How emotions are made to do things: An introduction

There can be no doubt that academic work on emotions is broad and complex. Emotions are a topic approached from disciplines spanning the humanities to the natural sciences, with an intellectual history dating back to Greek and Roman philosophy about the passions of the soul (Dixon 2012), to contemporary cognitive psychology and affective neuroscience that explores the nature and organisation of emotional experiences in the brain (Feldman Barrett 2017, Hamann 2018). However, simple answers to seemingly straightforward matters such as the meaning of the concept (Dixon, 2012), what kinds of emotions there are (Zickfeld et al. 2019) or its relationships to language, discourse, cultural practices and social behaviours (Wetherell 2012) remain elusive. [...]