Psychological constructivism of affect argues that experienced emotions are constructed through two processes: 1) formation of the core affect on the basis of interoception which is neural representation of bodily signals, 2) categorization of the core affect by using concepts and contextual information. In this article, it is proposed that cultural and historical situations can affect experiences of emotions via revision of concepts and processes of co-construction of affect between individuals. For this purpose, a hierarchical Bayesian computational model of affect is introduced, and the processes of co-construction of affect are examined through computational simulation. Furthermore, importance of culture and history is discussed in the perspective of co-construction of affect.

This essay discusses how society constructs the sense of self. The sense of self is divided into minimal self and narrative self. The former is further divided into sense of self-agency, bodily self-consciousness, and neural subjective frame. In this essay, I try to make a hypothesis as to how society constructs the sense of self per each layer of the sense of self.

In this article the author discusses about the locus of consciousness in psychology of emotion or experimental psychology in general. To begin with a consideration is made about “the great chain of being” to illustrate historical change of the ideas about the distance between man and animals. Some famous philosophers’ ideas are also discussed.

In the second section a few experimental studies are presented that indicate animals, such as fish or mice, feel pain. Animals may not automatically respond to a noxious stimulus, but compare some neural representations and choose the most beneficial action.

The next section treats whether an animal has real consciousness. Even though an English word “feel” predominantly indicates the subject is conscious, leading psychologists have never asserted that animals are conscious beings. In fact no one has ever succeeded in showing humans are conscious animals if everyone believe “I am conscious.” We have no evidence that inanimate things are really unconscious.

Finally two books written by famous psychologists of emotions, William James and Carol Izard, are reviewed and the conclusion is that both psychologists believe that consciousness plays a central role in emotions, but consciousness is not a secure scientific concept, contradictorily. Many psychologists and philosophers believe consciousness has no active role (epiphenomenon theory of consciousness). The author suggests that consciousness is a window to communicate with others by using a code system, i.e. language. Vygotski presented the idea in 1934, but he did not extend the idea to animals. Consciousness expresses a part of the inner state of the organism to other animals including humans, verbally or nonverbally like facial expressions of emotions.

This article discusses how the historical study of emotions, which emerged during the period from the 1910s to the 1940s, took ideas and inspirations from psychology. During this period, the basis for the history of senses and feelings was laid out by Johan Huizinga and Lucian Febvre. Much has been written about the roles played by the two historians, especially the latter, in bringing the methods and methodologies of other disciplines such as anthropology and sociology into the historical investigation of the emotional life of people in the past. Yet the contribution of psychology has hitherto been relatively understated. To fill the gap, the article analyses the psychological origin of the history of emotions. It argues that while Huizinga took a nuanced attitude towards natural sciences including physiological psychology, Febvre pleaded for the collaboration between history and psychology and appropriated the dialectical paradigm from Henri Wallon. Wallon’s theory of the cognitive development, together with his holistic understanding of the human mind, was drawn into Febvre’s conception of the emotional history of civilization. It is hard to overestimate the significance of the collaboration between historians and psychologists of emotions during the years leading to the Second World War. It can be discussed and shared across the boundaries of academic disciplines in the present era. The dialogue with the past helps navigate emotion studies to the future.

This article deals with the question of how historical science can treat and/or analyze emotions. The importance of historical research written in the 1930s, which focused on the “relationship between mind and body,” is introduced at the outset. I then provide an overview of other academic disciplines such as neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy and see how they treat emotion, specifically “fear.” This first part clarifies what historical science can do in terms of analyzing emotions. In the next section， I discuss the history of emotions and curse words. Using dictionaries like Deutsches Schimpfwörterbuch oder die Schimpfwörter der Deutschen (1839) and the Brothers Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch (1838–) as well as documents written by university students, I identify the curse words used in Germany in the 19th century. If these vulgarities were exchanged between students and/or young craftsmen, semi-fatal duels or brawls took place, which allows one to reconstruct the various emotions in the “emotional communities”. I conclude this paper by arguing that the moral values of the modern German society were reflected in the curse words of the time.

This article explores emotions during England’s long Reformation by focusing on a lawsuit in the court of Star Chamber fought among Yorkshire gentry in 1600–2. Building on M. Scheer’s concept of ‘emotional practice’ (2012), this case study aims to demonstrate current agendas of historical research on emotions together with its potentials and limits. The lawsuit was filed by Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby, a zealous protestant and a newcomer to the region, following an unexpected and riotous visit by a hunting party. The group was led by the sons of powerful local magnates who were known to be Catholic sympathizers. The unwelcome visitors mocked Sir Thomas before his pious household by introducing cards, excessive drinking, and blasphemies into his house, as well as disturbing the public prayer of the household. The events recoded in court records and Lady Margaret Hoby’s spiritual diary reveal conflicts between two ‘emotional communities’: Hoby claimed his opponents’ misconducts as a part of ‘partial customs of those frozen parts,’ whereas the defendants called Hoby’s ‘cold welcome,’ ‘not answerable to our northern customs.’ The case also shows Sir Thomas’s sense of honour, the peculiarly Calvinist emotional reactions of the Hobys, and their emphasis on prayers as the ties of their own emotional community; all of which conditioned their ‘emotional practice.’ The nature of primary historical sources, however, defies historians’ attempts to ‘label’ the emotion they had at specific moments. This is mainly because their own emotional reactions to the events did not count much in the context of the legal or spiritual text writing and they remain silent on the subject. However, the history of emotions may have potentials for historians to capture various bodily, cultural, social, legal, and religious codes and practices as an organic whole, which shaped and reshaped the emotional practice.

Desertion, a chronic problem in the early modern army, was an important issue to address when the French army engaged in a reform following its defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). Many officers who aspired to improve the military reflected on this question and, echoing Montesquieu and Beccaria, criticized the death penalty, which was officially the only punishment for the crime of desertion. As a result of this movement, in 1775 the absolute monarchy abolished the death penalty for deserters in peacetime and decided to sentence them to forced labor for a period to be determined according to the seriousness of the crime. While highlighting, as other historians do, the importance of this moment in the history of the penalty, this article emphasizes the reformers’ preoccupation with soldiers’ feelings. Indeed, in their memoranda the officers seem to be deeply interested in the psychology of soldiers, who, according to their experience, would, for instance, desert because of “lightness” but later “regret” it. The article shows how this interpretation was able to inspire the king’s reform of the punishment and also create the possibility for ‘regretful’ deserters to return to service. It therefore identifies a new form of power seeking to regulate the realm of the psyche.

At the beginning of the 18th century, a debate emerged between Gottsched and the so-called Swiss. In order to design possible worlds, the former relied on reason, while the latter emphasized ‘the pleasures of the imagination.’ The Swiss insisted that the logic of poetry and imagination accomplishes something that mathematical logic, experimentation, and observation can no longer provide. This controversy in the Early Enlightenment revealed an emerging dimension of the human mind. On the basis of the conventionalized language of representation, humans’ horizons of time and space expanded drastically, just as all the functions of the mind—one of which is emotion—have evolved based on the homeostasis of the body, cultivating ever newer dimensions in the history of the human mind; a specific case arose from this foundation at a certain historical point as the negation of all conventional language: aesthetic subjectivity. Only when imagination and emotion work together in an educated, sophisticated way may the human mind long for—beyond the biological condition—precious ends.

During the Interwar period, a new movie genre appeared in Germany, called “Bergfilm” (mountain film). Bergfilm, which depicted adventures of mountaineers and skiers facing extreme conditions in the Alps charmed German audiences in the 1930s. Some ideological characteristics (anti-modernism, heroism, and self-sacrifice) were displayed among the works of the best-known directors of the genre, such as Arnold Fanck, who is the pioneer of this genre, and his pupils. And it has been also observed that Bergfilm is a movie genre that is categorically unique to Germany, a result of Hitler’s ascending dictatorship and welcoming crowd in Germany hungry in the interwar period for stories of German heroes. It’s the purpose of this research to analyze how Alpine motifs were a mechanism that influenced emotional experiences thorough the use Bergfilm during the interwar period, when Germans were seeking a refuge from modern life and new heroes for the defeated country to idolize.

From a philosophical viewpoint, this paper aims to interpret the ‘Embodied Predictive Interoception Coding Model’ which is developed in cognitive science. Based on the concept ‘free energy’ applied, by Karl Friston, as a model of information processing in human body, Lisa Feldman Barret forthward proposes an interpretation of emotions as social reality, which should be considered within the social ontology discussed by John Searle and Francesco Guala. Defending emergentism of voluntary behavior in this context, I argue that ‘freedom’ is understood as emotion of subject acquired from reliable and credible conditions between environment and self.