Emotion regime

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 people ought to feel and express themselves in particular social settings. The differing structures of these social norms shape the expectations that guide everyday conduct and vary across historical periods and communities. Reddy defines an emotional regime as a configuration of prescribed “emotives”, which are expressions that both describe and help produce feelings, together with the rituals and practices through which they are inculcated. By emphasizing the ways such norms channel expression, authorize some feelings, and suppress others, the concept highlights how feelings are organized within specific social groups.

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. Subsequent analysis in the history of emotions, sociology, and cultural theory has used the concept to examine how communities and institutions cultivate characteristic repertoires of feeling. It is often discussed alongside Barbara Rosenwein’s framework of emotional communities are groups that share norms, valuations, and styles of expression and offers a complementary emphasis on plural emotional formations within a given society. 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 allows researchers to describe how emotional norms are organized, maintained, and contested. It draws attention to the relationship between feeling and power, showing how political, religious, professional, or familial settings can cultivate expectations that shape 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 adjacent mechanisms through which they operate, historical and contemporary cases in which they appear, and their application across institutional, social, political, and digital contexts. The coverage also situates the concept in relation to adjacent analytic frameworks, including emotives, emotional communities, feeling rules, and emotional practices.