History of emotions

Last updated

The history of emotions is a field of historical research concerned with human emotion, especially variations among cultures and historical periods in the experience and expression of emotions. Beginning in the 20th century with writers such as Lucien Febvre and Peter Gay, an expanding range of methodological approaches is being applied.

Contents

Scope

In the last decade,[ which? ] the history of emotions has developed into an increasing productive and intellectually stimulating area of historical research. Although there are precursors of the history of emotions - especially Febvre's Histoire des Sensibilités [1] or Gay's Psychohistory [2] - the field converges methodologically with newer historiographical approaches such as conceptual history, historical constructivism and the history of the body. [3]

Similar to the sociology of emotions or anthropology of emotions, the history of emotions is based on the assumption that not only the expression of feelings, but also the feelings themselves are learned. Culture and history are changing and so are feelings as well as their expression. The social relevance and potency of emotions is historically and culturally variable. In the view of many historians, emotion is, therefore, just as fundamental a category of history, as class, race or gender.

Methodology

A number of different methodological approaches have been discussed in recent[ when? ] years. Some historians of the emotions limit their research to the historical analysis of emotional norms and rules under the heading of emotionology. [4] Particularly in the recent past,[ when? ] however, the methodological spectrum of the history of emotions has expanded to include performative, constructivist and practice theory approaches. Currently fundamental methodological concepts include: emotives, [5] emotional habitus and emotional practice. [6] Additionally there are several terms that describe the different scope and binding effect of feeling cultures such as emotional community, [7] emotional regime, [8] and emotional style. [9] More recently,[ when? ] the history of emotions has engaged with recent social and cultural turns in the neurosciences, positing the history of emotions as a component part of a broader biocultural historicism. [10]

Bibliography

Introductions

Literature

Methodological discussions

Research centres and organizations

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emotion</span> Conscious subjective experience of humans

Emotions are physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, or creativity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wilhelm Wundt</span> German founder of psychology (1832–1920)

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor, one of the fathers of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person ever to call himself a psychologist.

Positive psychology is a field of psychological theory and research of optimal human functioning of people, groups, and institutions. It studies "positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions... it aims to improve quality of life."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Ekman</span> American psychologist (born 1934)

Paul Ekman is an American psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco who is a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. He was ranked 59th out of the 100 most cited psychologists of the twentieth century. Ekman conducted seminal research on the specific biological correlations of specific emotions, attempting to demonstrate the universality and discreteness of emotions in a Darwinian approach.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wilhelm Dilthey</span> German historian, psychologist, sociologist, student of hermeneutics, and philosopher (1833–1911)

Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karl Lamprecht</span> German historian (1856–1915)

Karl Gotthard Lamprecht was a German historian who specialized in German art and economic history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Stearns</span> American historian (born 1936)

Peter Nathaniel Stearns is a professor at George Mason University, where he was provost from January 1, 2000 to July 2014.

“Emotional expressions”, also called “emotives” are an effort by the speaker to offer an interpretation of something that is observable to no other actor. If emotions are feelings, emotives are the expressions of those feelings through the use of language, specifically through constructions that explicitly describe emotional states or attitudes..

Cross-cultural psychology is the scientific study of human behavior and mental processes, including both their variability and invariance, under diverse cultural conditions. Through expanding research methodologies to recognize cultural variance in behavior, language, and meaning it seeks to extend and develop psychology. Since psychology as an academic discipline was developed largely in North America and Europe, some psychologists became concerned that constructs and phenomena accepted as universal were not as invariant as previously assumed, especially since many attempts to replicate notable experiments in other cultures had varying success. Since there are questions as to whether theories dealing with central themes, such as affect, cognition, conceptions of the self, and issues such as psychopathology, anxiety, and depression, may lack external validity when "exported" to other cultural contexts, cross-cultural psychology re-examines them using methodologies designed to factor in cultural differences so as to account for cultural variance. Some critics have pointed to methodological flaws in cross-cultural psychological research, and claim that serious shortcomings in the theoretical and methodological bases used impede, rather than help the scientific search for universal principles in psychology. Cross-cultural psychologists are turning more to the study of how differences (variance) occur, rather than searching for universals in the style of physics or chemistry.

According to some theories, emotions are universal phenomena, albeit affected by culture. Emotions are "internal phenomena that can, but do not always, make themselves observable through expression and behavior". While some emotions are universal and are experienced in similar ways as a reaction to similar events across all cultures, other emotions show considerable cultural differences in their antecedent events, the way they are experienced, the reactions they provoke and the way they are perceived by the surrounding society. According to other theories, termed social constructionist, emotions are more deeply culturally influenced. The components of emotions are universal, but the patterns are social constructions. Some also theorize that culture is affected by the emotions of the people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eva Illouz</span> Israeli sociologist

Eva Illouz is a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. She was the first woman president of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Horst Bredekamp</span> German art historian

Horst Bredekamp is a German art historian and visual historian.

Neurohistory is an interdisciplinary approach to history that leverages advances in neuroscience to tell new kinds of stories about the past, but especially of deep history. This is achieved by incorporating the advances in neurosciences into historiographical theory and methodology in the attempt to reconstruct the past It was first proposed by Harvard professor Daniel Lord Smail in his work and it offers historians a way to engage critically with the implicit folk psychologies in the interpretation of evidence.

