the history of human emotions essay

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EVOLUTION OF HUMAN EMOTION

Joseph e. ledoux.

New York University, 4 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, 212-998-3930. Nathan Kline Institute, 140 Old Orangeburg Road, Orangeburg, NY 10962

Basic tendencies to detect and respond to significant events are present in the simplest single cell organisms, and persist throughout all invertebrates and vertebrates. Within vertebrates, the overall brain plan is highly conserved, though differences in size and complexity also exist. The forebrain differs the most between mammals and other vertebrates. The classic notion that the evolution of mammals led to radical changes such that new forebrain structures (limbic system and neocortex) were added has not held up, nor has the idea that so-called limbic areas are primarily involved in emotion. Modern efforts have focused on specific emotion systems, like the fear or defense system, rather than on the search for a general purpose emotion systems. Such studies have found that fear circuits are conserved in mammals, including humans. Animal work has been especially successful in determining how the brain detects and responds to danger. Caution should be exercised when attempting to discuss other aspects of emotion, namely subjective feelings, in animals since there are no scientific ways of verifying and measuring such states except in humans.

Introduction

The topic of emotion and evolution typically brings to mind Darwin’s classic treatise, Emotions in Man and Animals ( Darwin, 1872 ). In this book Darwin sought to extend his theory of natural selection beyond the evolution of physical structures and into the domain of mind and behavior by exploring how emotions too might have evolved. Particularly important to his argument was the fact that certain emotions are expressed similarly in people around the world, including in isolated areas where there had been little contact with the outside world and thus little opportunity for emotional expressions to have been learned and culturally transmitted. This suggested to him that there must be a strong heritable component to emotions in people. Also important was his observation that certain emotions are expressed similarly across species, especially closely related species, further suggesting that these emotions are phylogenetically conserved.

With the rise of experimental brain research in the late 19 th century, emotion was one of the key topics that early neuroscientists sought to relate to the brain (see LeDoux, 1987 ). The assumption was that emotion circuits are conserved across mammalian species, and that it should be possible to understand human emotions by exploring emotional mechanisms in the non-human mammalian brain.

In this chapter, I will first briefly survey the history of ideas about the emotional brain, and especially ideas that have attempted to explain the emotional brain in terms of evolutionary principles. This will lead to a discussion of fear, since this is the emotion that has been studied most thoroughly in terms of brain mechanisms. The chapter will conclude with a reconsideration of what the term emotion refers to, and specifically which aspects of emotion can be studied in animals and which must be studied in humans.

A Brief History of the Emotional Brain: The Rise and Fall of the Limbic System Theory

All organisms, even single cell organisms, must have the capacity to detect and respond to significant stimuli in order to survive. Bacteria, for example, approach nutrients and avoid harmful chemicals ( Macnab and Koshland, 1972 ). With the evolution of multicellular, metazoan organisms with specialized systems, particularly a nervous system, the ability to detect and respond to significant events increases in sophistication ( Shepherd, 1983 ).

Invertebrates, the oldest and largest group of multicellular organisms, exhibit a wide variety of types of nervous systems. However, all vertebrates share a common basic brain plan consisting of three broad zones (hindbrain, midbrain, and forebrain) with conserved basic circuits ( Nauta and Karten, 1970 ; Swanson, 2002 ; Bulter and Hodos, 2005 ; Striedter, 2005). In spite of this overall similarity, differences in size and complexity exist. For example, the forebrain differs the most between mammals and reptiles. On the basis of such differences, the classic view of forebrain evolution emerged in the first half of the 20 th century (e.g. Smith, 1924 ; Herrick, 1933 ; Arien Kappers et al, 1936 ; Papez, 1937 ; MacLean, 1949 , 1952 ). According to this view, with the emergence of mammals, the forebrain plan underwent radical changes in which new structures, especially cortical structures, were added. These were layered over and covered the reptilian forebrain, which mainly consisted of the basal ganglia. First came “primitive” cortical regions in early mammals. In these organisms the basic survival functions related to feeding, defense and procreation were taken care of by fairly undifferentiated (weakly laminated) cortical regions (primitive cortex, including the hippocampus and cingulate cortex) and related subcortical areas (such as the amygdala) that were closely tied to the olfactory system. Later mammals added highly novel, laminated cortical regions (neocortex) that made possible enhanced non-olfactory sensory processing and cognitive functions (including learning and memory, reasoning, and planning capacities, and, in humans, language).

The basic principle that equated cognition with evolutionarily new cortex (neocortex) and emotion with older cortex and related subcortical forebrain regions culminated in Paul MacLean’s limbic system theory of emotion (1949 , 1952 , 1970 ). The term limbic was first used by the French anatomist Paul Broca as a structural designation for a rim of cortex in the medial wall of the hemisphere. Broca called this rim the limbic lobe ( le grande lobe limbique ) (limbic is from the Latin word for rim, limbus ). MacLean built on the classic findings of comparative anatomists such as Herrick and Papez, and experimental findings from Walter Cannon, Phillip Bard and Henrich Kluver and Paul Bucy ( Cannon, 1929 ; Bard, 1928 ; Kluver and Bucy, 1937 ) to transform the limbic lobe into an emotion system, the limbic system. The limbic system was defined anatomically as the primitive medial cortical areas and interconnected subcortical nuclei (including the amygdala and septum).

MacLean called the limbic system the paleomammalian brain (since it was said to have emerged with the evolution of early mammals), and contrasted it with the reptilian brain (basal ganglia and brainstem). In more recent mammals the neocortex, also called the neomammalian brain, was said by MacLean to increases in size and complexity at the expense of the limbic system. The decrease of the limbic system reduced the dependence of humans on base emotions, and the increase in the neocortex allowed humans greater control over remaining emotional circuits as well as greater cognitive capacities.

The limbic system concept stimulated much research in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. However, it has been criticized on a number of grounds, and has been rejected by many scientists ( Swanson, 1983 ; LeDoux, 1987 , 1991 , 1996 ; Kotter and Meyer, 1992 ; Butler and Hodos, 2005 ). Because the limbic system concept continues to be referred to in some scientific circles (e.g. Panksepp, 1998 , 2005 ) and persists in many lay accounts of the brain, it is worth considering why it is not acceptable.

First, the theory presumes that the neocortex and limbic system are unique mammalian specializations. Neither of these ideas is accepted by contemporary comparative neuroanatomists ( Nauta and Karten, 1970 ; Northcutt and Kaas, 1995 ; Butler and Hodos, 2005 ; Striedter, 2005). Birds and reptiles, for example, have been shown to have structures that correspond with both mammalian neocortex and with MacLean’s cortical and subcortical limbic areas (hippocampus, amygdala). Second, MacLean argued the architecture of limbic areas is ill-suited for cognitive processes. However, the hippocampus, viewed by MacLean as the centerpiece of the limbic system and a central structure for emotional functions, is recognized as one of the key areas related to higher cognitive functions, such as declarative or explicit memory ( Squire, 1987 ; Eichenbaum, 2002 ) and spatial cognition ( O’Keefe and Nadel, 1978 ). Third, efforts to define the system have failed. Connectivity with old cortex is a flawed criterion if old cortex is itself an unjustified notion. Connectivity with the hypothalamus once seemed plausible, since that was a way of distinguishing relevant and irrelevant cortical areas ( Issacson, 1982 ). However, as anatomical techniques improved, areas from the neocortex were also found to be connected with the hypothalamus, as were areas of the spinal cord, potentially extending the limbic system across the entire brain. Finally, and perhaps most important, there is no evidence that the limbic system, however defined, functions as an integrated system in the mediation of emotion. While specific areas of the limbic system contribute to some emotional functions, these areas do not do so because they belong to a limbic system that evolved to perform emotional functions. Indeed, relatively few limbic areas have been shown to contribute to emotional functions. As noted above, the hippocampus, the centerpiece of the limbic system theory of emotion, has been strongly implicated in cognitive functions but the evidence for a role in emotion is far less impressive.

The limbic system theory attempted to explain all emotions within a single anatomical concept. Contemporary researchers are more inclined to focus on tasks designed to study the brain systems of specific emotions. As we will see, this has been a more profitable empirical approach.

Contributions of the Amygdala to Avoidance Conditioning: An Early Approach to Linking Emotional Behavior to the Limbic System

Why, then, has the limbic system concept persisted for so long given that it proved questionable on evolutionary, structural, and functional grounds? The key reason can be summarized in the term “guilt by association.” One limbic area, the amygdala, has consistently been implicated in emotional behavior. Because the amygdala was part of the limbic system concept, its involvement vindicated the whole concept. This does not mean that the amygdala is the only structure involved in emotion, but instead that the amygdala is one area that has been extensively implicated in emotion, in part because of the behavioral tasks that have most often been used to study emotion.

The amygdala was first implicated in emotion through studies of the Kluver-Bucy Syndrome, a set of unusual behaviors observed in monkeys after removal of large areas of the temporal lobe ( Kluver and Bucy, 1937 ). Monkeys with such lesions attempted to eat inappropriate items and copulate with inappropriate partners, and lost their fear of snakes and humans. It was concluded that the animals had psychic blindness, an inability to appreciate the significance or value of visual stimuli. Weiskrantz (1956) attempted to localize the effects within the temporal lobe using a behavioral task where behavior was guided by stimulus value. Specifically, he used an avoidance conditioning paradigm where monkeys learned to use a cue to signal when to perform a behavioral response in order to avoid receiving a painful shock. Such a paradigm was viewed as especially useful in assessing the role of the amygdala in processing threats that lead to fear. Damage targeted to the amygdala disrupted performance, leading Weiskrantz to conclude that the amygdala was responsible for the inability of animals with temporal lobe damage to use stimulus value to guide behavior, and thus that an important function of the amygdala was to ascertain stimulus value. Specifically, Weiskrantz proposed that the amygdala processes the rewarding and punishing consequences of events. However, the data were essentially about aversive or punishing events since avoidance conditioning is a fear-based paradigm.

