The cluster focuses on the interdependencies between language and affect. The most widely discussed models of emotion in more recent psychology and neuroscience tend to disregard the role of language as well as of other cultural sign systems. Conversely, the current language models in modern linguistics say little or nothing about emotional processes. The theoretical modeling efforts following Chomsky’s “generative grammar” are one of many examples of the prevailing tendency to dissociate theories of language from theories of affect. The cluster aims to reverse this trend.

The cluster’s four research areas will address the following topics: (1) the relations between affective phenomena and various representational media (language, sound, image); (2) the artistic practices and poetics of (re)presenting / shaping emotions; (3) correlations between emotional and linguistic competencies (and their disorders); and (4) modes of emotion modeling at the level of cultural codes and patterns of social behavior.

According to a view widely held in evolutionary theory, the evolution of the human capacity for symbolization ranks among the prime factors supporting the rapid development of human intelligence and culture. Because emotions at the same time play a crucial role in human interaction, it is to be expected that language skills and emotion scripts are interconnected in multiple ways. Psychological studies have found preliminary evidence for correlations between the development of emotional and linguistic competence in early childhood as well as between emotional disorders and linguistic impairment in adults, thus supporting our guiding hypothesis. Research into the correlations between signs and emotions thus addresses an elementary anthropological feature, while simultaneously offering new perspectives on the rich historical and cultural differentiations in artistic, religious, political, social, and gender-specific codes of affect.

It appears to be a distinctive feature of the ways symbolic and emotional practices interact in human communication that these practices apply not just to real phenomena, but also to imaginary constructions. Only human beings develop close and highly intense emotional relationships to supernatural beings (such as gods, demons, etc.) as well as to values and narratives belonging to imaginary worlds with their own self-referential structures. The cluster will investigate—throughout its research areas—the forms and functions of such configurations of emotion, symbolic practices, and imaginary (fictive) phenomena.

The cluster brings together academic expertise from more than 20 disciplines, which all possess their own, in some cases very long, traditions of addressing emotion: Anthropology, Near Eastern Studies, Biology, Film Studies, Japanese Studies, History of Art, Literary History and Criticism (Comparative Literature, Classical Greek and Latin Studies, English and American Studies, German Studies, Romance Languages and Literatures, Slavic Studies), Musicology, Philosophy, Political Science, (Neuro-)Psychology, Psychiatry, Religious Studies, Sociology, Linguistics, and Theater Studies and Dance Studies. In addition the scientists of the Freie Universität Berlin cooperate with colleagues from Humboldt-University, the Viadrina-University of Frankfurt/Oder, the University of Potsdam and of other outstanding research centers in Germany and abroad.