History Of Emotions Research Articles

History Looks Forward: Interdisciplinarity and Critical Emotion Research

The history of emotions has become a thriving focus within the discipline of history, but it has in the process gained a critical purchase that makes it relevant for other disciplines concerned with emotion research. The history of emotions is entangled with the history of the body and brain, and with cultural and political history. It is interested in the how and why of emotion change; with the questions of power and authority behind cultural scripts of expression, conceptual usages, and emotional practices. This work has reached a level of maturity and sophistication in its theoretical and methodological orientation, and in its sheer quantity of empirical research, that it contributes to emotion knowledge within the broad framework of emotion research.

The Unavoidable Intentionality of Affect: The History of Emotions and the Neurosciences of the Present Day

The “problem of emotions,” that is, that many of them are both meaningful and corporeal, has yet to be resolved. Western thinkers, from Augustine to Descartes to Zajonc, have handled this problem by employing various forms of mind–body dualism. Some psychologists and neuroscientists since the 1970s have avoided it by talking about cognitive and emotional “processing,” using a terminology borrowed from computer science that nullifies the meaningful or intentional character of both thought and emotion. Outside the Western-influenced contexts, emotion and thought are not seen as distinct kinds of things. Here a solution of sorts is proposed by thinking of emotional expression as a dynamic activity that declares and stirs emotions at the same time. As such, its dynamism may help historians to understand the dramatic changes and trends they investigate.

Emotional Rescue: The Emotional Turn in the Study of History

For the last twenty years, an “emotional turn” in the study of history has been gathering momentum, building on other disciplines. Fifty years ago, neuroscientists started to trace brain activity that linked reason and emotion. Psychologists—early pioneers in the study of emotions—had already begun investigating the power and universality of emotional drivers. Social scientists took notice first, and historians have followed. The upshot to this trajectory is that the study of emotions in history has become fundamentally interdisciplinary; as a result, historians have become the new pathbreakers.

Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy. Medieval Sensibilities: A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages.

Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy. Medieval Sensibilities: A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages.

TOWARD A MULTIDIRECTIONAL FUTURE OF HISTORIOGRAPHY: GLOBALITY, INTERDISCIPLINARITY, AND POSTHUMANITY

ABSTRACTCompared with the survey offered in the New Perspectives on Historical Writing nearly three decades earlier, historical practices around the world today have witnessed a remarkable change on several fronts. First, marked expansions occurred in such fields as gender history, history of memory, history of knowledge, and visual history, resulting in their noticeable transformation (for example, “gender history” to “history of sexuality” and “visual history” to “history of things”). Second, by exploring and presenting the “other(s)” in modern historiography, new areas are opened up in postcolonial history, global history, emotions history, and so on, which have prompted historians to reconceptualize their notions of time and space. Third, menacing global climate change and notable breakthroughs in various areas of modern technology have exerted an unprecedented impact on historical writing, exemplified by the new developments in environmental history, neurohistory, digital history, and animal history. Science and technology help historians to rejuvenate their research methodology and teaching pedagogy, but they have also demanded that historians acquire a better understanding of the interaction and co‐evolution of humans and nonhumans in history, or to take the nonanthropocentric and nonanthropomorphic approach. In sum, what lies ahead for historians and history students today is a multidirectional future, which is at once an opportunity and a challenge.

A NEUTRALIZAÇÃO DO MEDO NA GESTÃO DE CONFLITOS E O PAPEL DO ADVOGADO NESSA GESTÃO

A própria história relata inúmeros conflitos do homem contra seu semelhante, e isso demonstra o quanto o conflito faz parte do ser humano. Entretanto, há um ponto gerador desse conflito: o medo. É preciso pensar em métodos de solução de conflitos onde se leve em conta o histórico emocional das partes envolvidas com base no medo e, a partir daí, gerir o conflito.

