“Emotion”: The History of a Keyword in Crisis

Abstract

The word “emotion” has named a psychological category and a subject for systematic enquiry only since the 19th century. Before then, relevant mental states were categorised variously as “appetites,” “passions,” “affections,” or “sentiments.” The word “emotion” has existed in English since the 17th century, originating as a translation of the French émotion, meaning a physical disturbance. It came into much wider use in 18th-century English, often to refer to mental experiences, becoming a fully fledged theoretical term in the following century, especially through the influence of two Scottish philosopher-physicians, Thomas Brown and Charles Bell. This article relates this intellectual and semantic history to contemporary debates about the usefulness and meaning of “emotion” as a scientific term.

Emotions and City Life

“…19 Victoria Thompson analyzes the powerful feelings of sadness, fear, and anxiety experienced by British visitors to post-revolutionary Paris. As Thompson points out, their understandings of identity were rooted in sites located both inside and outside their nation, and the upheavals of the Revolution were seen as having had a traumatic effect on the British psyche.…”

The Interpersonal Functions of Empathy: A Relational Perspective

“…A firm conceptualization of empathy must be rooted in a firm conceptualization of emotion-a term that has suffered from similar definitional ambiguity (Dixon, 2012). Interestingly, most theories of empathy fail to take a strong stance on defining emotion.…”

Emotional theory of rationality

“…According with this reasoning, and though emotion definition is an active debate (Dixon, 2012) , we give now a first partial definition of emotions as innate contingency action programs, which act as "indicators" about the incapacity of the already available responses, to effectively resolve a triggering stimulus in a given context.…”