About Me

Seth Abrutyn is a Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, where he studies Sociological Theory, Youth Suicide and Mental Health, Emotions, Social Psychology, and Culture. His work has been published in journals such as American Sociological Review, Sociological Theory, Society and Mental Health, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, and Journal of Health and Social Behavior. He is the editor of Springer’s Handbook of Contemporary Theory and co-editor of Springer’s Handbook of Classical Theory, and is currently co-editor of Contexts magazine.
 
My current research works to answer this theoretical question within the context of youth suicide and suicide clusters. Taking a community-based, ethnographic approach, I examine the daily interactions of schools and small communities, focusing on what makes youth more or less likely to seek help from adults. This includes shedding light on the challenges schools face in balancing academic with socioemotional goals, how schools and communities respond to youth suicide in ways that stymie or foster suicidality, and thinking about ways schools can better adapt suicide prevention strategies to their daily routines to reduce costs and improve the safety net.
 
In addition to this, I have recently grown interested in incorporating interdisciplianry research on motivation, decision-making, and action. This is mostly an effort to bring empirical insights about affect and emotion into sociological explanations of behavior. To have a better conception of how wanting or liking works helps us understand how the social environment that shapes us facilitates or constrains these neurophysiological processes. For instance, sociology has a laundry list of concepts whose defintions often allude to or metaphorically include the notion of “pain,” like collective trauma or anomie. Instead of metaphors, I synthesize the research on social pain, or the negative affective response that mirrors physical pain but in response to rejection, exclusion, and isolation. My hope is that this sort of theorizing can provide new pathways for marrying the study of emotions to the study of other sociological interests like rationality, cognition, culture, and even inequality.