Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Lecture at the conference "A Matter of Feeling? Recent Perspectives in the Study of Emotions", February 2, 2024
James Russell, one of the leading psychologists of emotion today, has written in Emotion Review 4 (2012), the journal of the International Society for Research on Emotion: “Emotion researchers face a scandal: We have not agreed upon definition for the term—emotion—that defines our field. We therefore do not know what events count as examples of emotion and what events theories of emotion must explain”. But is the concept of emotion in fact unitary? Do all cultures have a concept corresponding to “emotion” in many modern languages? Do the terms even in these languages identify a uniform idea? Are the individual emotions perceived and experienced uniformly across cultures, and are they bundled in the same way under a single heading? These questions are central to the historical and comparative study of emotions, a flourishing field that is nevertheless still in its infancy. In my presentation, I will illustrate some of the ways in which emotions, and the very idea of emotion, vary across cultures, taking as my primary example ancient Greece but venturing as well into other linguistic traditions.
Lecture at the conference "A Matter of Feeling? Recent Perspectives in the Study of Emotions", February 2, 2024
James Russell, one of the leading psychologists of emotion today, has written in Emotion Review 4 (2012), the journal of the International Society for Research on Emotion: “Emotion researchers face a scandal: We have not agreed upon definition for the term—emotion—that defines our field. We therefore do not know what events count as examples of emotion and what events theories of emotion must explain”. But is the concept of emotion in fact unitary? Do all cultures have a concept corresponding to “emotion” in many modern languages? Do the terms even in these languages identify a uniform idea? Are the individual emotions perceived and experienced uniformly across cultures, and are they bundled in the same way under a single heading? These questions are central to the historical and comparative study of emotions, a flourishing field that is nevertheless still in its infancy. In my presentation, I will illustrate some of the ways in which emotions, and the very idea of emotion, vary across cultures, taking as my primary example ancient Greece but venturing as well into other linguistic traditions.