Subsequently, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, avoidance conditioning paradigms were used to study the contribution of the amygdala to emotion, an especially to fear. The bulk of the evidence was consistent, in general, with the idea that the amygdala is a key structure in avoidance conditioning, and by implication, in processing the value of emotional stimuli. Such findings were treated as evidence in support of the limbic system theory of emotion since the amygdala was part of the limbic system.

By the mid 1980s, thirty years of research on the brain mechanisms of avoidance had been conducted. While it seemed clear that the amygdala was somehow involved, there was considerable confusion as exactly what its role might be ( Sarter and Markowitsch, 1985 ). There are several explanations likely for this unsettled state of affairs. First, there was little appreciation of the anatomical complexity of the amygdala, a brain region with a dozen or so nuclei, each with subnuclei ( Amaral et al, 1992 ; Pitkanen et al, 1997 ; LeDoux, 2007 ). Failure to recognize this anatomical complexity may have led to confusion. Indeed, more recent work has shown that different nuclei and subnuclei have different functions ( Repa et al, 2001 ; LeDoux, 2007 ). Second, the behavioral complexity of avoidance conditioning itself was not fully appreciated. Avoidance tasks can be constructed in various ways (active, passive, signaled, unsignaled), and each involves the learning of a Pavlovian association and an instrumental association ( Cain and LeDoux, 2007 ; Cain et al., 2010 ; LeDoux et al., 2009 ; Choi et al, 2010 ; Amorapanth et al, 2000 ; Lazaro-Munoz et al., 2010 ). In retrospect, failure to separate these components also probably played a role in adding confusion to efforts to understand the brain mechanisms of avoidance.

Contribution of the Amygdala to Fear: Studies of Aversive Pavlovian Conditioning

During the 1960s, researchers began using Pavlovian conditioning to pursue the cellular and molecular mechanisms of learning in invertebrates (e.g. Kandel and Spencer, 1968 ; Kandel et al., 1986 ). The success of this approach, together with the fact that avoidance conditioning was stuck in a rut, led mammalian researchers to turn to Pavlovian conditioning as well ( Thompson, 1986 ; Kapp et al, 1979 ; LeDoux et al, 1984 ; Tischler and Davis, 1983 ).

As mentioned already, Pavlovian conditioning is the initial phase of avoidance conditioning. After the subjects rapidly undergo Pavlovian conditioning, they then slowly learn to perform avoidance responses using the CS as a warning signal. Indeed, the emotional learning that occurs in avoidance conditioning occurs during the Pavlovian phase. Pavlovian conditioning is thus a more direct means of studying emotional processing. Perhaps Pavlovian conditioning would be easier to understand.

In Pavlovian fear conditioning, the subject receives a neutral conditioned stimulus (CS), usually a tone, followed by an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US), typically footshock. After one or at most a few pairings, the CS comes to elicit innate emotional responses that naturally occur in the presence of threatening stimuli, such as predators. For example, after conditioning a CS elicits defensive freezing behavior and associated autonomic and endocrine responses that support the behavior ( Blanchard and Blanchard, 1969 ; Bolles and Fanselow, 1980 ; LeDoux et al, 1984 ). The subject does not have to learn to perform these responses. The responses are innate. What is learned is an association that allows a novel stimulus, a warning of danger, to elicit the defensive responses in anticipation of the actual danger.

With the simpler approach provided by fear conditioning, as opposed to avoidance, much progress was made in mapping the circuitry, including the regions in the brain where the CS and US converge to form the associations and the regions involved in the control of emotional responses by the CS in animals (see LeDoux, 2000 ; Maren, 2001 , 2005 ; Rodrigues et al, 2004 ; Johansen et al, in review ; Davis, 1992 ; Davis et al., 1997 ; Fanselow and Poulos, 2005 ; Pape and Pare, 2010 ) and humans ( Phelps and LeDoux, 2005 ; Phelps, 2006 ; Sehlmeyer et al., 2009 ; Kim et al., 2011 ; Whalen and Phelps, 2009 ). In brief, CS and US convergence occur in the lateral nucleus of the amygdala (LA), and specifically in the dorsal subregion of the LA. This convergence leads to synaptic plasticity and the formation of a CS-US association. Damage to LA, inactivation of LA, or manipulation of a variety of molecular pathways in LA prevents fear conditioning. A second important region is central nucleus of the amygdala (CE). Manipulations of the region also disrupts conditioning. LA and CE are connected directly and by way of various intra-amygdala pathways. Once the CS-US association is formed, later exposure to the CS results in the retrieval of the learned association formed by CS-US convergence during conditioning. Information then flows from LA to CE, which then connects to hypothalamic and brainstem areas that control behavioral, autonomic, and hormonal responses that help the organism cope with the threat. Plasticity also occurs in CE, and in CS processing regions and motor control regions. This simplified description omits many details.

Much has been learned about the molecular mechanisms in LA that make fear conditioning possible ( Blair et al, 2001 ; Schafe et al, 2001 ; Rodrigues et al, 2004 ; Fanselow and Poulos, 2005 ; Maren, 2001 , 2005 ; Pape and Pare, 2010 ; Sah et al, 2008 ; Johansen et al, in review ). In brief, the CS input synapses undergo plasticity when the LA neurons they connect with are depolarized by the shock US. As a result, the ability of the CS to activate the LA cell is potentiated. Plasticity is triggered when the depolarizing US allows calcium to flow into the cell via NMDA receptors and voltage sensitive calcium channels. The elevated calcium activate a number of protein kinases that ultimately lead to phosphoylation of transcription factors such as CREB that lead to gene expression and protein synthesis. The newly synthesized proteins then stabilize the synaptic potentiation, allowing the CS to strongly activate the LA cell for over long periods of time. It is particularly interesting that many of the molecular changes that underlie fear conditioning in mammals have also been show to be important for Palovian conditioning in invertebrates, showing the conserved nature of the molecular mechanisms of learning and memory.

The advances made in understanding Pavlovian fear conditioning made it possible to revisit the neural system of avoidance and related aversive instrumental behaviors ( Cain and LeDoux, 2007 ; Cain et al., 2010 ; LeDoux et al., 2009 ; Choi et al, 2010 ; Amorapanth et al, 2000 ; Lazaro-Munoz et al., 2010 ). This work showed that as in fear conditioning, the LA is essential for forming the CS-US association. But in contrast to fear conditioning, in avoidance information flows from the LA to the basal amygdala (not to the CE). Extrapolating from appetitive conditioning finding ( Everitt et al, 1989 , 1999 ; Cardinal et al, 2002 ), it has been proposed that connections from the basal amygdala to the ventral striatum allow the CS-US association to control aversively motivated instrumental behavior.

Avoidance responses are not emotional responses per se. They are simply responses. An animal can learn to avoid harm by running, climbing, pressing, swimming, or even remaining stationary. The animal learns to do what it needs to do to attain safety. But the same responses could be used to obtain food if the animal is hungry and those responses are a way to gain access to food. In contrast, in Pavlovian fear conditioning the CS elicits specific emotional responses, fear or defense responses. Researchers were much more inclined to discuss Pavlovian conditioning results specifically in terms of fear/defense circuits.

Comparative Observations

Amygdala areas have been implicated in fear conditioning in a variety of mammals, including rats, mice, rabbits, and monkeys (see LeDoux, 1996 , 2000 ; Johansen et al, in review ; LeDoux, 2000 ; Maren, 2001 , 2005 ; Rodrigues et al, 2004 ; Davis, 1992 ; Davis et al., 1997 ; Fanselow and Poulos, 2005 ; Pape and Pare, 2010 ). This suggests strong conservation of the circuitry within mammals, including humans. Indeed, a large body of work implicates the human amygdala in fear conditioning and in instrumental responses like avoidance ( Phelps and LeDoux, 2005 ; Phelps, 2006 ; Whalen et al., 2004 ; Dolan and Vuilleumier, 2003 ; Whalen and Phelps, 2009 ; Delgado et al., 2009 ; Labar, 2003 ; Ousdal et al., 2008 ; Gianaros et al., 2008 ; Damasio, 1994 ; Bechara et al., 1995 ). Thus, damage to the amygdala in humans prevents fear conditioning from occurring and functional imaging studies show that activity increases in the amygdala during fear conditioning. Additionally, a number of studies have found amygdala activation in response to angry or fearful faces, considered to be unconditioned threat stimuli ( Adolphs, 2008 ). Thus, findings involving both lesion studies and functional imaging suggest strong correspondence with the animal literature, at least at a gross anatomical level. Techniques available for studying the human brain do not allow precise localization of specific nuclei, though some progress is being made in this regard ( Davis et al., 2011 ; Bach et al., 2011 ).

