Managing Emotions, Intimacy, and Relationships in a Volunteer Search and Rescue Group

Abstract

In this article, the author examines interpersonal emotion management during crisis situations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a volunteer search and rescue group, she shows how rescuers managed victims' and families' intense emotions during searches and rescues, which led them to form unusually rapid and intimate bonds with these strangers. After the rescues, some victims and families sustained the newly intimate relationship with rescuers, repaying them with monetary donations and emotions like gratitude, while others terminated the relationship altogether. The author concludes by discussing the effects of interpersonal emotion management on victims' and families' selves and on their relationship with rescuers. She also extends the theoretical model of the socioemotional economy by incorporating the concept of interpersonal emotion management.