Why Real Men Don't Cry [YouTube]
posted on Feb 9, 2008 - View this thread

The Feel Tank. "We are a feel tank, but this does not mean that we do not think. We are governed by outrage that the desires and demands for a less bad life and a better good life continue to go unrecognized."
posted on Feb 7, 2008 - View this thread

Universe is the newest project from Jonathan Harris, who was also behind the amazing WeFeelFine, and the Yahoo Time Capsule. Here's a talk he gave about his projects at TED 2007.
posted on Jul 25, 2007 - View this thread

The history of emotions has yielded substantial studies on love, anger, fear, grief, jealousy, and many other discrete emotions. However, there is no particular study of cheerfulness, a rather moderate emotion, which, for reasons that I will discuss further, has remained unnoticeable to the scholarly eye. Based on much of the historical literature on emotions, some primary sources and some other areas of cultural history, I outline here the social use and conceptualization of cheerfulness over the last three centuries. I argue that, in the modern age, cheerfulness rose in value and became the most favored emotion for experience and display; as such, it was individually sought and socially encouraged until it became the main emotional norm of twentieth-century America.

From Good Cheer to "Drive-By Smiling": A Social History of Cheerfulness
And the Taxonomy of Emotion Terms there is of interest on its own.
posted on Mar 13, 2006 - View this thread

Language started with emotional signaling. That's the thesis of a new book, The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, And Intelligence Evolved From Our Primate Ancestors To Modern Humans, by Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker.

Lived emotional experience is key to language learning, the authors suggest. "Mathematicians and physicists may manipulate abstruse symbols representing space, time, and quantity, but they first understood those entities as tiny children wanting a far-away toy, or waiting for juice, or counting cookies. The grown-up genius, like the adventurous child, forms ideas through playful explorations in the imagination, only later translated into the rigor of mathematics."

The book is very ambitious, and I don't think we'll ever know where language came from, but this sounds like a more fruitful line of thinking than Chomsky's deus ex machina "language gene" mutation.
posted on Sep 29, 2004 - View this thread

Emotional rescues. An article by Susam Tomes questions how much distance is required by a performer in order to communicate emotion effectively. Does the on-stage show of emotion by some musicians distract from their performance? Compare and contrast: cellists Yo-Yo Ma and Jacqueline du Pré with the immobile, stone-visaged Jascha Heifetz. [via Arts & Letters Daily]
posted on Dec 11, 2003 - View this thread

Eric Conveys an Emotion. Not just the easy ones like fear, annoyance, and did I leave the oven on?, but also the universal states of the human condition: realizing Dan Quayle is your father, the blue screen of death, caught downloading naughty pictures, erectile dysfunction. Requests cheerfully accepted.
posted on Apr 18, 2003 - View this thread

"The study of feelings, once the province of psychology, is now spreading to history, literature, and other fields." Scholarship on the emotions is a rich field for historians and philosophers. Martha Nussbaum (previously discussed here) has written on historical views of the relationship between morality and emotion, and delves more deeply into it in her recent book, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Of particular relevance these days may be M.F. Burnyeat's new book, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity, which focuses on Classical views of anger and its proper place in human action. Many today could learn from Marcus Aurelius: "as grief is a mark of weakness, so is anger, for both have been wounded and have surrendered to the wound." [First link via Ye Olde Phart.]
posted on Feb 25, 2003 - View this thread

Disgust is universal it seems. Can anyone think of any other universal disgusts out there?
posted on Nov 25, 2002 - View this thread

Next generation emoticons or another step in tearing down cultural (and man-machine?) walls?
posted on Sep 8, 2001 - View this thread

SmileProject
posted on Sep 25, 2000 - View this thread