An important question concerns the nature of the amygdala in non-mammals and the role of the homologous structure in fear conditioning. According to classic view, areas such as the amygdala, being paleomammalian structures, should not exist in reptiles. However, in the 1970s, Cohen (1975) claimed to have indentified the amygdala in avian species and found that lesions of this regions disrupted of Pavlovian fear conditioning in pigeons. More recently, there has been much debate about what constitutes the amygdala, and specifically individual amygdala nuclei, in reptiles and birds ( Karten, 1997 ; Martinez-Garcia et al., 2002 ; Lanuza et al., 1998 ; Moreno and Gonzalez, 2007 ; Bruce and Neary, 1995 ). Using connectivity patterns established in mammals, areas believed to be homologous to the lateral and central nucleus have been identified in lizards ( Martinez-Garcia et al., 2002 ; Lanuza et al., 1998 ). When threatened, these animals undergo tonic immobility, and damage to the CE homologue interferes with this defensive response ( Davies et al., 2002 ).

Much more work is needed to resolve what constitutes the amygdala in non-mammalian vertebrates and to determine whether the functions of the amygdala known to exist in mammals have some relation to the function of the homologous regions in the vertebrate ancestors of mammals.

Amygdala Contributions to Other Emotions

While the contribution of the amygdala to fear has been most thoroughly studied, it is clear that the amygdala contributes to other emotional states as well. A relatively large body of research has focused on the role of the amygdala in processing of rewards and the use of rewards to motivate and reinforce behavior ( Cardinal et al., 2002 ; Everitt et al., 1999 ; Holland and Gallagher, 2004 ; Murray, 2007 ; Salzman et al., 2007 ; Nishijo et al., 2008 ). As with aversive conditioning, the lateral, basal, and central amygdala have been implicated in different aspects of reward learning and motivation, as well as drug addiction. The amygdala has also been implicated in emotional states associated with aggressive, maternal, sexual, and ingestive (eating and drinking) behaviors ( Bahar et al., 2003 ; Galaverna et al., 1993 ; Miczek et al., 2007 ; Pfaff, 2005 ; Siegel and Edinger, 1981 ). Less is known about the detailed circuitry involved in these emotional states than is known about fear.

Emotional Evolution in Perspective

There is no shortage of theories that have speculated about the relation of emotion circuits to brain evolution. In the tradition of Darwin, basic emotions theorists have proposed that certain emotions are innate, in part because they are expressed the same in people around the world ( Tomkins, 1962 ; Ekman, 1977 , 1992 ; Izard, 1971 , 1992 ; Plutchik, 1980 ; Buck, 1981 ). These innate emotions are said to be mediated by affect programs in the brain. An affect program, in effect, is psychological description of a dedicated neural circuit. Some neuroscientist have adopted the basic emotions idea, and have proposed specific circuits for different basic emotions ( Panksepp, 1980 , 1998 , 2005 ), though the basic emotions discussed do not completely correspond with those proposed in the psychological theories.

The above discussion of the amygdala and its role in fear and defense might be construed as a mini-version of basic emotions theory, a version focused on one basic emotion. However, there is a fundamental difference between the approach I take and the approach of basic emotions theorists.

The goal of basic emotions theories is to understand subjective states of conscious experience that humans label with emotion words (fear, love, sadness, joy, etc). Their goal is to understand “feelings.” This is also true of brain science theories of emotion focused on basic emotions. Panksepp (1980 , 1998 , 2005 ), for example, searches for brain systems in animals that underlie feelings in the animals as a way of understanding the brain systems that underlie human feelings. Vocalizations that result from tickling a rat are ways of indexing joyful or pleasurable feelings in the rat brain, and freezing, flight and fight behaviors are markers of fearful feelings.

The approach I take is quite different ( LeDoux, 1984 , 1996 , 2002 , 2008 ). I use emotional behavior as a means of indexing circuits that have evolved to allow organisms to deal with challenges and opportunities in their environments. I make no assumption about what an animal is feeling, since I believe it is not possible to scientifically measure, and thus not possible to research, feelings in animals other than humans. I do not deny that other animals may have feelings. I simply question whether these can be studied using scientific methods. Beyond this methodological barrier, I am also critical of attempts to equate feelings in humans and other animals for other reasons. First, most studies that have explored conscious experience in humans have found that when information (including emotional information) reaches awareness the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is active, and if information is experimentally prevented from reaching awareness this area is not active (for summary see LeDoux, 2008 ). The dorsolateral granular prefrontal cortex is a unique primate specialization ( Preuss, 1995 ; Wise, 2008 ) and has features in the human brain that are lacking in other primates (Semendeferi et al., 2011). If human conscious experience depends on these unique features of brain organization, we should be cautious about attributing the kinds of mental states made possible by these features to animals that lack the feature or the brain region. Second, language is a unique human capacity, and conscious experience, including emotional experience, is influenced by language. The once disputed idea that language, and the cognitive processes required to support language functions, add complexity to human experience, has regained respect ( Lakoff, 1987 ; Lucy, 1997 ). In the absence of language experience cannot be partitioned in the same way-- English speakers can partition fear and anxiety into more than 30 categories ( Marks, 1987 ). The diversity with which non-verbal organisms can conceptualize the world and their experiences in it is thus likely constricted by the absence of language.

In sum, basic tendencies to detect and respond to significant events are present in the simplest single cell organisms, and persist throughout all invertebrates and vertebrates. Within vertebrates, the overall brain plan is highly conserved, though differences in size and complexity also exist. The forebrain differs the most between mammals and other vertebrates, though the old notion that the evolution of mammals led to radical changes such that new forebrain structures were added has not held up. Thus, the idea that mammalian evolution is characterized by the addition of a limbic system (devoted to emotion) and a neocortex (devoted to cognition) is flawed. Modern efforts to understand the brain mechanisms of emotion have made more progress by focusing on specific emotion systems, like the fear or defense system, rather than on efforts to find a single brain system devoted to emotion. Also, progress has been made in animal studies by focusing on emotion in terms of brain circuits that contribute to behaviors related to survival functions. Efforts to use scientific methods identify circuits in animals that might correspond to circuits in the human brain that are responsible for conscious feelings are not likely to succeed since we have no way of scientifically measuring feelings in animals. Conscious feelings are an important topic, but one that is best pursued through studies of humans.

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Fear is the emotion most thoroughly understood in the brain. Much of the progress made has involved studies of Pavlovian fear conditioning in rats. During conditioning the conditioned stimulus (CS), usually a tone, and the unconditioned stimulus (US), usually a footschock, converge in the lateral nuclecus of the amygdala (LA) to induce synaptic plasticity of the CS inputs (CS–US convergence not shown). The CS is then able to flow through amygdala circuits to the central nucleus (CE) to control the expression of hard-wired, automatic, defensive reactions (freezing behavior, autonomin nervous system, ANS, activity, and hormonal release). CE outputs also activate networks in that control the release of neuromodulators, such as norepinephrine (NE), dopamine (DA), acetylcholine (ACh), and serotonin (5HT) throughtout the brain. These, like hormonal feedback, help add intensity to and prolong the duration of the aroused state. In addition to these various automatic responses controlled by CE, the LA also sends information, via the basal nucleus (B) to the ventral striatum, especially the nucleus accumbens. The latter connections are likely to be involved in the invigoration of goal-directed behaviors that allow the organism to act in certain ways on the basis of past instrumental learning or on-the-spot decisions about how to cope with the threat. Other abbreviations: ITC, intercalated nuclei of the amydala; CG, central gray; LH, lateral hypothalamus; PVN, paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus; VP, ventral pallidum.

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DOI: 10.5860/choice.192178
Corpus ID: 143300546

The History of Emotions: An Introduction

Jan Plamper
Published 22 March 2015
Psychology, History, Political Science, Philosophy, Art

169 Citations

The history of emotions: past, present, future, histories of emotion in communist and post-communist europe after 1945, labels, rationality, and the chemistry of the mind: moors in historical context, introduction to the edward elgar research handbook on law and emotion, introductory essay: emotion, affect, and the eighteenth century, an interview with jan plamper: on the history of emotions, history looks forward: interdisciplinarity and critical emotion research, emotions and the global politics of childhood, enacting musical emotions. sense-making, dynamic systems, and the embodied mind, 3 references, are emotions a kind of practice (and is that what makes them have a history) a bourdieuian approach to understanding emotion, against constructionism: the historical ethnography of emotions, the affective turn: historicising the emotions, related papers.

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A Human History of Emotion: How the Way We Feel Built the World We Know

A sweeping exploration of the ways in which emotions shaped the course of human history, and how our experience and understanding of emotions have evolved along with us. "Eye-opening and thought-provoking!” (Gina Rippon, author of The Gendered Brain )

We humans like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, who, as a species, have relied on calculation and intellect to survive. But many of the most important moments in our history had little to do with cold, hard facts and a lot to do with feelings. Events ranging from the origins of philosophy to the birth of the world’s major religions, the fall of Rome, the Scientific Revolution, and some of the bloodiest wars that humanity has ever experienced can’t be properly understood without understanding emotions. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, art, and religious history, Richard Firth-Godbehere takes readers on a fascinating and wide ranging tour of the central and often under-appreciated role emotions have played in human societies around the world and throughout history—from Ancient Greece to Gambia, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, the United States, and beyond. A Human History of Emotion vividly illustrates how our understanding and experience of emotions has changed over time, and how our beliefs about feelings—and our feelings themselves—profoundly shaped us and the world we inhabit.

