The Potential of the Sociology of Emotions and Affect Studies for Understanding Ageing Processes

Abstract

In everyday life as well as in scientific discourses, ageing as a social process is often associated with the highly affective term of loss—e.g. of autonomy, choice, self-efficacy, social networks, or physical losses—and, therefore, age and ageing are commonly linked to emotions and affects such as grief or anger. Even though loss in older age might be an emotional experience, sociological theories of ageing rarely consider emotional and affective dimensions of ageing processes in their theoretical and conceptual thinking. We propose to link ageing with the theoretical concepts of emotional capitalism and emodities (Illouz 2007, 2017) as an example for the sociology of emotions, and resonance (Rosa 2019) as an example of affect studies. By applying these theoretical lenses to the field of ageing research, we aim to get a deeper understanding of how ageing and the losses associated with it appear through the lenses of the sociology of emotions and affect studies. Additionally, we link those perspectives to gerontological approaches and highlight how they might be enriched by including concepts that explicitly deal with emotions and affect. Through this reflexive exploration, we seek to renegotiate how the understanding of ageing in the social sciences is characterised by preconceptions about the associated emotional and affective processes, and we highlight the potential of theoretically sensitising existing gerontological perspectives with insights from the sociology of emotions and affect studies.