Emotions and the Body: Raising the Issues for Medical Sociology

Emotions lie at the juncture between mind and body, culture and biology and are crucial to our survival by their ‘signal function‘ in relation to danger. Yet despite their cultural significance, and the obvious implications for the study of health and illness in particular, social science research in this area has remained predominantly under the psychological rubric until very recently. Echoing an earlier call in this newsletter (Olesson 1990), this brief paper emphasises the importance of the sociology of emotions for medical sociology and relates these approaches to other highly significant and newly emerging realms of study; namely, the sociology of the body and pain.