Psychological Perspectives on Emotion in Groups

Abstract

Historians who study emotions in the cultural and intellectual context of eighteenth-century Britain confront many issues that also preoccupy psychologists of emotion. Historical topics that might attract the interest of psychologists include emotional communication in the eighteenth-century British public sphere, emotional reportage in eighteenth-century newspapers, the analysis of sympathy by philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the development of group identity through consumption of sentimental novels. These topics overlap subjects studied by cultural and social psychologists, such as the contagion of emotions from one person to another, the characterisation of the emotional climate of a culture at a particular point in history, the ways that emotions pervade groups, and the relation between sympathy and empathy. The purpose of this chapter is to share ideas and research from psychology that might pertain to the topics being addressed from the more humanities-based perspectives in this book.