After months of planning, last week it was finally time for the Centre’s one-and-a-half day conference on the theme ‘Mastering the Emotions: Control, Contagion and Chaos, 1800 to the Present Day’. This international and interdisciplinary gathering of scholars with a … Continue reading
Control, Contagion and Chaos @ Queen Mary, 16-17 June, 2011 For most conferences, ‘interdisciplinary’ is little more than an aspirational adjective. There is normally very little, if any, pushing at the boundaries of established departmental norms. This was certainly not … Continue reading
If emotions were Twitter feeds then schadenfreude would surely be ‘trending’ high right now. From Cheryl Cole’s surprise ejection from American X-factor to Manchester United’s drubbing at the hands of Barcelona, schadenfreude is the emotion of the moment or, at … Continue reading
There has been a series of fear-related British news stories during the last week. First there was the Archbishop of Canterbury, in an editorial for the New Statesman, warning the coalition government about the effects of their policies in such … Continue reading
The Department for Education has just released a report which evaluates the effectiveness of ‘emotional resilience classes’ in British schools. The classes were designed by Martin Seligman, professor at Penn University and the inventor of Positive Psychology, and rolled out … Continue reading
Do animals have emotions? The histories of science, literature, philosophy and religion have offered up a range of answers. This series of occasional essays on emotional animals in history offers some materials with which to think about the question. No. … Continue reading