Emotion

A Brief History of Emotion

The concept that emotions oppose reason is relatively new. The great Enlightenment philosophers David Hume, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid saw emotions as an integral part of human life and society. It was not until the Romantic Movement that a gulf appeared to separate reason and emotion. Rousseau claimed that reason corrupted mankind, and that the only way to recover the innocence of the "state of nature" was to act according to the prompting of emotion while eschewing the temptations of reason. Science, which has always been more inclined to act according to the dictates of logic, ignored Rousseau’s exhortation and, until quite recently, all but ignored emotions.

That, however, is changing. Scientific investigations during the 1990s shed new light on the emotions and revealed them to be an important part of the human mind. Anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience all contributed importantly to this understanding. For example, until recently many scientists thought that emotions were a product of culture, and that people from one culture would no more recognize emotional expressions from another culture than they would recognize ...