Introduction

Most music lovers probably know the 1967 song by The Troggs “Love Is All Around,” later re-recorded, revived, and popularized by Scottish pop band Wet Wet Wet as part of the soundtrack for the 1994 box office success Four Weddings and a Funeral (starring Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell) True, in that movie love was in fact all around— even at the one funeral ceremony—and there is little doubt that love is indeed an important emotion in most people's lives. There are, however, many different emotions and emotional experiences that make their mark on human life: love, hate, regret, anger, joy, sadness, happiness, trust, shame, self-blame, contempt, and so on (too many emotions to list here). Although sometimes overlooked, ambivalence is indeed also one of them—but it is an emotion that we often, even within emotion research, tend to disregard, although it is in fact not all that uncommon.

“Ambivalence” is admittedly not a word often used in everyday vernacular, and whenever we do employ it, we seldom stop to think about what it actually means. Sometimes it seems to be almost used synonymously with some sort of indecisiveness or tergiversation, other times it is used in a more technical matter referring to situations characterized by double binds or a deep-seated uncertainty. Moreover, sometimes ambivalence is used to describe a personal situation, other times it captures more structurally determined conditions or consequences. Within social theory, the idea of ambivalence also appears every now and then, but as in everyday language often also in a rather undertheorized manner—it is there between the lines, mostly not explicated or sometimes even regarded as self-explanatory. In many studies, ambivalence is therefore often an implicit rather than an explicit concern or finding. However, ambivalence is, in fact, a phenomenon that should acquire the attention of most social theorists and sociologists, and a topic that should be subjected to a much more targeted treatment (theoretically and empirically), simply because ambivalence is part and parcel of so many different aspects and dimensions of what we call human or social life.