School of Advanced Study Emotion, Memory & the Mind Anatomizing the Emotions: The Human Mind in History Thomas Dixon (Reader in History, Queen Mary University of London; Director, Centre for the History of the Emotions In this talk I will survey the history of emotions as a burgeoning field of historical research, making use of several of my own research topics to illustrate the various ways in which a historical perspective can complement a scientific one, and contribute to the study of the human mind. I will do this by thinking about emotions as complex entities that can be pulled apart, or ‘anatomized’, separating out their component parts, each of which has its own history – including language, moral values, bodily expressions, and social norms. Examples will include the history of the term ‘emotion’ itself as a psychological category, the invention of ‘altruism’ as a new scientific and moral idea in the nineteenth century, the changing meaning of tears through modern history, and the experience and expression of anger in different cultures. All of this will be used to suggest that it is not just social attitudes to emotions, or modes of emotional expression, that can change over time, but embodied emotional experiences themselves. The Human Mind Project in collaboration with University of Sussex Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science