Tag Archives: emotions

CfP: History of Emotions in the Modern Period

Call for Papers,

History of Psychology invites submissions for a special issue on the history of emotions in the modern period.

The relatively new specialization of the history of the emotions has revealed that emotion, felt experience, and expression have played a key role in culture, society, and politics. In the history of science, however, interest in the emotions has been more muted. This special issue will focus on the exploration of emotion theory and practice in the human sciences in the modern period – roughly from the late 18thcentury to today.

This special issue will address the following themes, among others. Was there a particular historical moment in which interest in emotions in the sciences, broadly construed, increased? While some historians situate heightened study of the emotions in the sciences in the 1960s, others point to a surge in interest in emotions after World War II. But we can also go back to William James’s 1884 influential theory of emotion that stimulated intense debate; or to the 1910s, when Walter Cannon experimented on the physiological concomitants of emotion; or to the early 1920s, when unorthodox psychoanalysts Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Rank raised emotional understanding to a central place in psychoanalysis. More recently, studies in the new discipline of social neuroscience have contributed to the ever-growing literature on emotion and the brain.

Can we discover the roots of the academy’s recent turn to the emotions in older traditions that have not yet received their due? Might historical investigations shed light on contemporary debates on emotion including the existence, or not, of a set of universal, basic emotions, or whether emotion is primarily a bodily affect or a cognitive response?

As the study of emotion has not been confined to any one discipline, we welcome submissions on the history of psychology, psychotherapy, neuroscience, psychophysiology, social work or other relevant fields.

The submission deadline is March 1, 2019.

The main text of each manuscript, exclusive of ?gures, tables, references, or appendices, should not exceed 35 double-spaced pages (approximately 7,500 words). Initial inquiries regarding the special issue may be sent to the guest editor, Susan Lanzoni <smlanzoni@gmail.com>or the regular editor, Nadine Weidman <hop.editor@icloud.com>.

Papers should be submitted through the History of Psychology Manuscript Submission Portal with a cover letter indicating that the paper is to be considered for the special issue. Please see the Instructions to Authors information located on the History of Psychology website.

Ruth Leys’s The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique

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 Ruth Leys’s just published The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique is sure to interest AHP readers. Leys explores twentieth century efforts to understand emotions, analyzing the work of psychologists like Silvan Tomkins, Paul Ekman, and Richard Lazarus. The book is described as follows:
In recent years, emotions have become a major, vibrant topic of research not merely in the biological and psychological sciences but throughout a wide swath of the humanities and social sciences as well. Yet, surprisingly, there is still no consensus on their basic nature or workings.

Ruth Leys’s brilliant, much anticipated history, therefore, is a story of controversy and disagreement. The Ascent of Affect focuses on the post–World War II period, when interest in emotions as an object of study began to revive. Leys analyzes the ongoing debate over how to understand emotions, paying particular attention to the continual conflict between camps that argue for the intentionality or meaning of emotions but have trouble explaining their presence in non-human animals and those that argue for the universality of emotions but struggle when the question turns to meaning. Addressing the work of key figures from across the spectrum, considering the potentially misleading appeal of neuroscience for those working in the humanities, and bringing her story fully up to date by taking in the latest debates, Leys presents here the most thorough analysis available of how we have tried to think about how we feel.

History of the Human Sciences Special Issue: Psychology and its Publics

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It is my pleasure to direct AHP readers to a just released special issue of History of the Human Science on Psychology and its Publics, guest edited by Michael Pettit and myself. The issue includes articles tackling a diverse array of topics on psychology’s relationship with the public, including: the public psychology of sentimentalism and the guillotine during the French Revolution; the construction of an attitudinal public in concert with the development of questionnaires; the dissemination of Albert Ellis’s rational therapy via popular media forms; the public’s interaction with psychological ideas via the graphic novel Watchmen and its queer history; the function of sexual assault surveys in structuring rape’s ontology and politicizing rape as a social issue; and consideration of the ontology of the public through the lens of deliberative public opinion. Thanks to all our contributors for their wonderful and thought provoking work!

