A Genealogy of the Science of Emotion. Nineteenth Century Foundations of Contemporary Concepts of Emotion

Psychology, when it reconfigured itself as an academic discipline around 1900, radically dispensed with the terminological Ballast that characterized descriptions of the emotions during the 19th century. Indeed, it is peculiar that in basic research in emotion in the neurosciences “emotion” is commonly used in the singular. The (natural-) scientific concept of emotion that was created in late nineteenth century experimental psychology tacitly underwrites twentieth-century research in emotion and debates up to the “emotional turn.”

This research project seeks to elucidate how the scientific concept of emotion came into being. Who studied “emotion” or “the emotions” in which disciplines, and in which historical contexts? What was the place of emotion in cognitive theories? How did the concept of emotion shift in the process of scientific study? What happened to the universal category of emotion in different local and national contexts? While physiologists and psychologists in Germany, France and the United States engaged in transnational dialogues, the answers to the question of emotion that were given at the turn of the 20th century clearly showed national preferences that mattered. What were the consequences of the scientific reification of emotion a larger socio-cultural context? The project thus traces the genealogy of the meta-term emotion focusing on the time period of 1860 to 1920 and based on scientific texts in physiology and experimental psychology, and on popular treatises on the psychology of the emotions in Germany, France, and the United States.