Emotion has long been a contested concept and subject to different, often conflicting, definitions and approaches. Emotions have long been viewed in a reductionist way as solely biological components, as private components of the personality structure of an individual, or as entirely socially and culturally constructed. These views, that separate analytically different facets of emotion, reflect persisting dichotomies of human phenomena as nature vs. nurture, universality vs. culture-specificity, and private vs. public, which have served as the key organizing principles in Western science and humanities. Emotions, however, occupy a liminal space between divisions (Leavitt, 1996); they involve phenomena that are interactive and integrated with cognition (Izard, 2009), playing a key role in human development, in everyday social interaction, and in the organization of social and cultural life. Emotions are, then, to be understood as a not exclusively private object of inquiry (Zembylas, 2007). The study on emotion has received an enormous increase since the 1980s with a marked rise in psychological studies, and gradually engendering more insight from sociology, political science, anthropology, communication, and cultural studies, among others (Döveling, Scheve, & Konijn, 2011). Scholars seem to have reached consensus on the usefulness of the term "emotion" to refer to certain socially embedded psychobiological processes, even if they do not necessarily agree on how such processes cohere, or to what extent components such as arousal, feeling, appraisal, or facial expression can be given causal or definitional prominence (Beatty, 2013, p. 416). It is, however, agreed that emotions constitute Korina Giaxoglou (Ph.D., King's College London) is lecturer in English Language and Applied Linguistics at the Open University, UK. Her research interests include lamentation and cultural practices of death, dying and mourning, language and emotion, digital narrative, discourse circulation and (social) mediatization. Katrin Döveling (Ph.D., University of Erfurt) is professor of communication and media studies at Alpen-Adria-University of Klagenfurt. Her research interests are emotion research, empirical communication and media studies, mediatization, online communication, media psychology, and media sociology.