In advance of the issue’s release I was also interviewed about the rationale and aims of the special issue by History of the Human Sciences editor-in-chief Felicity Callard. Read that interview in full here.

Full titles, authors, and abstracts for the pieces in the special issue follow below.

“Psychology and its publics,” by Michael Pettit and Jacy L. Young. Abstract:

This paper introduces the special issue dedicated to ‘Psychology and its Publics’. The question of the relationship between psychologists and the wider public has been a central matter of concern to the historiography of psychology. Where critical historians tend to assume a pliant audience, eager to adopt psychological categories, psychologists themselves often complain about the public misunderstanding of them. Ironically, both accounts share a flattened understanding of the public. We turn to research on the public understanding of science (PUS), the public engagement with science (PES) and communications studies to develop a rich account of the circuitry that ties together psychological experts and their subjects.

“The unfailing machine: Mechanical arts, sentimental publics and the guillotine in revolutionary France,” by Edward Jones-Imhotep. Abstract:

This article explores how the pre-eminent public psychology of the French Revolution – sentimentalism – shaped the necessity, understanding and construction of its most iconic public machine. The guillotine provided a solution to the problem of public executions in an age of both sentiment and reason. It was designed to rationalize punishment and make it more humane; but it was also designed to guard against the psychological effects of older, more variable and unpredictable methods of public execution on a sentimental public. That public, contemporaries argued, required executions performed by an unfailing technology. Rather than focus on the role of the guillotine after 1793, the article explores how the implacable mechanical action that helped produce the Reign of Terror and multiply the cadavers of medical science was demanded by the guillotine’s origins as a sentimental machine.

“Numbering the mind: Questionnaires and the attitudinal public,” by Jacy L. Young. Abstract: Continue reading History of the Human Sciences Special Issue: Psychology and its Publics →

New HHS: Brainwashing, Scientific Expertise and the Politics of Emotion, & More!

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The July 2017 issue of History of the Human Sciences is now online. Articles in this issue explore cinematic representations of brainwashing, scientific expertise and the politics of emotion, and more. Full details below.

“Brainwashing the cybernetic spectator: The Ipcress File, 1960s cinematic spectacle and the sciences of mind,” by Marcia Holmes. Abstract:

This article argues that the mid-1960s saw a dramatic shift in how ‘brainwashing’ was popularly imagined, reflecting Anglo-American developments in the sciences of mind as well as shifts in mass media culture. The 1965 British film The Ipcress File (dir. Sidney J. Furie, starr. Michael Caine) provides a rich case for exploring these interconnections between mind control, mind science and media, as it exemplifies the era’s innovations for depicting ‘brainwashing’ on screen: the film’s protagonist is subjected to flashing lights and electronic music, pulsating to the ‘rhythm of brainwaves’. This article describes the making of The Ipcress File’s brainwashing sequence and shows how its quest for cinematic spectacle drew on developments in cybernetic science, multimedia design and modernist architecture (developments that were also influencing the 1960s psychedelic counter-culture). I argue that often interposed between the disparate endeavours of 1960s mind control, psychological science and media was a vision of the human mind as a ‘cybernetic spectator’: a subject who scrutinizes how media and other demands on her sensory perception can affect consciousness, and seeks to consciously participate in this mental conditioning and guide its effects.

“Scientific expertise and the politics of emotions in the 1902 trial of Giuseppe Musolino,” by Daphne Rozenblatt. Abstract: Continue reading New HHS: Brainwashing, Scientific Expertise and the Politics of Emotion, & More! →

New History of Psychiatry: LSD, Madhouses, Psychiatric Semiology…

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The June 2016 issue of History of Psychiatry is now online. Articles in this issue explore psychiatric semiology, the German Research Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, madness in novelist Muriel Spark’s work, LSD as treatment in Denmark, the DSM and learning disabilities, Joseph Mason’s madhouse, and the work of Max Scheler. Full titles, authors, and abstracts follow below.