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What is the History of Emotions?

2019, Social History

Related Papers

Sharon Crozier-De Rosa

The Introduction to this volume introduces students to the broad field of the history of emotion, touching on its development over the last several decades, and its key dimensions in current scholarship. It then explains the structure and logic of the volume, providing hints about how it can be used by students and scholars new to the field. A final section reflects on the limitations and gaps in the volume and field more widely, and the ways that they may be filled by future research.

Erin Sullivan

Penelope Gouk , Helen Hills

Emotions in Social Life: Social Theories and …

Alexander Dean

In 1941 historian Lucien Febvre challenged historians to reflect upon the emotions, stating that no historian concerned with the social life of individuals can any longer disregard their importance . Historians were quick to see, as Joanna Bourke states, that examination of the “transformations undergone by emotions within societies could provide a unique insight into everyday life .” However, the Primary problem facing historians has been how to define emotions to enable a rigorous academic study . If emotions are to have such a thing, then the historian is behoved to seek out and propose suitable methods to achieve such ends. This essay will seek to review the number of different methodological approaches that have been developed to fulfil this requirement and how such work has gleamed new historical insight. First by looking at how it has been suggested we may correctly interpret the cultural meaning of emotion from the past, from our modern vantage point. This in turn requires a review of the debates surrounding how it is proposed historical analysis of emotions be carried out, or if it can at all. Finally, exploring two fundamental methodological concepts central to the history of the emotions, by using as means of analysis the history such methods have produced, the essay will demonstrate how such studies of emotion can contribute to the wider academic practice.

Andrew Kettler

What Is the History of Emotions? provides historiographical narratives of the roots, current theories, and future goals for this well-established field of historical study. As part of the What Is History? series from Polity Press, which offers introductions to specific historical subfields, this edition provides lessons that can easily be used by graduate students and early career scholars who desire quick references to both the sturdy and wobbly columns that uphold the architecture of the history of emotions.

Passions in Context, No. 1 © Stiftung Einstein Forum https://www.passionsincontext.de/

Barbara H Rosenwein

What are some of the general methodological issues involved in writing a history of the emotions? Before answering this question, we need to address a major problem. If emotions are, as many scientists think, biological entities, universal within all human populations, do they-indeed can they-have much of a history at all? Once it is determined that they are less universal than claimed (without denying their somatic substratum), a host of problems and opportunities for the history of emotions emerge. In this paper, I propose that we study the emotions of the past by considering "emotional communi-ties" (briefly: social groups whose members adhere to the same valuations of emotions and their expression). I argue that we should take into consideration the full panoply of sources that these groups produced, and I suggest how we might most effectively interpret those sources. Finally, I consider how and why emotional change takes place, urging that the history of emotions be integrated into other sorts of histories-social, political, and intellectual .

Emotion Researcher

Riccardo Cristiani , Barbara H Rosenwein

A conversation about the history of emotions with Nicole Eustace, Eugenia Lean, Julie Livingston, Jan Plamper, William Reddy, Barbara H. Rosenwein

Margaret Mullett & Susan Ashbrook Harvey (eds) Managing Emotion: Passions, Affects and Imaginings in Byzantium

Maria G. Xanthou FHEA

In 1941 Lucien Febvre officially launched ‘history of emotions’ as a discipline on its own right. Ever since 1941, it has evolved into an increasingly productive and stimulating area of historical research. In the ’80s the ‘emotional’ or ‘affective’ turn was in full swing: historians interested in the history of society and mentalities in Medieval Europe and in the western world focusing on emotions. The resurgence of interest and its subsequent twenty year study of the interaction between historical conditions and the manifestations of emotions in Greek, Roman and Byzantine texts, images and material culture have already yielded its ἀπαρχαί as regards its set goal. In this thriving discipline, the historian’s task has been defined as follows: to examine the very diverse significance of emotions in society and culture in their broadest definitions (including religion, law, politics, etc.) [Chaniotis 2012, 15]. The discipline is based on the assumption that not only the way the emotions are perceived, namely feelings, but also the feelings themselves are learned. Culture and history are changing and so are feelings as well as their expression. The social relevance and potency of emotions is historically and culturally variable. In the view of many historians, emotion is, therefore, just as fundamental a category of history, as class, race or gender. Over the past years a wide array of methodological approaches have been discussed. A particular school of thought focuses on the historical analysis of emotional norms and rules under the heading of emotionology. In recent years, the history of emotions intersected with modern historiographical approaches such as conceptual history, historical constructivism and the history of the body. Thus, the methodological spectrum of the history of emotions has been enriched by performative, constructivist and practice theory approaches. Currently fundamental methodological concepts include emotive, emotional habitus and emotional practice. Additionally, there are several terms that describe the different scope and binding effect of feeling cultures such as emotional community, emotional regime and emotional style. My aim is to provide a succinct survey of the most important methodological approaches, as they have been already applied in the study of emotions in Greek, Roman and Byzantine texts, images and material culture.

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History of Emotions

After sixteen successful years of research, the Center for the History of Emotions will conclude its work on 30 June 2024 . Our thanks go to the many scholars who shared their ideas and knowledge , were guest researchers, gave lectures or explored new avenues of the history of emotions with us as collaboration partners.

Do emotions have a history? And do they make history? These are the questions that the Research Center History of Emotions seeks to answer. To explore the emotional orders of the past, historians work closely with psychologists and education specialists. In addition, they draw on the expertise of anthropologists, sociologists, musicologists and scholars working on literature and art. Our research rests on the assumption that emotions – feelings and their expressions – are shaped by culture and learnt/acquired in social contexts. What somebody can and may feel (and show) in a given situation, towards certain people or things, depends on social norms and rules. It is thus historically variable and open to change.

A central objective of the Research Center is to trace and analyse the changing norms and rules of feeling. We therefore look at different societies and see how they develop and organise their emotional regimes, codes, and lexicons. Research concentrates on the modern period (18th to 20th centuries). Geographically, it includes both western and eastern societies (Europe, North America and South Asia). Special attention is paid to institutions that have a strong impact on human behaviour and its emotional underpinnings, such as the family, law, religion, the military, the state. Equally important to the Center's research programme is the historical significance of emotions. Emotions are said to motivate human action and thus influence social, political, and economic developments. In this capacity, they are and have been a privileged object of manipulation and instrumentalisation. Who appealed to what kind of emotions for what reasons? To what degree did emotions play a part in/contribute to the formation and dissolution of social groups, communities and movements? These and other questions open doors to a new field of research, one which aims to thoroughly historicise a crucial element of human development.

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A History of Emotions, 1200–1800

A History of Emotions, 1200–1800

This book is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core
Edited by Jonas Liliequist
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Book description

The history of emotions is an expanding field of research. The essays in this collection examine emotional responses to art and music, the role of emotions in contemporary notions of gender and sexuality and theoretical questions as to their use. Bringing together a series of case studies from points across the medieval and early modern periods, the authors in this volume provide fascinating glimpses into human emotional experience across a variety of cultures.

"‘From this collection we discover that emotions were the objects of constant vigilance and effort, shaped by ever changing ideas and norms concerning the self, the holy, the mind, the arts, friendship, sickness and health. Overall, a fascinating sampling of the best recent work in the history of emotions, framed by a strong introduction and a provocative methodological essay by Barbara H Rosenwein.’"

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Frontmatter pp i-iv

Contents pp v-vi, list of contributors pp vii-x, list of figures pp xi-xii, introduction pp 1-6.

By Jonas Liliequist , Umeå University

I - Theoretical Issues

1 - theories of change in the history of emotions pp 7-20.

By Barbara H. Rosenwein , Loyola University Chicago

2 - Ottoman Love: Preface to a Theory of Emotional Ecology pp 21-48

By Walter Andrews , University of Michigan

II - Emotional Repertoires

3 - preachers, saints, and sinners: emotional repertoires in high medieval religious role models pp 49-64.

By Christina Lutter , University of Vienna

4 - Theology and Interiority: Emotions as Evidence of the Working of Grace in Elizabethan and Stuart Conversion Narratives pp 65-78

By Paola Baseotto , Insubria University

5 - ‘Finer’ Feelings: Sociability, Sensibility and the Emotions of Gens de Lettres in Eighteenth-Century France pp 79-94

By Anne C. Vila , University of Wisconsin-Madison

III - Music and Art

6 - music as wonder and delight: construction of gender in early modern opera through musical representation and arousal of emotions pp 95-104.

By Johanna Ethnersson Pontara , Stockholm University

7 - Politesse and Sprezzatura : The History of Emotions in the Art of Antoine Watteau pp 105-118

By Pamela W. Whedon , University of North Carolina

IV - Gender, Sexuality and the Body

8 - emotions and gender: the case of anger in early modern english revenge tragedies pp 119-134.

By Kristine Steenbergh , Utrecht University

9 - Beauty, Masculinity and Love Between Men: Configuring Emotions with Michael Drayton's Peirs Gaveston pp 135-152

By Anu Korhonen , University of Helsinki

10 - ‘Pray, Dr, is there Reason to Fear a Cancer?’ Fear of Breast Cancer in Early Modern Britain pp 153-166

By Marjo Kaartinen , University of Turku

V - Uses of Emotions

11 - the little girl who could not stop crying: the use of emotions as signifiers of true conversion in eighteenth-century greenland pp 167-180.

