A Strategic Compromise: Universality, Interdisciplinarity, and the Case for Modal Emotions in History of Emotion Research

Abstract

Abstract Historians of emotion largely agree that their research can be usefully informed by interdisciplinary engagement with disciplines like psychology and neuroscience. There is, however, an immediate barrier to such interdisciplinary work: researchers in the affective sciences largely believe that human emotions are meaningfully universal, while historians of emotion overwhelmingly reject the concept of emotional universality. The current essay argues that, despite this fundamental difference, it is still possible for historians of emotion to learn from universalist affective science. This can be done, I suggest, by taking a cue from Klaus Scherer’s concept of ‘modal emotions’, which provides a roadmap for how historians of emotion might make a strategic compromise with universalist science – one that would allow them to access a much wider pool of interdisciplinary opportunity, but would not require them to sacrifice their anti-universalist beliefs. My paper proposes that emotion history will be better served by expanding the scope of its interdisciplinary borrowings, and offers a model for how this might be responsibly done.