Managing Emotion, Fashion Design and Fashion Marketing

Interest in how we manage our emotions has grown dramatically in recent years, both among researchers and as a practical approach to daily life. Researchers have discovered that individuals experience variations in intensity, persistence, modulation, onset time, the duration of the rising emotion phase, the range of emotions experienced and their ability to recover from strong emotional responses – these are called “emotion dynamics” (Thompson 1993). Each person has a certain amount of control over these characteristics of emotional response – this ability to influence our emotions is what we mean be the expression “the management of emotions”. It is possible, indeed, to influence the quality, the intensity and the duration of emotions as well as other dynamic features.

Another part of the interest in emotions follows from the shift in how our society thinks about and understands emotion. Emotions were long held to be “irrational”, disorganized and a source of stress and turbulence, hence to be avoided – typified, perhaps, in the Vulcan culture found on Star Trek. However, from a research perspective, it has become clear that emotion is a crucial component of “rational thinking” – people who have damage to the parts of the brain that support emotion experience a disruption of their ability to organize ideas (See Antonio Damasio’s book Descartes Error for a fascinating presentation of this discovery). Emotion has also been found to be profoundly adaptive as well as to play a central role in the construction of our psychological makeup, indeed, our identities.

Emotions can be turbulent and disruptive but they are also an extremely important part of our abiliity to make and to act on decisions. How we manage our emotions is the key to making sure the latter predominates over the former. One of the ways by which researchers have discovered we manage our emotions is through our facial expressions. For example, when we attempt to smile and feel the changes this brings about to our face, this enhances our feeling of happiness and the smile grows stronger as a result. So we may smile when we’re happy, but smiling may also bring on a state of happiness. Not only that, but facial expressions have been found to be universally understood in similar ways across all cultures.

Another area where the management of emotions has been studied is among high stress service workers such as firefighters, 911 call takers and prison corrections officers. In a study carried out by Sarah Tracy, Karen Myers and Clifton Scott (2006), humor was found to be the primary means of managing the heavy emotions aroused by situations in this kind of work. By making light of the situation, the workers were able to distance themselves from highly disturbing encounters. Humor also allowed the workers to present themselves in empathizing and sympathetic light, even to people with whom they were profoundly uncomfortable. Tracy, Myers and Scott found the humor was not only used to enhance coping mechanisms, but that it actually structured the interactions and changed the way the work was done. For example, the 911 call takers used humor to refocus their attention away from the most disturbing calls, by highlighting and laughing about the odd calls (saving a cat, for example). This refocussing allows them to process and make sense of the more disturbing calls and to come up with appropriate follow-up actions.

More recently, emotions have come to be understood as less about our biological organisation (i.e. emotions determined by our body states) and more about processes that mediate our interactions with the environment (both social and physical). In this latter sense, the management of our emotions is actually a roundabout way of managing our experience of the world around us. Moreover, different cultures teach different strategies for the management of emotions.

Studies of the relationship between emotional management, depression and mental health reveal effective and ineffective management strategies (Kallay, Tincas and Benga, 2009). Among effective strategies, one finds “positive refocusing” such as the use of humor studied by Tracy, Myers and Clifton. Among less effective strategies, one finds “ruminating”, “catastrophizing” and “self-blaming”. Rumination in particular seems to enhance negative emotion states and to lengthen bouts of depression.

As indicated in an earlier blog posting, recent research links this emerging understanding of how emotions are managed and the role of fashions in constructing identities. In the earlier blog posting we described work concerned with the construction of identity among muslim businesswomen who are struggling with situations of conflicting identity. In another study, women in academia, also placed into situations of conflicting identity, use choice in clothing to construct their “intellectual identity” at the interface between emphasizing attractiveness while maintaining professionalism and intellectual authority (Kaiser, Chandler and Hammidi 2000). Likewise, pregnant women use fashion to explore issues of embodiedness (Longhurst, 2001) while gay men have also used fashion to explore some of the paradoxes involved in the gay experience (Cole, 2000). Through these studies, it has become clear that fashion choices provide a powerful means for individuals to construct and reinforce identity choices as well as to find ways of reconciling conflicts between how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us (Crewe, 2001).

The role of fashion in constructing identity is related to the work on embodied emotions, such as via facial expressions. Just as by smiling we may enhance our feelings of happiness, by adopting particular identities via fashion choices, we may allow ourselves to “take on” those identities within limited contexts and hence “test out” different states of being before embracing them more fully, or deciding to reject them if they are judged inappropriate.

As highlighted above, humor is also a powerful tool for managing emotions in complex situations. Combining fashion and humor in new and interesting ways could provide new opportunities for exploring emotional and identity issues at the edges of our lives, especially given that our “edges” are becoming ever more important. Although a sense of humor is sometimes found in fashions on the runways, overall, fashions tend to be a little too serious and not allow enough room for play and fun. This is an area ripe for new possibilities for fashion designers.

Fashion marketing today is strongly oriented towards a person’s “expressivity” – that is, marketing messages are based on the older idea that fashion choices “express identity” rather than “create identity”. There is room here to innovate – given the role of fashions to challenge establishment images and allow individuals to explore conflicting identities, the way fashions are marketed could take advantage of these newer ideas. There are a whole range of “niche” populations where these possibilities exist. In addition to the ones already cited in this and the earlier post – muslim business women, recent immigrants, gay men, women in academia, troubled youth, pregnant women – there are other groups that represent larger parts of the population. For example, the elderly also struggle with changing and conflicting identities, and the elderly represent a major (and growing!) segment of the population.

Cole, Shaun, 2000, Don we know our gay apparel : Gay Men’s Dress in the Twentieth Century, Oxford: Berg, 224 p.

Crewe, Louise, 2001, The besieged body: geographies of retailing and consumption, Progress in Human Geography 25(4) : 629-640.

Damasio, Antonio, 2005, Descartes’ Error : Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, London: Penguin, 336 p.

Kaiser, Susan B., Joan L. Chandler and Tania N. Hammidi, 2000, Minding appearances in female academic culture, in Through the wardrobe : women’s relationships with their clothes, A. Guy, E. Green and M. Banim (eds.), Oxford: Berg, 117-136.

Kallay, Eva, Ioana Tincas and Oana Benga, 2009, Emotion Regulation, Mood States, and Quality of Mental Life, Cognition, Brain, Behavior. An Interdisciplinary Journal 13(1) : 31-48.

Longhurst, Robyn, 2000, ‘Corporeographies’ of pregnancy : ‘bikini babes’. Environment and Planning D : Society and Space 18(4) : 453 – 472.

Thompson, Ross A., 1993, Socioemotional Development : Enduring Issues and New Challenges, Developmental Review 13, 372-402.

Tracy, Sarah J., Myers, Karen K., & Scott, Clifton W., 2006, Cracking jokes and crafting selves: Sensemaking and identity management among human service workers. Communication Monographs : 73, 283-308.