EmbPatristics · Crafting Emotion: The Late Antique Panegyris as Embodied Experience (ca. 330-ca. 500)

Crafting Emotion: The Late Antique Panegyris as Embodied Experience (ca. 330-ca. 500)

EmbPatristics set out to produce a working model for identifying the emotional profile of complex human experiences. Because affect was shown to influence human decision making, it is essential to develop the instruments for assessing how individual and collective experiences engage affect. To this end, a nuanced analysis of all three components of cognition was necessary, since body, mind, and affect are intertwined in our interaction with the world. Applying methodologies from across the historical and cognitive sciences, EmbPatristics analysed in detail a multiple-day collective experience that was designed by Christian bishops in the 4th-century CE integrating theoretical and empirical know-how on human perception, memory, and emotions that had been accumulated for almost a millennium in Graeco-Roman culture. The experience’s constitutive parts were identified, as well as how they engaged participants. This produced an affective blueprint of the experience. Finally, how the experience’s features related to what its designers knew about human cognition was assessed, in order to identify the effects they sought to achieve. Emotions became an important research topic in the last two decades, with scholars speaking of an “affective turn.” Theories regarding the evolutionary origin of emotions and their relationship with the body and mind have been proposed. In parallel, cultural historians pointed out the instrumental role societies play in managing emotions by establishing categories that allow us to make sense of what we feel and by indicating ways to react. Thus, it is now established that emotions are interior phenomena caused by specific events and whose experiencing is shaped by biological factors and socio-cultural norms. Of particular relevance are recent findings regarding the human capacity to experience emotions in groups and of the role collective actions play in synchronising affect. This opens the way for us to study the emotional eliciting and synchronising dimension of rituals, as well as to inquire whether they had been designed as mechanisms for emotional regulation. In the last few years, it has become known that the computer algorithms that select which news we see—thus shaping our perception of the world, political decisions, and social behaviour—are calibrated to elicit negative emotional responses in order to keep viewers engaged. Thus, awareness of how emotions are used to steer individuals and communities has grown but there lacked the methodology to identify the emotional profile of complex experiences and how it can be traced back to the intentions of the designers. Focused on an exceptionally well-documented historical context, EmbPatristics provides both a methodology and a model for such analyses, thus opening the way for a better understanding of the role emotions played in human behaviour. EmbPatristics’s overall objectives were to, on the one hand, deconstruct and analyse as an embodied experience—i.e., engaging body, mind, and affect—the annual celebration of martyrs as performed in fourth- and fifth-centuries CE Asia Minor and, on the other, develop a methodology that allows us to relate the features of complex experiences to individual and collective emotional responses. Both objectives were reached.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз