A Second Chance for Emotion

Abstract

Abstract Both neuroscience and cognitive science have neglected emotion until recently. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud had written extensively on different aspects of emotion, and Hughlings Jackson had even made a first stab at its neuroanatomy. There would have been reason to expect that the expanding brain sciences would embrace emotion and solve its riddles, just as the new century started. Unfortunately, that never happened. Emotion was left out of the scientific mainstream, and this circumstance is confirmed by the few exceptions to it—a handful of psychologists that carried out important studies on emotion; another handful of neuroanatomists interested in the limbic system; and the psychiatrists and pharmacologists that concerned themselves with the diagnosis and management of mood disorders and developed drugs which gave indirect information on the mechanisms of emotion. Emotion was not trusted, in real life or in the laboratory. Emotion was too subjective; it was too elusive and vague; it was too much at the opposite end of the finest human ability, reason. It was probably irrational to study it.