Emotional geography is a subtopic within human geography, more specifically cultural geography, which applies psychological theories of emotion. It is an interdisciplinary field relating emotions, geographic places and their contextual environments. These subjective feelings can be applied to individual and social contexts. Emotional geography specifically focuses on how human emotions relate to, or affect, the environment around them.

Vulnerability refers to "the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally." The understanding of social and environmental vulnerability, as a methodological approach, involves the analysis of the risks and assets of disadvantaged groups, such as the elderly. The approach of vulnerability in itself brings great expectations of social policy and gerontological planning. Types of vulnerability include social, cognitive, environmental, emotional or military.

Gerhard Vinken is a German art historian and heritage conservationist.

Historical anthropology is a historiographical movement which applies methodologies and objectives from social and cultural anthropology to the study of historical societies. Like most such movements, it is understood in different ways by different scholars, and to some may be synonymous with the history of mentalities, cultural history, ethnohistory, microhistory, history from below or Alltagsgeschichte. Anthropologists whose work has been particularly inspirational to historical anthropology include Emile Durkheim, Clifford Geertz, Arnold van Gennep, Jack Goody, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss and Victor Turner.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jan Plamper</span> German professor of history (1970–2023)

Jan Plamper was a German professor of history at the University of Limerick. His research interests included Russian history, the history of emotions, sensory history, and the history of migration.

Barbara H. Rosenwein, née Herstein is an American historian who is professor emerita of history at Loyola University Chicago. Rosenwein is an expert in medieval history, on which she has written a number of influential works.

Kerstin Brückweh is a historian with a focus on German and British modern and contemporary history. She is a professor in economic and social history at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences and Technology in Berlin, Germany.

References

  1. ↑ Lucien Febvre, La sensibilité et l’histoire. Comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefois?, in: Annales d’histoire sociale 3 (1941), p. 5-20.
  2. ↑ See Peter Gay’s main work: The Bourgeois Experience. Victoria to Freud, 5 volumes, New York 1984-1998.
  3. ↑ On the precursors of the history of the emotions see: Jan Plamper, Geschichte und Gefühl. Grundlagen der Emotionsgeschichte, München: Siedler 2012, p. 53-72.
  4. ↑ The term emotionology can be traced back to: Peter N. Stearns / Carol Z. Stearns, Emotionology. Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards, in: The American Historical Review 90, 4 (1985), p. 813-830 and Rom Harré (ed.), The Social Construction of Emotion, Oxford 1986.
  5. ↑ William M. Reddy, Against Constructionism. The Historical Ethnography of Emotions, in: Current Anthropology 38,3 (1997), p. 327-351.
  6. ↑ See: Monique Scheer, Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion, in: History and Theory 51, no. 2 (May 2012), p. 193-220.
  7. ↑ Barbara H. Rosenwein, Worrying about Emotions in History, in: The American Historical Review 107, 3 (2002), p. 821-845.
  8. ↑ William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, Cambridge 2001.
  9. ↑ For a discussion on different concepts, see Benno Gammerl, Emotional Styles - Concepts and Challenges, in: Rethinking History 16, 2 (2012), p. 161-175.
  10. ↑ Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.
  11. ↑ "Emotionsgeschicte - ein Anfang mit Folgen" (PDF). Hsozkult.geschite.hu-berlin.de. Archived from the original (PDF) on 31 January 2016. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
  12. ↑ Barbara H. Rosenwein. "Problems and Methods in the history of Emotions" (PDF). Passionsincontext.de. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
  13. ↑ "SEALS - Server für digitalisierte Zeitschriften". retro.seals.ch. Archived from the original on 7 April 2013. Retrieved 2 February 2022.
  14. ↑ Rosenwein, Barbara H.; Reddy, William M.; Plamper, Jan; Livingston, Julie; Lean, Eugenia; Eustace, Nicole (2012). "TAHR Conversions : The Historical Study of Emotions". The American Historical Review. 117 (5): 1487–1531. doi:10.1093/ahr/117.5.1487.
  15. ↑ "ACCESS | Amsterdam Centre for Cross-Disciplinary Emotions and Senses Studies". Access-emotionsandsenses.nl. Retrieved 2015-02-22.
  16. ↑ "Home | ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion". Historyofemotions.org.au. Archived from the original on 2012-09-20. Retrieved 2015-02-22.
  17. ↑ "History of Emotions | Max Planck Institute for Human Development". Mpib-berlin.mpg.de. Archived from the original on 2015-05-05. Retrieved 2015-02-22.
  18. ↑ "The North American Chapter on the History of Emotion". nachemotion.com. Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  19. ↑ "The Centre for the History of the Emotions, Queen Mary, University of London". Qmul.ac.uk. Retrieved 2015-02-22.
  20. ↑ "Les émotions au Moyen Âge, carnet d'EMMA". Emma.hypotheses.org. Retrieved 2015-02-22.
  21. ↑ "CHEP : An International Network for the Cultural History of Emotions in Premodernity". Archived from the original on November 5, 2012. Retrieved June 4, 2015.
  22. ↑ "Welcome - School of Archaeology - University of Oxford". Emotions.classics.ox.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 2015-02-22. Retrieved 2015-02-22.
  23. ↑ "Historia cultural del conocimiento. Discursos, prácticas, representaciones | Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales". Cchs.csic.es. Archived from the original on 2010-06-07. Retrieved 2015-02-22.
  24. ↑ "Languages of Emotion: Startseite". Languages-of-emotion.de. 2011-05-28. Retrieved 2015-02-22.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.