Domestic workers’ experiences of motherhood in mid-twentieth-century Buenos Aires

ABSTRACT This article advances the burgeoning field of the history of emotions by discussing not only how parents expressed love for their children but also how they experienced such emotions, and what impact working conditions had on those experiences. Specifically, it addresses domestic workers’ experience of maternal love in mid-twentieth-century century Buenos Aires, focusing on those who placed their children under institutional care. The files analyzed in this article document workers’ lives beyond the workplace. Moreover, they allow us to trace the movements of workers over time and hear the workers give voice to their experiences. They further permit us to make an affective turn in labor history, showing the constraints imposed on workers by the particularities of their employment as well as their agency and the strategies they developed to confront those limitations.

Frogs and Feeling Communities: A Study in History of Emotions and Environmental History

Abstract This article offers an overview of some approaches from the history of emotions that environmental historians could employ in order to sharpen engagement with emotion, and applies some of these approaches to a long history of human-frog interactions, by way of example. We propose that emotions have played a key role in the constitution of human communities, as well as enabling or inhibiting particular kinds of human thoughts and actions in relation with the living planet. In tracing human-frog relations over time we tease apart the complex historic relationships between cultural frameworks, scientific expectations and conventions, and the texts and images emerging from these contexts, which operate explicitly or implicitly to train and discipline the emotional selves of human adults and children.

La inmigración como un viaje emocional. Una reflexión a partir del caso de la Argentina entre fines del siglo XIX y al Segunda Posguerra

Este trabajo recorre parte de la historiografía argentina de la inmigración para reflexionar sobre una posible lectura del fenómeno que impactó al país y cambió su anatomía entre fines del siglo XIX y los años 1950, a partir del aporte conceptual de la historia de las emociones. Aunque las emociones están implícitas en la interpretación del grueso de los estudios que abordan desde múltiples ángulos el problema inmigratorio, no han sido utilizadas como una categoría de análisis. Transitar por ese camino de indagación contribuiría a complejizar el cuadro de la experiencia migratoria a nivel individual/familiar y a develar las prescripciones que regulaban la expresión y las prácticas emocionales de los actores que convergieron en aquel singular escenario: los inmigrantes, las clases dirigentes y los argentinos.

Screen confessions: The test case of “breaking the silence”

AbstractThe present paper focuses on the phenomenon of “screen confessions” (the term was chosen to allude to Freud's “screen memories”): perpetrators' voluntary confessional texts which create false presentation of a coherent link between the speakers and their deeds—while in fact using multiple sophisticated mechanisms in order to undermine this link. The main hypothesis is that screen confessions are created through the perpetrator's use of a double language which dissociates between overt and hidden contents, and which rewrites factual and emotional history alike. The duplicity of this language is expressed through the massive use of screening mechanisms, such as the mechanical use of military or official rhetoric; the heavy use of passive rather than active constructions; the creation of a false moral hierarchy and a false causality, and the displacement of the position of the victim to the perpetrator him or herself. Seven hundred and ten testimonies of Israeli army veterans from the archive of “Breaking the Silence” (an organization of veteran combatants who have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories) were qualitatively analyzed by two researchers, focusing on the use of psycho‐linguistic defense mechanisms. The analysis validated, as demonstrated through a close reading of five testimonial vignettes, the effectiveness of deploying psycho‐linguistic‐defense mechanisms in differentiating between screen confessions versus transformative confessions.

EMOTION AND ITS RELEVANCE TO THE POLEMIC BETWEEN REFORMED AND PENTECOSTAL/ CHARISMATIC

The relevance of emotions in Christian worship have become an important issue particularly when polemic on this topic emerges between Reformed and Pentecostal/Charismatic Christians. In this paper, I strive to study and analyze the emotions both in history and in recent study to find out the concept and meaning of that term in the hope that this research contributes to both Reformed and Pentecostal/Charismatic toward a better worship in the future. I start with presenting the polemic between Reformed and Pentecostal/Charismatic, then describing the concept and meaning of the emotions in history and in recent research, and finally, making proposals on how emotions to be used in Christian worship.
 KEYWORDS: Emotions, history of emotions, Reformed, Pentecostal/Charismatic, Christian worship

The rhetoric of paintings; the Balinese "Malat" and the prospect of a history of Balinese ideas, imaginings and emotions

