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 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.