Emotions

Abstract

Research on emotion is strongly routed in psychology, but many scientific disciplines including neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, and ethnology have contributed. Beginning with the pioneering work of Charles Darwin (1972), emotion research was a truly cross-cultural or global research endeavor. One of the most important discourses in emotion research revolved around the question whether human emotions are predominantly determined by genetically based biological features of the conditio humana or by the more contingent historical development of social rules. For both perspectives there is impressive evidence. The universalist perspective is backed by the fairly culture-independent ability of humans to recognize emotions in members of very different cultures. The culture-relativistic position is corroborated by ample evidence that different cultures feature very different social rules such as which kind of emotions and emotional expressions are considered adequate or permitted in specific situations. The last century has seen a dramatic shift in the emotion discourse. Whereas the leading emotion scholars in the nineteenth century were almost exclusively European, this geographical domination came to an end with a global turn during the World War II. From then on, emotion research (and psychology in general) was clearly dominated by the United States. Only in recent years do we observe a European comeback, and first signs of a truly globalized scientific discourse including scholars from hitherto underrepresented parts of the world.