Balinese paintings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shed light on how painters and their works speak to their viewers both about how Balinese in this period knew, imagined, thought, and felt about the world in which they lived, and about the visual representation and communication of these ideas, imaginings, and feelings through the medium of narrative paintings. In this paper I discuss five Balinese paintings of the Malat . The first two illustrate the episode in which Raden Misa Prabangsa stabs Raden Ino Nusapati’s horse. The third and fourth paintings illustrate Prabu Melayu’s rescue of his sister Princess Rangkesari of Daha from the court of the King of Lasem, and the fifth, the reuniting of Princess Rangkesari with her parents, the King and Queen of Daha. However, before I consider the paintings, I discuss briefly a number of historiographical issues concerning the reception of ideas, imaginings, and feelings conveyed in these five narrative paintings of the Malat and which need to be kept in mind when assessing interpretations of them.

F. W. Albrecht, Assimilation Policy and the Education of Aboriginal Girls in Central Australia: Overcoming Disciplinary Decadence in Australian History

ABSTRACTThis article explores the work of Lutheran missionary F. W. Albrecht, who in the decades following the Second World War instituted a privately funded school scheme to provide formal education to Aboriginal children in central Australia. The scheme that Albrecht devised targeted “half-caste” girls living at cattle stations located within the orbit of the Finke River Mission—historically significant because, unlike the child removal commonly associated with the Stolen Generations, it relied on the consent of Aboriginal parents and encouraged the girls to maintain links to and pride in their Aboriginal cultural heritage. As part of a larger study of F. W. Albrecht and the Aboriginal women who were subject to his education scheme, this article discusses the in loco parentis–style relationship that existed between Albrecht and one of his Aboriginal students. By outlining the emotional content of this history, as researchers (one who claims an Indigenous identity position and one who does not) we argue that an ethical engagement with emotions in history is necessary to avoid what Lewis Gordon has termed “disciplinary decadence”.

What, if Anything, Can the History of Emotions Learn from the Neurosciences?

The last decade has seen a wave of scholarship on both the history of emotions and the affective and social neurosciences. Both disciplines promote the view that emotions serve partly cognitive and goal-driven functions and are thus susceptible to change. Differences are, however, marked in understanding the nature of the change in question. Is it rooted in social constructivism or neuroplasticity? Are these two paradigms mutually exclusive or compatible? Is it even possible or intellectually sound to utilize ‘laboratory-produced’ and isolated data in historical studies? Nevertheless, in light of recent research on the connections between the history of emotions and the neurosciences the article suggests that the interplay between the historical and brain-scientific knowledge may be more fruitful than has previously been understood. Thus far the implications of the critical and social brain sciences for the history of emotions remain to be worked out. This article proposes an intellectual move from linguistically defined constructivism towards a more corporeal understanding of emotions with a constructivist element. This leads us theoretically towards an understanding of emotions as biocultural, historically changing experiences and intellectual concepts, which, however, possess certain transcultural continuities. The article highlights the intrinsic and dynamic relationship between pan-human characteristics and cultural, normative and temporal variance in emotions. However, the article explores the methodological difficulties and dangers of applying specific brain-scientific data to historical study. The difficulty arises mainly from the academic distance between the history of emotions and the neurosciences.

Early Modern Ottoman Politics of Emotion: What Has Love Got to Do With It?

Despite a growing interest worldwide in the history of emotions, the topic has attracted the attention of scholars of Ottoman history only recently. In an attempt to understand the motivations underlying political undertakings, this article explores emotions, with a specific focus on mahabbet (love) and merhamet (compassion). It examines the social meaning attached to and the cultural importance of love and compassion in early modern Ottoman political language. I claim that as a socially constructed and political emotion, compassion was historically and culturally significant, serving as a tool to formulate political relations of domination and subordination.

Book Review: Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, Medieval Sensibilities: A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages

Book Review: Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, <i>Medieval Sensibilities: A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages</i>

The Odor of Disgust: Contemplating the Dark Side of 20th-Century Cancer History

This article explores how historians of emotions and historians of the senses can collaborate to write a history of emotional experience that takes seriously the corporeality of emotions. It investigates how smell, feelings of disgust, and the moral judgments associated with these feelings were interrelated in 20th-century German cancer history. It demonstrates that this complex decisively shaped the emotional experiences of cancer patients. Uncovering this dynamic is only possible by conjoining the history of emotions with a more expanded version of the history of the senses. The combination reveals that the “odor of disgust” was not an ahistorical constant, but was, both in its parts and as a whole, subject to considerable shifts.