By Allan Sortkær , Aarhus University

12 - The Political Rhetoric of Tears in Early Modern Sweden pp 181-206

Notes pp 207-250, index pp 251-259, full text views.

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AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions

Nicole Eustace is Associate Professor of History and Co-Director of the Atlantic History Program at New York University. She received her B.A. from Yale University and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her training as a historian of eighteenth-century British America and the early United States. Her works include 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) and Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), as well as articles and essays in the William & Mary Quarterly , the Journal of Social History , the Journal of American History , and numerous encyclopedias and anthologies.

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Nicole Eustace, Eugenia Lean, Julie Livingston, Jan Plamper, William M. Reddy, Barbara H. Rosenwein, AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions, The American Historical Review , Volume 117, Issue 5, December 2012, Pages 1487–1531, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/117.5.1487

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In the past few years, the AHR has published five “Conversations,” each on a subject of interest to a wide range of historians: “On Transnational History” (2006), “Religious Identities and Violence” (2007), “Environmental Historians and Environmental Crisis” (2008), “Historians and the Study of Material Culture” (2009), and “Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information” (2011). For each the process has been the same: the Editor convenes a group of scholars with an interest in the topic who, via e-mail over the course of several months, conduct a conversation, which is then lightly edited and footnoted, finally appearing in the December issue. The goal has been to provide readers with a wide-ranging consideration of a topic at a high level of expertise, in which the participants are recruited across several fields and periods. It is the sort of publishing project that this journal is uniquely positioned to undertake.

This year's topic is “The Historical Study of Emotions.” Given the expanding range of new methodological and disciplinary forays among historians in recent years, it may be too much to proclaim that we are witnessing an “Emotional Turn.” (Indeed, one conclusion that might be drawn from the June 2012 AHR Forum on “Historiographic ‘Turns’ in Critical Perspective” is that the very concept of “turns” may have outlived its intellectual usefulness.) But it cannot be denied that the study of emotions has become a thriving pursuit among historians from many different areas and periods. Not only does its emergence as a legitimate subfield foster the interrogation of descriptors—love, hate, resentment, passions, pity, happiness, and the like—that historians are more often likely to use uncritically if at all; it also allows for the crossing of the boundaries between private and public, the personal and collective, that often constrain our work. To be sure, a major problem with the study of emotions is how we can access the emotional lives of people in past times: is it possible to go beyond emotional expressions —usually conveyed in language—and attain some assurance that these are indicative of actual emotional states ? This is only one of the questions confronted in the course of this wide-ranging conversation.

Joining the Editor in this conversation are Nicole Eustace, a historian of early America; Eugenia Lean, who studies modern Chinese history, literature, and culture; Julie Livingston, a historian who works in Africa; Jan Plamper, a specialist in Soviet and Russian history; William M. Reddy, who has written widely on modern European as well as comparative history; and Barbara H. Rosenwein, whose research has ranged across the religious, social, and intellectual history of the Middle Ages.

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June 01, 2024 | VOL. 181, NO. 6 CURRENT ISSUE pp.461-564
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Why We Feel: The Science of Human Emotions

PROF. DR. CHISTOPH MUNDT ,

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Nothing in our subjective self-experience gives us so much the impression of individuality and uniqueness as our feelings. Not only poetry but art in general has elevated the realm of emotions to a world of its own, which seems to exist of itself without purpose.

Victor Johnston makes us abandon this view with his biopsychological theory of emotions. He points out that the fact that we have feelings and the way we feel are relentlessly determined by the evolutionary selection process. Evolution has refined our system of appraisal of our perceptions, ultimately according to reproduction advantages. Johnston’s rigorous theorizing by means of Darwinian learning principles dismantles human narcissistic illusions of the uniqueness and grandeur of our moods, emotions, affects, and their reflection. Feelings appear as mere by-products of an ever self-refining system for maximum gene survival. This painfully plausible book makes it difficult to hold anything against it; therefore, those who by all means want to stick to man’s uniqueness in creation due to our emotional life should be warned against reading it.

The informed reader may consider the entry to the book somewhat tedious up to the chapter about the basics of learning mechanisms in adaptive biological systems that have survived the evolutionary selection process. Johnston starts off with Socrates’ cave metaphor: what we see as “green” has no such quality equivalent in nature but is entirely made up of perceptual appraisals generated in our brain. The seemingly arbitrary selection, for example, of a tiny band of electromagnetic wave frequencies for our perception of green has been determined by the survival benefit of those biological systems which could sense the green plant for food. Very small differences between frequency bands have to be exaggerated by the “proximal valuing system,” whereas a vast amount of information about other wave frequencies remains unnoticed because it is irrelevant for the reproduction advantage. This means that there is greenness neither in nature nor in our brain. Greenness exists only as “emergent property,” which is a tool for the evolutionary selection process. It just happens to emerge from the development of the organism according to its survival benefit. This emergent property can be submitted to further evolutionary molding.

The basic learning principles extracted by the author, mainly from well-known working mechanisms of the immune system and from other paradigms of evolutionary learning, include the following:

1. The system has to offer to the outside world a random variation of selectable or moldable tools—“emergent properties” like antibody proteins, organ sensations, or feelings—for selection by the evolution process. Randomness of the variations is the most essential principle. Adaptiveness and creativity, the ability to transcend the learning system itself, depend on it.

2. The repetition of this process by “entangled learning processes” of different degrees of freedom entails phylogenetic learning for long-term stability (adaptation to the day-night cycle, for example), ontogenetic learning (as in the morphological and neural network organization of the brain) to adapt to medium-range stable environmental cues like food, and functional adaptability to very volatile short-living cues for adaptation (like mimic changes in the face of a mate).

3. Steering the degree of variation at its optimum between preservation of ascertained adaptive functions and instigation of the evolutionary process by increasing the number of variations presented to the outside world for selection is another important principle, recently exemplified with the heat proteins (see, for example, the disputation between Gould and Dawkins provided by Groß [1] ).

Johnston applies his generalized Darwinian learning theory to the development of a novel method to gain the most adequate facial composite to track a criminal. Instead of asking a witness to describe the face of the criminal, Johnston offered a random sample of faces of which the witness had to select the one that best resembles the suspect. Of this, another sample of random variations was generated, and so forth. The result turned out to be far more accurate than those faces which emerged from the usual description procedure.

Transferring the principles of the evolutionary learning theory to the world of feelings means, first, that feelings—i.e., appraisals—are considered nothing else than “emergent properties” that the evolutionary selection acts upon. Johnston considers feelings to be “proximate values” whose task has become to steer the “two-loop” (phylogenetic and ontogenetic) learning model by selecting the best-fitting hypothesis from several hypotheses generated by the sensory input. From the establishment of lasting behavior patterns up to more volatile memory storage, feelings decide what is kept and what is let go according to the reproduction advantage. The tuning spectrum of hedonic versus unhedonic does it. Johnston exemplifies this with many amusing observations and, in the end, with an artificial intelligence creature, a dog-like sniffer whose sensory and feeling systems decide whether it can sniff successfully to get hold of its prey or runs into starvation.

One most disenchanting for human narcissism but most plausible example of Darwinian learning theory applied to emotions is Johnston’s work on beauty and erotic partner selection, for which he won a scientific award. To prove that our feelings for beauty and sex appeal do not follow arbitrary individual patterns but the stern rules of the “net reproduction gain,” Johnston invited the world to choose the most attractive female and male faces of those he posted on the World Wide Web. Statistical evaluation demonstrated that from full lips (due to little fat cushions after estrogen rise in puberty) to the hip-waist ratio for the pelvis most likely to deliver without complications, every sign of sexual attraction is in fact related to the “net reproduction gain,” i.e., the likelihood to win the most fertile and successfully delivering woman. The attractiveness of male faces seemed to rest mainly with signs of health and physical strength. Furthermore, according to the selection experiment, our feelings are tuned to the age of highest fertility. Again, these cues cause exaggerated feelings, in the sense of a “discriminant amplifier,” to waste not even a minimal reproduction advantage.

The same learning principles underlie memory. Johnston claims that memory stores only experience related to events that matter for biological survival. Memories work by indexing episodes according to their hedonic tone—the basis for man’s reasoning on future events. The ability of “mind reading” is based on the comparison of currently perceived and formerly experienced social situations and their past and presumptive future social sequelae. It is obvious that this ability has an enormous impact on the competence to adjust to and influence other individuals’ feelings and hence to improve the reproduction rate.

Social feelings have played an increasing role in evolution for man’s reproduction advantage. Experimental games like “the prisoner’s dilemma” suggest that modesty and cooperation may do better than directly acting on the individual’s instant advantage. Johnston describes a set of feelings particularly adjusted to this somewhat paradoxical condition: an elaborate emotional monitoring system for the mutuality of affection, protection, and concern. If the reciprocity is broken by recklessness, a “pop out feeling” indicates the loss of the “investment”—hopefully not too late. In addition to anger, “pop out emotions” are fear and love—Johnston comments at length on their serendipity and their potential reproduction advantages. Emotional framing for decisions by a hedonic tone is also seen in the context of gene survival. The group size, for example, plays a crucial role in the amount of reciprocal interactions of social altruism offered by the group members to each other. Johnston quotes studies that relate the maximum group size allowing for altruism to the size of hunting bands in prehistoric times—the root of an adjustment that may no longer fit, like many others: the “naturalist’s fallacy.” The nepotistic, oligarchic regimes in some countries may resemble these mechanisms, however.

