Week 3 Flashcards
Microhistory and its hope
Way of doing history and theory together
Hope: To describe humans lawfully
How does psychology describe humans
Static and subject to development
What does studying the brain tell us
Tells us about what the mind is doing
Mind is not identical to the brain eg. Brain can have a defect but person is unaware
Which argument is better- Neuroscientific or psychological
Generally neuroscientific
First brain
500 million yrs ago in flatworms
When did modern humans emerge
200-300 thousand years ago
Historiography
The doing of history separate from the content of historical discussions
Philosophical engagement with the historical method
Emotive
-Isn’t a thing like an emotion might be
-A relation of outward action and an inward sensation
-Translation between ‘what its like’ to be me now, and how its culturally possible for experiences to have meaning (This translation is a loop- The possibility of context constrains and enables how you experience yourself)
Core emotions
-Emotives are meaningful and meaning is contextual
-Either core emotions are about lower-level processes than the use of emotion-terms suggests, or “emotion” means something else when psychologists use it
-Some psychologists argue against idea of core emotions (Lisa Feldmann Barrett)
History of emotions
Meanings of emotion-terms have changed over time- What it feels to be angry isn’t universal
Emotions as a kind of practice
-Emotions aren’t something that happen to us
-They are something we do, we perform our inner life and we share
-Mediated by the context we are in
-What we know and how we know it is relevant (epistemology)
Old dichotomies of emotion breakdown
Culture vs biology, Conscious vs unconscious, Nature vs nurture
-There are no functions that can be isolated from context (divisions are pointless)
McGrath and old dichotomies
-Stable vs decentred self
-Timeless psychology vs chronically rooted history
-Individual agency vs social construction
Core subjective feelings
-Not only are core emotions not stable, neither are lower levels eg. cold and warmth
-Things like hunger and satiation, pain and relief, cold or warmth, homeostasis itself have cultural origins
-Meaning of these feelings are different even though the ‘sensation’ is the same
-Have to see how the action makes sense to the actor before we can observe it empirically
-Bottom up signals are not innately meaningful
looking at the nature of affection allows us to
Establish a relationship between scientific and historical enquiry
What do critics call the study of emotion
Neuro-turn
How does transformations in culture allow changes in biology
Synaptic connections between neurons are formed in response to human activity- Brain is not rigid
Baldwin effect
Neurons are wired to a social context
How brain responds to psychotropic mechanisms
They trigger neurotransmitters and affect the levels of hormones
Examining psychotropics social history allows us to
Examine biology and culture
-Theory that psychotropics imported into Europe laid the biochemical conditions for the explosion of ideas in the enlightenment
Change in reading genres
Reading accounts of torture translated to brain changes which brought about empathy and subsequently human rights
Neurohistorians understanding of affect
Lies on their approcch to neurosciences
2 tiered historiography
Changes in the site of psychotropic consumption on a historical plane while human biochemistry remains stable across time
Cogmotions
Integration of emotions and cognitions
-Emotions should not be separated from ideas
Emotives are
Historical actors statements about their effective experiences
“Form of speech act who’s performative force mobilises the speakers emotion”
-They display the context of time as they are a publicly recognisable form of affect
How affect involves mental control
-Pressure of culture and biology determine which emotives are expressed or repressed
-Cultural practices influence higher order processes in the prefrontal cortex
Examples of emotions in history
-Emotional regime repressed self-expression in the royal court of Louis XIV
-People sought emotional refuge in theatres and clubs (Created revolutionary feelings to overthrow this emotional regime)
-Colonists used emotions as forms of power eg. cheerfulness was seen as an elite emotion
Basic emotions paradigm
-Intrinsic class of discrete emotions
-Each emotion depends on a distinct neural circuit eg. Ekman faces
-Distinguished by higher conscious affects such as envy
-2 pathways: Rapid and slower higher order path
-Criticised because they dont take into account intentions, meanings, reasoning and beliefs
Appraisal theory
-Emotions integrate perceptions and judgements
-Many more displays of emotion that the basic emotions
-People shape their affects based on context
-Dispute that basic emotions are autonomous
-Emotion categories are not discreetly separable
Psychological constructivism
-Emotions are events made up of several integrated systems that involve content that is not necessarily emotional
-Emotions are mental events that traverse affective, cognitive and social dimensions of the brain
Example of the role of social context in emotions
People in a Namibian tribe didn’t group the Ekman faces into basic emotion categories
Who put history of emotions on the map
William Reddy
Wrote “Against constructivism”, putting the brain-body and the world in dynamic relation through his concept of emotives
To emote is
To try and give voice to what one feels- Translate a feeling into an expression
-If one fails to find a suitable expression it leads to emotional suffering
Emotives as a human effort of conscious self-management
All bodily feelings- Culturally mediated
All cultural expressions- Bodily situated
Bioconstructionists
Lisa Feldmann Barrett
See emotions as ephemeral constructions arising from the culturally situated brain
Universalists
Ekman and Tomkins
Emotions are hardwired into neural circuitry and are universal
Scheer and emotions
Emotions are things that humans do in the world, involving words, concepts as well as physical expressions, gestures and postures
How a neurohistorian works
Piecing context, practices and historical dynamics of power together with testimony, description and depiction of experience in historical terms
Natural kinds paradigm
-Assumption that each kind of emotion can be identified by a more or less unique signature response (within the body) that is evoked by a distinct causal mechanism (within the brain). As a result, it should be possible to recognise distinct emotions in other people, identify them in oneself, and measure them in the face, physiology and behaviour
-Doesnt answer historical questions to do with the role of emotions in social interaction , or the existence of shared emotions in rites or religious ceremonies, or explain the role played by material culture in shaping our emotions
Theoretical efforts addressing the problems of the natural kinds paradigm
-Labanyi’s exploration of the limits of representation and the idea of ‘emotions as practices’
-The work of Sara Ahmed
-‘Scheer’s ‘Are emotions a kind of practice’
-Boddice’s approach
Alberti- Emotions as social practice
History of emotions fails to deal with complex emotions
Tiedens and Leach-Social Life of Emotions
Emotions as a bridge between the individual and the world
-As a channel through which the individual knows the social world and the social world is what allows people to know emotions
-Individuals depend on social configurations not only to trigger emotions, but to form them
-Experience does not occur prior to the emotions (that colour it), nor are emotions a mere reaction to the world- They constitute each other
