Emotions, Social Activity and Neuroscience: The Cultural-Historical Formation of Emotion

Abstract

This article challenges the use of cognitive-behavioural psychological models underpinning many of the dominant and popular accounts of emotion in the neurosciences. Acknowledging that neurobiology is important for any understanding of emotion, an alternative model of neuropsychology is sought in the work of theorists of the cultural-historical school, particularly A. N. Leontyev and A. R. Luria. The importance of their work in stressing the key role of intentional social activity, culture, and language in the formation of human neuropsychological functions is developed into a theory of emotions that can provide an alternative for emotion studies. In this theory, activity, culture, history, and individual ontogeny play the defining role in structuring the neurobiological systems that underlie emotions, as opposed to the evolution of behaviours that are hard-wired into the brain and function as automatic responses. Instead, it is understood that there is a continuum between evolution and human social and cultural development.