Johnston’s book is both amusing and plausible, but its basic theories are not novel. For the clinician, the harvest of the great factual knowledge in this book is not as rich as it is for the theoretician and biologist. The mechanisms of learning, the language of emotions in primary relationships, and the consequences of its failure or distortion (2) do not play major roles in the book, although it starts with a clinical case vignette of schizophrenia. The neurophysiology of brain systems that generate and process emotions is touched upon only very briefly. There is a vast body of research that strives to disentangle the universally stable basic patterns of emotions from their individually changeable parts (3 – 5) . The microsocial and individual developments of distorted patterns of emotional language dealt with in trauma research could also build a bridge to clinical aspects, which obviously was not an intention of the author.

What lasts as a stimulating and original message of the book for the clinician is the generalization of principles of the Darwinian transgenerational “learning theory” concerning DNA under the selection process to other biological systems in general. Although DNA does not “learn” but just happens to change under the pressure of selection, the task of balancing the preservation of functions and their modification is the same in truly learning biological systems. Johnston’s application of the “Russian doll” learning processes to neuropsychology seems promising.

The strength of this book, namely its rigorous Darwinism and the relentless uncovering of what is seen as the ultimate purpose of feeling, nevertheless causes disillusionment and even disenchantment. Historical comparisons come to mind. After the overstretched adoration of rationality in the late enlightenment toward the end of the eighteenth century, when reason was put on the altar, the Sturm and Drang period swept away logic and returned to the realm of feelings as a colorful but less calculable world in its own right. Johnston has not indulged in those worlds which are best represented by art and religion. Certainly he would find “net-reproductive gains” in societies with superior ethical and religious systems; and fine arts may be considered tentative appraisals that at some time will lead to “emergent properties,” but a little bit of illusion may also be necessary to survive.

By Victor S. Johnston. Cambridge, Mass., Perseus Books, 1999, 224 pp., $26.00.

1. Groß M: Hitzeschockprotein hilft der Evolution auf die Sprünge: Spektrum der Wissenschaft. Scientific American German Edition 1999, pp 12–16 Google Scholar

2. Harris PL: The child’s understanding of emotion: developmental change and the family environment. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 1994 ; 35:3–28 Crossref , Medline , Google Scholar

3. Russell JA: Is there universal recognition of emotion from facial expression? a review of the cross-cultural studies. Psychol Bull 1994 ; 115:102–141 Crossref , Medline , Google Scholar

4. Ekman P: Strong evidence for universals in facial expressions: a reply to Russell’s mistaken critique. Psychol Bull 1994 ; 115:268–287 Crossref , Medline , Google Scholar

5. Izard CE: Innate and universal facial expressions: evidence from developmental and cross-cultural research. Psychol Bull 1994 ; 115:288–391 Crossref , Medline , Google Scholar

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The History of Emotions Blog

Conversations about the history of feeling from www.qmul.ac.uk/emotions.

What is the history of emotions? Part II

What is the history of emotions? And why does it matter?

As part of our first anniversary at the History of Emotions blog, I asked members and friends of the Centre for the History of the Emotions to write a paragraph or two on what they thought about the history of emotions, how they got involved in it, why it mattered, and what were their favourite publications in the field.

The dozen answers below range widely. Several are by PhD students here at Queen Mary, others are by established academics. Recurring themes include the relationship between scientific and humanistic attempts to get to grips with human mental life. The recommended reading (and viewing) includes some classics in the history of emotions and some more surprising items too from the fields of philosophy and anthropology.

This series of mini-posts starts with some warm words of support from the incoming Head of the School of History at Queen Mary, Professor Miri Rubin.

Miri Rubin Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History, QMUL

Author of: Emotion and Devotion: The Meanings of Mary in Medieval Culture

Having the Centre for the History of Emotions, and its lively blog, among us in the School of History has been a real inspiration. We have become better historians, for being reminded of the importance – in all that we study – of tears and fears, hopes and mopes. Emotions-awareness does not redefine what we do, but it enhances our understanding and refines our sensibilities. It also makes us feel part of a vast network of lively and interesting scholars.

Rhodri Hayward QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions

The history of emotions is a radical discipline. It takes as its subject matter what appear at first instance, to be the most authentic and intractable aspects of our identities and reminds us that these things are transitory and contingent. It teaches us that our feelings are not determined by deep psychology or biology but are instead historical constructions borne out of an accident of our language, relationships and material circumstances. In doing this, the discipline opens up the possibility of new forms of politics and new ways of working on the self. If our inner life is determined by the world around us then the first step to radical change or personal transformation is engagement with that wider environment. And as recent work in the discipline makes clear, this wider environment that sustains emotions includes a vast range of elements from friendships and family structures to popular novels, pension schemes or animal experiments.

Although our emotional categories might be transient and rooted in particular cultures they are none the less powerful. Anyone who has lived with small children or awkward flatmates will know that statements about inner feelings (‘I feel cross’, ‘I’m disappointed’) serve as bargaining chips as we negotiate competing agendas. They also work, as the anthropologist, Vincent Crapanzano argued in his Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire (1992) ‘to call the context’: announcing one’s feelings changes our understanding of a situation. Over recent years I’ve become interested in this traffic between the political shaping of the emotions and the emotional shaping of politics. Alongside the writings of Roger Smith, Thomas Dixon and Vincent Crapanzano, I have found Kurt Danziger’s work on the history of psychological objects enormously useful here (e.g. Naming the Mind ). Danziger’s account of the how psychological categories are first constructed and then serve to coordinate political arguments or economic decisions is a good tool for interrogating the enforced fun of the current government’s happiness agenda.

Jen Wallis PhD Student, QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions

When I first mention to people that I work within the ‘Centre for the History of the Emotions’, I often get an amused smirk in response – as in ‘Gosh, they really will teach anything at universities these days’. Once you talk it over, though, they generally realise it’s not all intangible trendy theory. In the history of psychiatry, for example, emotion is at the heart (and head) of the matter: the nineteenth-century asylum (my own area of study) was a site where emotions were to be calmed – or sometimes awakened, depending on the nature of the illness – and where ideas were formulated about ‘appropriate’ emotions. Investigating the point at which an emotion crossed over from the normal to the pathological is crucial, then, in understanding nineteenth-century responses to a whole range of mental illnesses.

Tiffany Watt-Smith British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Drama and Centre for the History of the Emotions, QMUL

In 2009, Judge Daniel Rozak of Illinois was handing down a sentence on a felony drug charge when the defendant’s cousin, watching from the gallery, let out an enormous yawn. Thirty-three-year old Clifton Williams was promptly served with a 6-month jail sentence for contempt of court. ‘It was not a simple yawn’, the attorney’s office later explained to the incredulous Williams family. ‘It was an attempt to undermine the court’s authority’.

'Self-portrait, yawning' by Joseph Ducreux

Yawns, flinches, shudders, sighs, smiles, tears, frowns and pouts are never ‘simple’. Like language, these fleeting emotional expressions are slippery, their meanings shifting across different contexts, times and cultures. Of course we’ll never know what Williams really felt in the moment of his yawn. Perhaps tiredness brought on the offending gesture. Perhaps his yawn spewed forth from a maelstrom of anger and frustration, manifesting as boredom, scorn and derision. But from a historian’s point of view, the feelings behind Williams’s yawn matter less than the cultural assumptions its performance highlights. Read by the Judge as an attempt to ridicule and challenge the operation of his power, Williams yawn is very revealing indeed.

Tracing the role of emotional expressions – even ones so marginal and inconsequential-seeming as yawns – in social interaction can help us understand a great deal about cultures of the past. These minor emotional skirmishes show a great deal about how power operates in any given society, how gender, race and class roles are performed, how alliances are formed, hierarchies challenged, manners regulated, expectations swerved and confidences betrayed. Emotions bind us to our communities, our relationships forged and broken on the strength of our feelings, but in reality these negotiations may be subtle ones, taking place over a quizzical look, an almost imperceptible shrug or a giggle stifled. The fact that emotional expressions are governed by rules of display determining what is appropriate or inappropriate reminds us that emotions exist in more than one dimension. We habitually think of our feelings as private, subjective experiences, yet as the history of emotions affirms, emotions are also part of a matrix of cultural identities and social interactions too.

Historians of emotion do their work in this social dimension, shining a light on what for previous generations may have been considered too trivial and too fleeting for study. One of the things historians of emotion do well is to make the familiar strange again, reminding us of the contingency of our own assumptions about feelings through comparison with the past. Over eight-hundred years ago in twelfth-century France, yawning was not an affectation of the angry and disenfranchised, but rather the mark of an ardent young lover. While in English romances unrequited lovers sighed, in Occitan they yawned for the object of their affections, as a verse written by the troubadour Arnaut Daniel in 1170 testifies:

Day-long I stretch, all times, like a bird preening, And yawn for her

Liz Gray PhD Student, QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions

Emotions are personal ‘things’. They are pervasive and they are how we all connect – with each other, and with our past. They are also one of the ways, often the first way we connect with history in general. But my emotions are mine, and your emotions are yours. And the emotions I felt five years ago are related to, but not the same as, the emotions I feel today. The emotions you felt five years ago are related to, but not the same as, the emotions you feel today. So what is there to gain from studying the history of emotions?

