Jan Plamper, trans. Keith Tribe, The History of Emotions

Jan Plamper’s The History of Emotions is broad in scope, offering the first overview of a rapidly expanding field. Keith Tribe’s translation (the work was originally published in German in 2012) is highly readable, and Plamper caters for the non-expert reader, offering an extensive glossary of keywords in emotion and affect studies. Plamper begins by considering the brain’s role in processing emotions and generating visceral responses, examining the degree to which emotions are either natural or conditioned experiences. This starting point is a useful one, as there are still important bridges to build between the work of cognitive neuroscientists and emo-storians, and Plamper offers a helpful long history of debates surrounding the social versus innate emotional experience. Plamper is highly conscious that his field is a dynamic one, making it important to attempt to consolidate work undertaken so far, before, as he expresses it, ‘knowledge reaches a critical mass beyond which no single person will have the capacity to absorb it’ (p. 7)

Affect (linguistics · Biology · Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Epistemology · Field (mathematics · German · Glossary · Linguistics · Natural history · Scope (computer science · Sociology · Tribe · Anthropology · Computer Science · History of Science and Medicine · Neuroscience · Psychology · Communication · Ecology · History · Philosophy