“The emergence of psychiatric semiology during the Age of Revolution: evolving concepts of ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’,” by Diego Enrique Londoño and Professor Tom Dening. The abstract reads,

This article addresses some important questions in psychiatric semiology. The concept of a sign is crucial in psychiatry. How do signs emerge, and what gives them validity and legitimacy? What are the boundaries of ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ behaviour and mental experiences? To address these issues, we analyse the characteristics and rules that govern semiological signs and clinical elements. We examine ‘normality’ from the perspective of Georges Canguilehm and compare the differences of ‘normal’ in physiology and psychiatry. We then examine the history and the philosophical, linguistic and medical-psychiatric origins of semiology during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the Age of Revolution). The field of rhetoric and oratory has emphasized the importance of passions, emotions and language as applied to signs of madness. Another perspective on semiology, provided by Michel Foucault, lays stress on the concept of ‘instinct’ and the axis of voluntary-involuntary behaviour. Finally, we analyse how statistics and eugenics have played an important role in our current conceptualization of the norm and therefore the scientific discourse behind the established clinical signs.

“Psychiatric governance, völkisch corporatism, and the German Research Institute of Psychiatry in Munich (1912–26). Part 2,” by Eric J Engstrom, Wolfgang Burgmair, and Matthias M Weber. The abstract reads, Continue reading New History of Psychiatry: LSD, Madhouses, Psychiatric Semiology… →

New JHBS! Sociology, Stereotypes, & Emotions

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The autumn 2012 issue of the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences is now online. Included in this issue are articles on the role of emotions in animal experimentation, the career and interests of Japanese sociologist Tamotsu Shibutani, the development of sociology during the Progressive Era in the United States, and the importance of Walter Lippmann’s (left) theory of stereotypes. Full titles, authors, and abstracts follow below.

“Animal Tales: Observations of the Emotions in American Experimental Psychology, 1890-1940,” by Anne C. Rose.  The abstract reads,

In nineteenth-century science, the emotions played a crucial role in explaining the social behavior of animals and human
beings. Beginning in the 1890s, however, the first American psychologists, resolutely parsimonious in method, dismissed affective experience as intellectually imprecise. Yet in practice, feelings continued to influence at least one research setting: animal experiments. Laboratory reports, although focused on learning, became a repository of informal observations about the animals’ temperaments and moods. When American psychologists began to reexamine the emotions between the world wars, they drew on this empirical legacy in animal studies. They also devised a conceptual approach to emotion consistent with their expectation of experimental precision.

“Japanese American Wartime Experience, Tamotsu Shibutani and Methodological Innovation, 1942-1978,” by Karen M. Inouye. The abstract reads, Continue reading New JHBS! Sociology, Stereotypes, & Emotions →

CFP: Childhood, Youth & the Emotions

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The Max Planck Institute for Human Development’s Centre for the History of Emotions is organizing a three-day conference on Childhood, Youth, and the Emotions in Modern History. The conference will take place from November 29th to December 1st, 2012 in Berlin and will include a keynote address by Peter Stearns (right). The full call for papers follows below:

This three-day international conference will bring together scholars interested in the intersection of childhood, youth, education and the emotions in historical perspectives. Multi-disciplinary perspectives are welcome and encouraged.

The conference will be held from November 29 to December 1, 2012 at the Institute for Human Development, Centre for the History of Emotions, in Berlin and is organized by Stephanie Olsen and Juliane Brauer. Peter N. Stearns, Provost and Professor of History at George Mason University, will give the keynote address.

The emotional upbringing and education of children is a topic of acute historical as well as contemporary concern for policy makers and politicians. The main goal of this conference is to draw together new research in the history of childhood and youth, in the history of education and the important interventions from the emerging discipline of the history of the emotions. The conference seeks to build a comparative history of the education of the emotions through an exploration of formal and informal educational contexts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Continue reading CFP: Childhood, Youth & the Emotions →