceremonies or composure in professional settings. Practice-oriented researchers further note that these enactments become habitual and embodied, as repeated gestures and patterned interactions train participants to respond with dispositions that align with the prevailing order.
Change, breakdown, and emotional agency Emotion regimes are not fixed; they may loosen, fracture, or be replaced when their norms no longer align with lived experience. William Reddy introduces the concept of "emotional liberty" to describe moments when individuals or groups articulate feelings that exceed or contradict dominant prescriptions, so that they can experiment with alternative forms of expression. Such moments often emerge in periods of political upheaval, institutional instability, or cultural transformation. Analysts of social movements further show how new sentiments can mobilize collective action when actors contest prevailing norms or construct alternative emotional scripts.
Historical emotion regimes
Historians of emotions use the idea of emotion regimes or emotional regimes to describe historically specific configurations of prescribed feelings, evaluative vocabularies, and sanctioned practices that link inner experience to public order over time. Building on William Reddy's analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and Ute Frevert's work on modern Europe, research has traced how such regimes emerge, how they organise norms of feeling and expression, and how they are transformed through political upheaval, social change, and shifts in the language of feeling.
Reddy's foundational historical cases In The Navigation of Feeling, Reddy introduces "emotional regimes" as ensembles of prescribed "emotives" – speech acts that both express and help shape feeling – together with the rituals and institutional arrangements that support them. In his typology, regimes can be more or less strict: highly constraining regimes secure stability partly by producing "emotional suffering", Reddy's term for the distress that arises when individuals cannot reconcile their own feelings and goals with socially mandated patterns of expression. An important criterion for evaluating historical regimes is thus the degree of "emotional liberty" they afford – the extent to which people can reorient their projects and relationships without intolerable inner conflict.