Triangular Emotional Fiscal System (TEFS)

The Triangular Emotional Fiscal System (TEFS) extends the East Asian Emotional Economy Model (EAEEM) by shifting the focus from family-specific emotional dynamics to the wider circulation of emotional burden across family, school, and workplace contexts. Rather than treating these domains as separate environments, TEFS argues that they form a connected system in which emotional expectations, obligations, and coping scripts are carried forward and reinforced over time. Within this triangular structure, individuals do not simply move from one setting to another. Emotional fiscal patterns learned in the family are reproduced in school and later intensified in workplace life, where endurance, self-suppression, and responsibility-taking continue to be rewarded. What appears to be “adaptation” in one context therefore becomes the basis for renewed extraction in the next. TEFS highlights how emotional burden is sustained not through a single relationship or institution, but through the cumulative alignment of multiple contexts. By making these cross-context linkages explicit, TEFS shows how emotional pressure becomes structurally persistent rather than situationally isolated. It provides the system-level foundation for later extensions of the framework, including the gendered parameterisation of emotional burden and its intergenerational transmission over time.