in regards to their level of happiness and/or ‘emotional well-being’. So, whilst there continues to be a small amount of research focused on the way that adolescents perform these emotions, this has been primarily focused on the creation of emotional scripts (Hochschild 1983; Dykas, Woodhouse, Cassidy and Waters 2007), which are primarily focused now on the hidden world of the adolescent and the space where feeling and thinking takes place (Forgas 1995). Access to the inner world of the child is challenging. Little, if any, research has focused on the adolescents themselves. How the adolescent performs has been assumed to be how they are feeling. It is not clear if this is the case or not. In this thesis it will be important to explore how their actions and performances match what they are internally feeling. If they do not match, then how does the adolescent reconcile these tensions, and what does this mean for their performance. But more than this is the need to gain an appreciation of what the adolescents understand about their emotions and the effect that they can have on their performance. It will be important to explore if they manage their emotions to influence situations and social exchanges; to question if they use emotions as a currency to access areas which they are normally restricted from. This will reveal if they see emotions as resource which they can access and mobilise, thereby manipulating the emotion to produce a desired and considered outcome and response. In other words, to see emotional performance as a way of demonstrating a level of emotional competence, thereby realising the power that emotional management can have when under their control. 1.4 The concept of emotional competence The concept of emotional competence is not new, however the way in which it is to be applied within this thesis is new. White (1959) defined it as the ‘the capacity to engage with a variable social-physical environment, resulting in growth and mastery for the individual’. It
in regards to their level of happiness and/or ‘emotional well-being’. So, whilst there continues to be a small amount of research focused on the way that adolescents perform these emotions, this has been primarily focused on the creation of emotional scripts (Hochschild 1983; Dykas, Woodhouse, Cassidy and Waters 2007), which are primarily focused now on the hidden world of the adolescent and the space where feeling and thinking takes place (Forgas 1995). Access to the inner world of the child is challenging. Little, if any, research has focused on the adolescents themselves. How the adolescent performs has been assumed to be how they are feeling. It is not clear if this is the case or not. In this thesis it will be important to explore how their actions and performances match what they are internally feeling. If they do not match, then how does the adolescent reconcile these tensions, and what does this mean for their performance. But more than this is the need to gain an appreciation of what the adolescents understand about their emotions and the effect that they can have on their performance. It will be important to explore if they manage their emotions to influence situations and social exchanges; to question if they use emotions as a currency to access areas which they are normally restricted from. This will reveal if they see emotions as resource which they can access and mobilise, thereby manipulating the emotion to produce a desired and considered outcome and response. In other words, to see emotional performance as a way of demonstrating a level of emotional competence, thereby realising the power that emotional management can have when under their control. 1.4 The concept of emotional competence The concept of emotional competence is not new, however the way in which it is to be applied within this thesis is new. White (1959) defined it as the ‘the capacity to engage with a variable social-physical environment, resulting in growth and mastery for the individual’. It
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