This article defines a possible pragmatist approach to the sociology of emotions by discussing and delimiting the concept of “affective rupture.” According to this approach, emotions emerge from the breaking of habits in the face of the transformation of situations, producing reflexivity and relational adjustments. The pragmatist approach problematizes the “rhythm” of emotions, made up of ruptures, moments of quiet, adjustments, harmonizations, restorations, and relational revolutions. Rhythm is what emotions pragmatically “do,” ordering and transforming every social situation. This article employs (...) this idea to reinterpret some sociological approaches to emotions and, in parallel, to show how the interdependence between affectivity and irruption of events that involve and upset is constitutive of everyone's social behaviors. (shrink)

Some experimental results in science are productively surprising or beautiful. Such results are disruptive in their epistemic nature: by violating epistemic expectations they mark the phenomenon at hand as worthy of further investigation. Could it be that there are emotions beyond these two which are also useful for the epistemic evaluation of scientific experiments? Here, I conduct a structured sociological survey to explore affective experiences in scientific experimental research. I identify that learning the results of an experiment is the high (...) emotional point in the experimenting process. Thus, experimental results can be challenging, beautiful, or boring, and they can worry, amuse, make one sad, and so on. They can also drive meta-cognitive evaluations as well as motivate specific research-related actions. From this, I advance two claims: that emotions beyond surprise and disruptive beauty are epistemically useful in empirical research, and that emotions help to overcome specific challenges of reasoning about new experimental results. (shrink)

In general, epistemic emotions can be characterized as emotions that concern the subject's own states and mental processes and are associated with cognition and knowledge acquisition. They are the result of a cognitive inconsistency that may appear as a consequence of unexpected information that contradicts previous knowledge. They have a significant impact on the exploration and generation of knowledge about oneself and the world, as well as on conceptual changes and cognitive efficiency. There is no interspecies comparative perspective in experimental (...) studies on epistemic emotions. At first glance, this situation is not controversial, because the category of epistemic emotions has been defined in such a way that it seems to belong only to people. Inconsistencies arise when comparative research in the field of cognitive ethology, primatology or comparative psychology is analyzed. Researchers point to a number of behaviors of nonhuman animals that prove that they have a wide range of emotions - including those that stand out in the catalog of epistemic emotions, i.e. surprise, curiosity or uncertainty. The presented article is an attempt to answer the questions posed in the title and an introduction to research on an adequate model of epistemic emotions, taking into account the results of research in the above-mentioned areas. (shrink)