Book Review: Michael Hviid Jacobsen: Emotions, Everyday Life and Sociology

Love is all around! But also trust, anger, dignity, compassion, excitement, envy, shyness, boredom, grief, laziness and all the emotions that permeate everyday life. With this consideration, Jacobsen invites us to consider and reflect upon not only the 'core' emotions - like joy, fear or sadness - that have been widely explored by the sociological literature, but also all the other emotions that, although still unexplored, are worthy of sociological exploration, as they are deeply embedded in our everyday life and experience. Our lives, indeed, do not just ‘include’ emotions; they are ‘defined by’ them (Solomon 2017, p. 10). We are constantly experiencing emotional feelings and sensations, whether we are aware of it or not. Despite the importance of emotions not only at a personal, but also at a social level, they have been almost ignored in sociological research for long. It is only from the mid-1970s that emotions started to be considered as an interesting topic of research by sociologist. This interest has remarkably grown in the recent decades, eventually becoming a well-established stream of research, the ‘sociology of emotions’. This volume contributes to this new and emerging research debate, in particular, it focuses on the role of a wide range of different emotions in everyday life.