History and Neuroscience of Emotions

Course goals

The fundamental insight that this course builds upon is that while certain brain structures and bodily chemicals common to all human beings produce emotions, these entities are plastic, not hardwired. Culture "writes" onto nature, meaning that emotions have a history. Students will learn about the interaction between universal cognitive traits and historically specific cultures. They will come away from the course with a basic understanding of how and why emotions have changed throughout history, and why that matters. Specifically, at the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Explain some major philosophies of emotion;
• Explain the basic insights of the neuroscience and psychology of emotions;
• Apply insights from these disciplines to study emotions historically, and investigate the limits of interdisciplinary collaboration

Content

"No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and meaning of our existence than the emotions. They are what make life worth living and sometimes worth ending." This is how philosophers Andrea Scarantino and Ronald de Sousa introduce their major study of emotion, effectively capturing why it is so important to understand this phenomenon. But just what emotions are is far from clear. Are they experiences, evaluations, motivators, or all of the above? Are they a human universal or culturally specific? And how have they changed across history? This course tackles these questions through an interdisciplinary study of emotions. Covering the major philosophies of emotion and the state-of-the-art in affective neuroscience, students will use these insights to investigate the changing nature of emotional experience across human history and the role of emotions in shaping that history.

This course is deeply interdisciplinary. Historians have long engaged with neighbouring disciplines such as sociology or anthropology, but less commonly with neuroscience or psychology. Psychohistory failed and largely disappeared by the 1980s, but with major recent advances in neuroscience, it is time for historians to update their psychological assumptions—assumptions that all historians make. In this course, students will be challenged to seek the limits of interdisciplinarity and, through this unique collaboration, to appreciate that history can be an anthropological science that contributes to understanding humanity, rather than a political science that explains the present.

Additional information

This course is open to all students from level II upwards and, in addition to history students, will particularly appeal to those studying psychology or neuroscience, biomedical sciences, sociology, anthropology, and related disciplines.