By understanding the subjectivity of our emotions, we are able to approach history more objectively. Through studying the history of emotions we can pick apart the basis for the emotions in each historical setting. Instead of empathising with the emotional feelings we read in our sources, we can take a step back and get closer to understanding what those emotions meant to the person, people, communities we are studying. And at the same time, it allows us to take a step back and assess our own feelings and reactions towards the history we are studying.

Jane Mackelworth PhD Student, Centre for the History of the Emotions and Centre for Studies of Home, QMUL

My interest in the history of the emotions stems from my training in both psychology and history. I graduated in psychology with the intention of studying for a doctorate in clinical psychology. However, after working in both clinical and health psychology departments I realized that this was not the right course of action for me. There was (at that time) a heavy focus on cognitive behavioural therapy which was based upon a very particular model of human behaviour. The emphasis was on a ‘scientist practitioner’ approach which stressed the ability to stand back from your clients, observe an objective detachment and apply a scientific framework to access the mind (and the problems) of the person sitting opposite you. Values such as empathy and others which derive from a more humanistic tradition were unpopular and seen as unhelpful. It felt to me as though there was little interest in attempting to uncover a person’s emotional experience. Rather the attention was on changing their thoughts, within a limited time frame, no matter how traumatic their previous experiences may have been. Emotions had become, it felt to me, rather a dirty residue.

In such interactions, objects which might seem trifling were invested with intense emotional significance. They acted as the litmus test of relations between people. This was why so much of the substance of witchcraft testimony apparently concerns the giving of objects of minute value. With the witch giving went wrong.

I think that history is at its most powerful in its study of things that we now take for granted, as though they are real, or constant. Where the emotions are taught elsewhere it is almost always from a realist point of view, as though this is fact. And so today, for example, our emotions, particularly those thought of as ‘disordered’ are seen as stemming from our biological make up, our genes. Yet even a brief historical glimpse at the experience of emotions challenges this. Emotions are always given meaning in a particular time and context. So, for example, we learn a lot about a society by seeking to understand why the emotions accompanying hysteria were generally ascribed to women.

Another piece of work I read recently and enjoyed was an article in Social and Cultural History by Claire Langhamer entitled ‘Love, Selfhood and Authenticity in Post-War Britain’ . In this article, Langhamer explores the ways in which our understanding of love changed over the twentieth century. She argues that it has become seen as a route to self-actualization, thus it has become more about a route to personal fulfillment or liberation. She suggests that Love came to be seen increasingly as being about ‘chemistry’ and ‘emotional intimacy’ rather than ‘respect’ and ‘affection’ (p. 280). This also ties in with a greater focus in the twentieth century on the right to be happy and fulfilled.

Realising that emotions are culturally, and historically experienced is a curious realization. It is immensely liberating, because we realize that the meaning we give to emotions (and therefore the way that we experience them) is so intrinsically socially constructed. However, this moment of liberation is so fleeting because it is followed so quickly by the overwhelming sense that we can only ever be products of our age, so powerful is cultural and social conditioning. Thus, the emotions that we feel now are as real (and as different) as the emotions that were felt in the past.

Carolyn Burdett Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London

For me, thinking about emotions and/in history began with empathy. In November 2004, a US literary scholar, Suzanne Keen, sent a request to the VICTORIA listserv explaining that she was writing a book about empathy and the novel, and asking for respondents’ experiences of empathising while reading Victorian fiction. Her request produced a long debate, full of thoughtful and intelligent insight about reading novels. As I followed it, though, I began to feel distracted by the way in which the terms sympathy and empathy were being used. Sometimes they seemed to be interchangeable, while sometimes respondents stressed differences between them; at times, too, they were applied to either Victorian authors or to Victorian readers or to both. What struck me most, was that I couldn’t recall ever coming across the term empathy in the literature of the period. Did the Victorians empathise, I wondered; and the OED confirmed that they indeed did not. Empathy was coined in 1909 by the British-born, US-based experimental psychologist, Edward Bradford Titchener, to translate a German word, Einfühlung , which was in turn first used as a noun in an 1873 work, On the Optical Sense of Form , by the German aesthetician Robert Vischer.

This was the starting point for my research into what happens to a distinctively Victorian notion of sympathy in the final decades of the nineteenth century, and the coining of empathy in the first decade of the twentieth. In the meantime, interest in, and research about, empathy has boomed. In 2005, a quick search of the British Library’s Integrated Catalogue for ‘empathy’ produced 179 hits. Today, the BL’s new (and admittedly more inclusive) ‘Main Catalogue’ shows over 5,000 results. The tab showing ‘Creation date’ is interesting:

Before 1972 (17)
1972 To 1985 (20)
1985 To 1993 (128)
1993 To 2001 (888)
After 2001 (4,216)

In its first uses, though, empathy was primarily associated with aesthetic experience. In the hands of its initial exponent in Britain, the writer Vernon Lee, empathy hovered uncertainly between being a distinctively corporeal reaction to looking at beautiful forms which affected the viscera and thus feelings of health and well-being, and a more opaque mental experience which might ultimately explain the human impulse to metaphor and symbolisation. Lee, like many late Victorians, moved between enthusiastic hope that human experience might, eventually, be explicable in terms of verifiable, testable and indisputable physiological facts and a dogged conviction that the diversity, inventiveness and strangeness of life, human feelings and histories called for other ways of seeing things. When we contemplate empathy today, this Victorian debate remains a salutary case, reminding us that how our brains fire up is likely just one small part of the story.

Chris Millard PhD Student, QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions

As human beings inhabiting the twenty-first century, emotions are part of the very fabric of our existence. While contemporary experts seek to root our emotional responses in some deep evolutionary past or specific neurochemical reaction (or both), the history of emotions can show how these claims have a history of their own. Through the history of emotions, the varied ways in which human beings have understood themselves across time and space be analysed. We can seek out different understandings of emotional states that have occurred in the past without attempting to collapse them into more or less approximate versions of today’s emotions du jour . Our understanding of emotional states constitutes a substantial proportion of how we understand ourselves, and unthinkingly to hand over interpretive authority in this area to neurochemists or evolutionary psychologists seems misguided at best. An appropriately historical understanding of emotions leads to a stress on the contingency and malleability of the intellectual systems and shorthand we use in order to make sense of internal mental, psychological and emotional states.

Mark Honigsbaum Former PhD Student of QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions; University of Zurich

Long before I became a journalist and even longer before I became an historian, my first love was moral and political philosophy and, though I didn’t realise at the time, it was via Hume, Rousseau, Marx, and Mill that I first became interested in the place of emotions in history. The emotions, or the ‘passions’ as Hume called them, were central to these thinkers’ visions of a more just and moral society, hence Marx’s conviction that capitalism was founded on the ‘alienation’ or misery of it’s workers and Mill’s concern to maximise the happiness of the greatest number.

Today, such preoccupations are more present in our culture than ever. From David Cameron’s ‘well-being’ index to the ‘fury’ at bankers’ bonuses and the ‘anger’ felt in Greece and elsewhere at neo-liberal austerity programmes, we are used to the idea that emotions are important objects of epidemiological regulation. But it wasn’t until I read William Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling that I realised that this had not always been the case.

Put that way, Reddy’s thesis sounds simplistic. Didn’t we always knows that the French Revolution fed off the passions of the mob? Yes, but until Reddy we didn’t realise how far these passions were products of particular historical regimes and political and cultural practices. Nor did we really appreciate how the mere act of emoting could change what was actually felt. As Reddy puts it, ‘emotives are influenced directly by and alter what they “refer” to… emotives do things to the world.’

There has been much debate since about how far historians should be prepared to run with the emotives. Reddy himself presented his theory as an argument ‘against constructionism’ and at times seems to come perilously close to endorsing an essentialist view of the emotions. However, I would argue that Reddy’s real aim is to outline a third way between essentialist and Foucauldian constructivist positions by showing how power is always located in emotional control – in other words, in who gets to express and who must repress certain feelings.

At a time of great financial and political uncertainty, when we are daily being urged by Cameron and others to ‘calm down’ lest we become infected by Greek emotionalism, these insights are more pertinent than ever. I also like to think that Mill would have had sympathy with Reddy’s approach. ‘Ask yourself whether you are happy,’ he once famously asked himself, ‘and you cease to be so.’ Now that’s what I call an emotive.

Rebecca Kingston Political Science, University of Toronto

Author of Public Passion: Rethinking the Grounds for Political Justice

In his recent inaugural lecture as Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University, Jeremy Waldron called on political theorists to abandon almost exclusive focus on questions of virtue (or character) and ideas of justice and liberty, issues which dominated the field throughout most of the twentieth century, and instead refocus study on questions related to the practice of political institutions (separation of powers, judicial review, etc). The underlying justification for advocating this turn rested on the practical issue that we are living in societies where people disagree and the most important political questions facing us today involve how we come to reasonable accommodation through our shared authoritative institutions (rather some ideal form of dispute resolution). While laudable in its objective to move the field away from excessively abstract theorising, this position also demonstrates some blindness to what is central to the practice of politics and the working of institutions, and that is emotions that shape and are shaped by the political process.

In this context, the history of emotions matter because in a general way these studies help to demonstrate that ultimately individuals and groups give meaning to the institutions and practices that shape their lives. More specifically, though, in terms of my field of political theory, these studies can demonstrate that institutions are also limited in what they can do and that there is paradoxically both a certain hubris and excessive humility in thinking that political challenges can be resolved by institutional arrangements.

