Claudia Wassmann

The project investigates the scientific concepts of emotion that psychomedical research has produced between 1950 and 2000, and if and how these concepts have informed emotional culture and identity in post-industrial societies in Western Europe—assessed through cultural productions such as film. The innovative character of the project lies in the transdisciplinary approach that integrates expertise in psycho-medical research into current historical and cultural debate. Research in emotion is a vibrant field both in the bio-psycho-medical sciences and in the social sciences and humanities. The dominant approach in the history of emotion presumes that emotions are either biological and, as such, not interesting to historical analysis or that they are social and the biologically based theories of emotion get it wrong because they ignore historical complexities. Overall, few studies put these two approaches in dialogue with each other. Either the cultural embeddedness of emotions is studied or emotion is studied on the level of the individual— within the person, as a liminal phenomenon or on a systems level in neuroscience. However, a scientific understanding of emotion and an analysis of cultural concepts of emotional identities are mutually dependent upon each other and need to be studied together. Theories on emotion are still missing a comprehensive approach that brings together the biological in connection with the social and cultural context. The project takes an innovative stance on how scientific studies of emotion and cultural analysis of societal change and of processes and dynamics of identity formation can be studied as mutually dependent variables. It addresses interdisciplinarity--history of science, cultural anthropology, cinema studies--and multicultural methodology. Methodologically, the project has two components: (a) Quantitative and qualitative content analysis of: scientific communications (journal articles and conference proceedings) in the psycho-medical, social sciences and humanities discourses as well as a number of advertising texts with regard to the main trope frequencies; (b) comparing this analysis with the representation of emotion and identity in (audio-visual) media production.