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. (shrink)

I am very appreciative of those who wrote comments on my article. They raised some interesting and some quite challenging questions. Their responses seem quite in synchrony with my focus and intent—to reveal some problems that we need to address in advancing emotion science. The authors of the commentaries reflected some of the same sort of differences among themselves as I found among the emotion scientists whom I surveyed in search of a definition of emotion. Like the emotion scientists who (...) responded to my survey, most of the authors of the commentaries were generally in agreement on the significance of research in the emotion domain but not in agreement on the meaning of the term emotion. I briefly discuss the noteworthy question (raised in one of the commentaries) as to whether and when discrete emotion concepts might someday share the same fate as the general term emotion and disappear from emotion science. (shrink)

This article presents the first systematic typological study of emotional expressions involving body parts at the scale of a continent, namely the Australian continent. The role of body parts in figurative descriptions of emotions, a well-established phenomenon across the world, is known to be widespread in Australian languages. This article presents a typology of body-based emotional expressions across a balanced sample of 67 languages, where we found that at least 30 distinct body parts occur in emotional expressions. The belly is (...) by far the most frequent, and a dozen others also have significant representation. The study shows how the properties of these body parts – e.g., whether they are internal organs or visible facial parts – partly determine which historical scenarios led to their linguistic associations with emotions, and in turn, their semantic and figurative properties. (shrink)