Expressing friendship in letters: Conventionality and sincerity in the multilingual correspondence of nineteenth-century Catholic churchmen

AbstractThe relationship between the polite and conventional nature of friendly language and the sincerity of the writer’s feelings is a central topic in linguistic and historical research on friendship in epistolary communication. This relationship can be understood in the context of the emotional values and conventionalised emotional practices that characterise the writer’s emotional community.The language of friendship has a significant role in the history of letter writing in religious communities. However, epistolary and emotional practices among religious groups in the modern era remain a rather unexplored filed of research. In this regard, the nineteenth century is of particular interest, as it saw the consolidation of sincerity as a central notion in European standards of letter writing.Bringing together historical pragmatics and the history of emotions, this paper describes the forms and functions of sincerity in the negotiation of friendships between nineteenth-century Catholic churchmen. The article analyses a corpus of letters in Italian and Spanish from the multilingual correspondence of European Benedictine missionaries in Australia between the 1850s and the 1890s. The results of the analysis show that sincerity and emotional self-disclosure, while dependent on the pragmatic conventions of letter writing, belonged to cross-linguistic cultural scripts typical of religious communities.

Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings About Technology, From the Telegraph to Twitter by Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt

Reviewed by: Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings About Technology, From the Telegraph to Twitter by Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt Martina Hessler (bio) Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings About Technology, From the Telegraph to Twitter By Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. 464. The history of emotions is not an established field of research within the history of technology. Even though groundbreaking works have analyzed emotions toward technology, such as David Nye's American Technological Sublime (MIT Press, 1996) or Spencer Weart's Nuclear Fear (Harvard University Press, 2009), this is a rare focus. However, Luke Fernandez and Susan Matt's book demonstrates what a promising field of research this can be. Their starting point is observing a new American emotional style in the digital age. The authors refer to common contemporary statements about digital media, such as Facebook adding to loneliness or social media encouraging [End Page 1222] narcissism. They juxtapose such statements with a historical study that traces the changes in emotions since the eighteenth century. In doing so, they also demonstrate the importance of a historical contextualization of the digital present. In six chapters, they offer a thorough analysis of the history of six feelings: narcissism, loneliness, boredom, attention, awe, and anger. The book uses a wide array of sources: nineteenth and twentieth century diaries, letters, memoirs, and advertisements; psychological and sociological studies from the same period; and fifty-five interviews conducted between 2014 and 2018 to capture contemporary self-descriptions of the American emotional world. These interviews represent a small sample with predictable findings, but bring the study to the present day. In the introduction, the authors briefly outline the state of research in the history of emotions. Further, they refer to the basic consensus of the history of emotions: first, emotions have a history and are changeable; secondly, they are not purely biological, but also culturally shaped. The authors do not mention debates about different approaches, define terms, or provide conceptual considerations on the relationship between technology and emotions, which would have been useful for historians of technology. The aim of the book, however, is to understand a new American emotional style. Briefly and somewhat simplified, the authors summarize their core thesis: "Americans' emotional lives have changed as their society, culture, and technologies have changed. Today many are less humble about themselves and their powers and also less awed by the world around them. They expect constant stimulation, connection, affirmation, and activity, and they are disappointed when these expectations go unmet. This new conception of self breeds a sense of power and also a sense of disappointment" (p. 15). Throughout the book, Fernandez and Matt give voice to different social groups, revealing a variety of norms and experiences of emotions, while effectively describing changes in the broader patterns described in their summary. Interestingly, Fernandez and Matt describe the early twentieth century as a time of change for each emotion, with the interplay of all six emotions as central to the thesis of a new American emotional style. Only one chapter can be examined here. In the chapter on loneliness, the authors trace changing norms and experiences in a multifaceted way. People suffered from loneliness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well, illustrated by impressive quotes from slaves and workers. However, loneliness was regarded as a part of the human condition; it had to be endured. Loneliness was also considered a divine test, idealized by an individualistic ideology. In the twentieth century, the evaluation of loneliness began to change. It was no longer seen as something to passively endure, but something to actively fight. Around 1900, Lonely Clubs or Less Lonely Leagues emerged in cities. Letters had already been used to maintain social relationships [End Page 1223] from a distance and alleviate feelings of loneliness. Companies advertised radio and telephone as means of combating loneliness. According to the industry's message, loneliness could be fought with technology. In the course of the twentieth century, the negative view of loneliness increased. The term "loner" emerged, and the ability to endure loneliness decreased. Digital media and the Internet were able to tie in seamlessly, and alleviated loneliness...

Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion ed. by Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker

Reviewed by: Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion ed. by Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker Jennifer Sisk Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker, eds., Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. x, 249. isbn: 978-1-108-47196-1 (cloth), isbn: 978-1-108-67247-4 (e-book). $99.99 (cloth), $80.00 (e-book). This collection of essays offers sophisticated interpretations of medieval texts that foreground what the editors call the 'necessary intersectionality' (p. 2) of traditional histories of emotion, contemporary affect studies, and historicist approaches to literature. This orientation positions Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion to make valuable interventions in the scholarly realms of both medieval studies and affect studies. The volume prioritizes secular contexts, thus offering a corrective to the disproportionately large place affective piety has held for medievalists in histories of emotion. In its attention to premodern texts, the volume likewise offers a corrective to the insistent 'presentism' (p. 3) of affect studies by demonstrating again and again that medieval texts can and do represent, imply, and urge intensities of feeling that exceed culturally legible emotions. Moreover, the volume demonstrates the necessary ways that affect studies and histories of emotion must come together in any effort adequately to address the range of embodied experience we call feeling. The eight essays featured in the volume share a commitment to this work but contribute to it in refreshingly varied ways. Stephanie Trigg's 'Weeping Like a Beaten Child: Figurative Language and the Emotions in Chaucer and Malory' explores the polysemous potential of proverbial expressions by considering how the same figure of speech is used by two medieval authors to generate radically different emotional responses. Patricia DeMarco, in 'Imagining Jewish Affect in the Siege of Jerusalem' examines the text's suggestion that male aristocratic Christians in the religious wars of the Middle Ages secured their difference from Jews through the careful regulation of affect. Holly Crocker's 'Engendering Affect in Hoccleve's Series' likewise considers the regulation of affect, but from the vantage point of an individual subject's construction of masculine identity. In 'Becoming One Flesh, Inhabiting Two Genders: Ugly Feelings and Blocked Emotion in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale,' Glenn Burger reads Chaucer's text against the background of conduct literature and the changing subject positions marriage offered to husbands and wives in late medieval England to show how the text invites readers to tap into 'subaltern, blocked emotions' (p. 99) and to stand, empathetically and affectively, 'beside the Wife' (p. 95), uneasily in between the pressures of both tradition and innovation. Brantley Bryant turns to manorial bookkeeping in 'Accounting for Affect in the Reeve's Tale' to argue that the [End Page 122] tale shares with manorial texts an interest in the affective experience of surveillance and accounting systems that quantify and objectify all things, including people. Sarah Salih's 'Affect Machines' considers how Hector's tomb in Lydgate's Troy Book generates affect in viewers, extrapolating more broadly to consider the affective work of objects in contexts of worship and thus the usefulness of descriptions of pagan devotional practices in the image wars of the later Middle Ages. In 'Witnessing and Legal Affect in the York Trial Plays,' Emma Lipton offers an intervention in the study of medieval religious drama by describing what she calls 'legal affect' (p. 158), through which we can best understand the affective work of the plays, since viewers' engagement with the plays resembles the engagement of witnesses to a trial in late medieval England, who were subject not only to individual feeling but also to socially generated emotions. Finally, Anke Bernau's 'Affecting Forms: Theorizing with the Palis of Honoure' argues that Gavin Douglas's notorious lists effectively connote affective intensities experienced by his dreamer, whose successful submission to poetic authority only leads to an ultimate goal that carries a moral imperative poetically limiting in its absoluteness. The volume's Afterword, by Anthony Bale, not only wraps up this diverse yet topically focused collection but also counts as a contribution in its own right, as it explores what we can learn about medieval affect and...