In the Preface, the author reflects on her early fascination with how people manage emotions, sparked by her experiences as a child of US Foreign Service parents. Observing diplomatic interactions, she questioned the authenticity of emotions and the boundary between genuine feelings and performed roles. As a graduate student, she was influenced by C. Wright Mills’s ideas on selling personality but felt something crucial was missing: the recognition of the active emotional labor involved.

The author’s curiosity led her to explore how emotions function as internal messengers, signaling our responses to the world around us. Inspired by Erving Goffman’s work on social behavior, she sought to understand how emotions are managed, especially in the context of jobs requiring emotional labor, like flight attendants and bill collectors. The text refers to the challenges that workers face to maintain a sense of self amid the demands of emotional performance, highlighting the tension between genuine feelings and the necessity to display “correct” emotions for a wage. Through her research, she aims to examine the broader emotional systems at play in both personal and professional domains.