General Introduction

General Introduction  |  Emotion research around the world  |  Current Research  |  Research

 

 

 "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

Albert Einstein

"Let us not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it."

Vincent Van Gogh

 

As reflected in Einstein's words, throughout a long period of human history, primarily in Western society, rational thinking and logic were sacred and other aspects of the human mind were believed to be more inferior and baser, despite their great weight in human life. Indeed, emotion was considered to be, in the eyes of many researchers, a basic and central aspect of human beings. Practically speaking, there is no field or aspect of human existence wherein emotion does not play a significant role. It is not surprising then that, as opposed to modern society's relative disregard of emotions, evidence exists from the dawn of man's documented history that people were concerned with emotion in many different fields, beginning with religion and art through to philosophy and science. For example, the majority of the pre-eminent classical philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, and Hume espoused theories of emotion.

In recent years the realm of emotion has returned to center stage. This turn of events is expressed by the fact that psychologists and researchers in other knowledge fields are now conducting valid scientific inquiries focused on emotion. One reason for the previous relative neglect of scientific involvement with emotion is the complexity of the phenomenon and the inability to reach agreement about the definition of emotion and its characteristics - which made it impossible to study emotion empirically. The turning point arrived with the empirical work that categorized and sorted facial expressions characteristic of certain emotions (basic emotions), which opened the way for studying emotions scientifically. Today, the research in emotions has come a long way from dealing with basic emotions and problematic features of emotions and many different knowledge fields have transformed emotion into an important and central research field. This broad school of research demonstrates the importance of emotion and its significance in all aspects of human life, starting from social and educational relationships through to work and business. The importance of emotions in these contexts stems from emotion being a significant factor in getting people to act as well as being a source of social information touching upon the individual's condition and his or her attributes.

The research conducted by the Center's researchers and their colleagues in Israel and throughout the world is both fueled by this development as well as feeds it.

 

 

Information about the next event will be announced soon

המרכז הבינתחומי לחקר רגשות | טלפון:04-8288497 פקס:04-8249194 | emocntr@research.haifa.ac.il