How can there be a history of emotions? In today's scientific world, psychologists and neuropsychologists generally consider human emotions to be universal and “hard-wired.” Thus, for example, fear in all its manifestations today – as a facial grimace, as a bodily reaction, as a product of specific brain systems, or as a chemical process – is assumed to have been the same in the past. Evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby claim that the human mind today has not changed since the Stone Age. “Our modern skulls house a stone age mind,” is their curt summary. How indeed can there be a history of emotions?

What are emotions?

Although many scientists today think of emotions as universal, biological, and invariable, this is not true of all. For example, some neuroscientists today think that emotions are as much products of top-down processing (in which case they depend on cognitive work) as of bottom-up (in which case they are connected to precognitive, automatic biological responses). That view suggests that socialization affects emotions because it helps determine what is – and what is not – relevant to one's goals and values, which are aspects of cognition. On another front, a recent book by evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk argues that change in whole populations can take place in a very short period of time under the right circumstances. The “Stone Age” mind disappears if this is true. It is thus very unlikely that emotions are invariable.

But what are emotions? In 1981 researchers attempting to make sense of the welter of current definitions of emotions tried (to little effect) to find a common denominator. Many experimental psychologists and neuropsychologists today cling to the series of photographed faces developed by Paul Ekman and said to represent the expression of the six universal basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. But many other researchers are unconvinced, emphasizing the experiential nature of emotions, a characteristic entirely lacking in the posed faces of Ekman's photos. Thomas Dixon has shown that the very category of “emotion” is relatively recent, tracing the ways in which a great variety of passions and sentiments were brought together under the practical but limited term “emotion.” Ute Frevert and her colleagues have demonstrated that notions about emotions – their location, their importance, their associations with gender, civility, and society – have been in constant flux since the eighteenth century.