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EXC 302:  Languages of Emotion

Subject Area Art History, Music, Theatre and Media Studies
History
Literary Studies
Neurosciences
Philosophy
Psychology
Social and Cultural Anthropology, Non-European Cultures, Jewish Studies and Religious Studies
Social Sciences
Linguistics
Term from 2007 to 2014
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 39932880
 
Final Report Year 2015

Final Report Abstract

Many areas of society, e.g., politics, the economy and culture, are dominated by strategies and performances that aim to provoke and shape emotions. These strategies make use of the power of language, images and sound. Up to now, little has been known about exactly how different sign- and media-systems achieve such an impact. The goal of “Languages of Emotion” was to explore this topic. We approached the question of the interplay among signs, media and emotions in four research perspectives: in everyday communication (Area A: Emotion and Language), in aesthetic contexts (Area B: Emotion and Art), with respect to individual differences (Area C: Emotional Competencies and Disorders) and with regard to social and cultural imprint (Area D: Cultural Codification of Emotion). In doing so, we joined various approaches to emotion research from the humanities and the social sciences, from linguistics, clinical psychiatry, psychology and neuroscience. During the first – and ultimately last – funding period, we laid the foundations for further development of our agenda by establishing a technical and social infrastructure and setting up a program for early-stage researchers. In addition, out of the projects conducted arose two strands of future research – that are now being addressed by several follow-up projects initiated by former cluster members (see section 4.3 on sustainability). On the one hand, over the course of the first funding period, projects within the cluster increasingly dealt with affective phenomena with complex temporal dynamics that common emotion models fail to describe adequately. Hence, a major goal for a possible second funding period would have been to develop theoretical models and experimental procedures that capture the temporal structure of the development of affects as they are driven by sign practices. On the other hand, our results from the first funding period called for a reversal of our approach to the interrelation between signs and affects. Namely, the projects that were investigating how emotions are structured by signs to a great deal turned out highlighting the role of emotions within the very emergence of signs. These results call for future projects investigating to what extent the emergence and the use of sign systems are grounded in affective processes and their physiological expressive modalities (e.g., gestures and facial expressions). Thus, taken together, the major results of the cluster’s research point towards a new perspective to the broad discussion of the origin of language, the embodiment of cognitive processes and the onto- and phylogeny of human sign practices based on the theory of emotions.

Link to the final report

https://doi.org/10.2314/GBV:890357714

Publications

 
 

Additional Information

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