There is hubris because in the face of varied emotional responses and cultural contexts similar institutions function in vastly different ways; and there is excessive humility because greater focus on human emotion in history provides greater insight into ways in which we can move beyond traditional limits of political goods in security and liberty, and seek new goals of emotional wellbeing that can be effected by a much broader array of political and social strategies.

If there is any writer who has most influenced me in my reflections and for whom I have the greatest awe and respect it must be Jonathan Lear. My reading of his book Aristotle: The Desire to Understand marks a turning point in my intellectual development as it brought to me an understanding of the importance of emotion even at the core of intellectual endeavour. His more recent work Radical Hope I consider to be a masterpiece as it weaves together a deep understanding of emotional life as irreducibly tied to questions of moral philosophy and the good life and driven by a deep sense of humanism.

Jules Evans Policy Director, QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions

Author of Philosophy for Life, and Other Dangerous Situations

I’m probably the least qualified in the Centre to answer the question, so let me instead say what interests me about the history of the emotions. I am particularly interested in cognitive psychology, and the intersection between our biology and our beliefs and values. Our minds, bodies and emotions are deeply affected by the meaning we ascribe to events – and that meaning is constantly changing through culture and history. We can uncover or excavate the cultural constructions that shape our emotions. The point of doing that, for me, is to help liberate us from those constructions that serve us least well and cause us most suffering.

In terms of my favourite work of the history of the emotions, I think it would be Adam Curtis’ BBC documentary, The Century of the Self – the first bit of history of emotions I ever encountered, which left a lasting impression on me and many other people who saw it.

Thomas Dixon Director, QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions

For me, the point of studying the history of emotions is to liberate ourselves from contemporary psychology. By anatomising the feelings of the past, pulling apart the beliefs, bodily states, physical places and material cultures of which they were composed, we can undermine the idea that there are universal or ‘basic’ hardwired emotions that are felt by all people in all places. To use history imaginatively, to inhabit the worldviews and mental pictures of the people whose lives and ideas we study, is simultaneously to understand the past and to destabilise the present. We learn that what we feel now, how we feel it, and what we think our feelings reveal and express, is historically contingent and far from universal. Because our beliefs about our own mental states are themselves inescapable constituents of our mental lives – including, for instance, the belief in the power of involuntary invisible entities called ‘emotions’ – to study the history of ideas about emotions is itself to study the history of emotional experiences.

Febvre’s 1941 essay was an invitation to his fellow historians to get to work on this fascinating new field of history; to examine representations of emotions and sensibility in conduct books, court records, paintings, sculpture, music, and novels. ‘I am asking for a vast collective investigation to be opened,’ he wrote, ‘on the fundamental sentiments of man and the forms they take. What surprises we may look forward to!’

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A Historical and Theological Description of Jesus Christ

This essay is about the historical and theological description of Jesus Christ. It discusses his life as a Jewish preacher in first-century Judea, his teachings on love and forgiveness, and his role in founding Christianity. The essay highlights the absence of a physical description in biblical texts, the belief in Jesus as both divine and human, and the significance of his crucifixion and resurrection. It also touches on his influence on ethical principles and his broader spiritual significance across different religions. The essay underscores Jesus’ lasting impact on history, culture, and religion.

How it works

Jesus Christ is truly a big deal in human history, respected by billions worldwide. His life and teachings are the bedrock of Christianity, shaping everything from culture to philosophy and religion. To talk about Jesus means digging into both the history of his life and the beliefs about him held by believers.

Historically, Jesus was a Jewish preacher from Nazareth, living in Judea around 2,000 years ago. The stories we have about him mostly come from the New Testament in the Bible, which tells us he was born in Bethlehem and grew up in Nazareth.

His parents, Mary and Joseph, were devout Jews. Jesus started preaching about the Kingdom of God when he was about 30, doing miracles and gathering a big group of followers.

We don’t have a clear picture of what Jesus looked like from the Bible, so artists and early Christian writings imagined him with a beard and long hair, fitting in with how people looked back then. They often showed him as caring and serious, matching his teachings and personality.

In terms of belief, Christians think Jesus is God’s Son and the promised Messiah (Christ) from the Old Testament. The big idea in Christianity is the Incarnation, which says Jesus is fully God and fully human. This mix is a big mystery that’s at the heart of what Christians believe, showing how Jesus connects God and people in a special way.

One of the most important times in Jesus’ life was his crucifixion, a harsh Roman punishment. Christians believe he died to make up for everyone’s sins. Then, three days later, he came back to life—this is a huge deal in Christianity, showing that sin and death don’t win, and people who believe get to live forever.

Jesus’ teachings, written down in the gospels, are all about love, forgiveness, and being humble. The Sermon on the Mount, found in Matthew’s gospel, is super famous for saying things like, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and talking about how to live in a good way. He also told stories called parables, like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, which teach deep lessons about life and how to treat others.

Jesus didn’t just teach—he did amazing things, too. According to the gospels, he healed sick people, made blind folks see again, and even brought dead people back to life. These miracles showed his power and his love for people, making folks pay attention to what he had to say.

Beyond the miracles and teaching, Jesus cared a lot about everyone, especially those who were left out by society, like tax collectors, prostitutes, and sick people. His message was pretty radical for his time, shaking up how people thought about rules and religion. It’s why he got in trouble with the authorities and ended up arrested and killed on a cross.

Jesus’ impact goes way past his own time. Christianity, based on his life and teachings, is the world’s biggest religion today. His ideas about what’s right and wrong have influenced things like laws, human rights, and how we fight for fairness. He’s also a big figure in Islam, where he’s seen as a prophet, and in other religions, showing just how important he is to many people.

In the end, describing Jesus Christ means looking at both the history and what people believe about him. He’s a figure who’s made a huge impact, inspiring and challenging folks all over the world. Whether you see him as a historical figure or a religious leader, Jesus keeps showing us what love, sacrifice, and making things right are all about.

Remember, this is just a start for your own thinking and learning. If you need more help, think about talking to experts at EduBirdie—they’re great at making sure your work meets all the rules for school and helping you understand things better.

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

Title: esc-eval: evaluating emotion support conversations in large language models.

Abstract: Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is a crucial application, which aims to reduce human stress, offer emotional guidance, and ultimately enhance human mental and physical well-being. With the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), many researchers have employed LLMs as the ESC models. However, the evaluation of these LLM-based ESCs remains uncertain. Inspired by the awesome development of role-playing agents, we propose an ESC Evaluation framework (ESC-Eval), which uses a role-playing agent to interact with ESC models, followed by a manual evaluation of the interactive dialogues. In detail, we first re-organize 2,801 role-playing cards from seven existing datasets to define the roles of the role-playing agent. Second, we train a specific role-playing model called ESC-Role which behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4. Third, through ESC-Role and organized role cards, we systematically conduct experiments using 14 LLMs as the ESC models, including general AI-assistant LLMs (ChatGPT) and ESC-oriented LLMs (ExTES-Llama). We conduct comprehensive human annotations on interactive multi-turn dialogues of different ESC models. The results show that ESC-oriented LLMs exhibit superior ESC abilities compared to general AI-assistant LLMs, but there is still a gap behind human performance. Moreover, to automate the scoring process for future ESC models, we developed ESC-RANK, which trained on the annotated data, achieving a scoring performance surpassing 35 points of GPT-4. Our data and code are available at this https URL .

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COMMENTS

Introduction to the Special Section on the History of Emotions
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Emotions have appeared in histories, and associated writings, for centuries. History writing has sometimes valued the emotional; in eighteenth-century Europe, the centrality of the idea of sympathetic exchange to communication ensured that many historians of the period sought to produce feelings in their readers.1 The emotions of historical subjects too have long been of interest.
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In this series of stimulating reflective essays, prominent scholars of emotion and its history address the challenges and rewards of interdisciplinarity, recent work in the field, and the many conceptions of "emotion"—a polyvocality that presents limitations as well as opportunities. ... 2140 History & Systems. Population Group. Human ...
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(PDF) The History of Emotions
2018. "The history of emotions" is the first accessible book on the theories, methods, achievements, and problems in this burgeoning field of historical inquiry. Historians of emotion borrow heavily from the disciplines of anthropology, psychology, philosophy and neuroscience, and stake out a claim that emotions have a past and change over time.
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Victor Johnston makes us abandon this view with his biopsychological theory of emotions. He points out that the fact that we have feelings and the way we feel are relentlessly determined by the evolutionary selection process. Evolution has refined our system of appraisal of our perceptions, ultimately according to reproduction advantages.
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The emotions, or the 'passions' as Hume called them, were central to these thinkers' visions of a more just and moral society, hence Marx's conviction that capitalism was founded on the 'alienation' or misery of it's workers and Mill's concern to maximise the happiness of the greatest number.
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A Historical and Theological Description of Jesus Christ
Essay Example: Jesus Christ is truly a big deal in human history, respected by billions worldwide. His life and teachings are the bedrock of Christianity, shaping everything from culture to philosophy and religion. To talk about Jesus means digging into both the history of his life and the beliefs.
[2406.14952] ESC-Eval: Evaluating Emotion Support Conversations in
Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is a crucial application, which aims to reduce human stress, offer emotional guidance, and ultimately enhance human mental and physical well-being. With the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), many researchers have employed LLMs as the ESC models. However, the evaluation of these LLM-based ESCs remains uncertain. Inspired by the awesome development ...