This article analyzes the emotions of alienation, estrangement, and nostalgia, and how they are central to the production of neo-emotions in contemporary society. Alienation is a product of the macro-social context of capitalist societies and contemporary neo-emotions are a response to this, addressing the current misalignment between people, their emotional experiences, and their dynamic environment. I consider how alienation affects those on the left of politics, including those involved in radical activism, and how neo-emotions are the creative practices that forge new identities and collectives for active resistance. Those struggling to create non-alienated societies always experienced conflicting emotions, like optimism and pessimism, hope and despair, but these can be synthesized into positive neo-emotions such as progressive nostalgia and radical hope.

Neo-emotions are invented terms that express emotional experiences that are novel or that have not previously been labeled. This article considers the utility of the concept of neo-emotions for the study of the past, exploring concepts of novelty and historical change within the history of emotions; the limits of emotion words for the study of emotional life; and the ways that neo-emotions point to the place of creativity and play in the development of new emotions. It suggests that the prominence of neo-emotions in the 21st century reflects current philosophical and scientific ideas about how emotions operate, which do not apply in all societies. Despite this, the concept of neo-emotions requires historians to look again at past emotional practices and the place of play in the development of new emotions.

We propose a cognitive and neurobiological model by which curiosity regulates affective memory, by positively biasing memory encoding through the promotion of emotion regulation. We begin with a brief overview of curiosity's observed emotional effects. Then we introduce three prominent models of affective memory encoding to suggest that the dopaminergic modulation of encoding associated with curiosity may positively bias memory processes. We situate the role of curiosity role in emotion regulation relative to its promotion of abstract thinking and cognitive flexibility. We then identify the neural processes associated with abstraction and flexibility observed in the left inferior frontal gyrus, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and the lateral prefrontal cortex as the neurobiological mechanisms underlying our framework.

Extant evidence suggests that the two self-conscious emotions pride and guilt guide people's behavior in the context of self-control dilemmas. Pride and guilt are both outcomes of and antecedents to how people resolve self-control dilemmas. However, evidence on how pride and guilt motivate individuals to exert self-control is inconsistent. Based on the Expectancy Value Theory, we propose a conceptual framework to predict when and how pride and guilt can lead to increased or decreased self-control. One particularly important factor is the relatedness of the past and focal dilemmas: whether pride or guilt arises from a success or failure to exercise self-control in a domain related or unrelated to a focal self-control dilemma may determine people's motivation to exert self-control.

Over the past two decades, historians have developed methods for the history of emotions based on frameworks from philosophy and cognitive science. Although these methods are often applied by others in the field, there has been less engagement with the theoretical frameworks on which they were based. This paper argues that historians made use of frameworks that are in part incompatible with their central aim of accounting for meaningful, situated, and embodied experiences. Building on and combining the work of authors such as William Reddy, Monique Scheer, and Rob Boddice, this paper aims to provoke further research based on dynamical, situated, and biocultural frameworks, which are more compatible with the aims and principles of the history of emotions.

Emotions and moods have been distinguished in the literature. If they are distinct, we may expect emotion regulation and mood regulation to be distinct too. We show that although emotion regulation and mood regulation are considered theoretically distinct, they are often confounded empirically. We review characteristics proposed to distinguish emotions from moods by different theoretical approaches to emotion. We also review challenges to these propositions, suggesting that one valid distinction involves intentionality. Building on the above, we discuss possible differences between emotion regulation and mood regulation. Finally, we encourage the use of accurate terminology, argue for the importance of empirically testing hypotheses regarding distinctions between emotion regulation and mood regulation, and discuss possible implications.

Attribution of mental states is fundamental to our engagement with fiction. Crucially, its social content depends on mental states recursively “embedded” within each other; for instance, when a person doesn’t want other people to know about her intentions. Given that some characters seem to be consistently capable of embedding mental states on a higher level than others, this essay reviews factors that may influence authors’ constructions of such mindreading hierarchies as well as their reversals. The argument focuses on the reversal scenes in films Goodbye Lenin, The Lives of Others, and Never Look Away, and on prosocial emotions evoked by their depiction of a more equitable distribution of a presumably valuable and scarce resource, that is, access to other people's minds.

Emotion and affect play a central role in persuasion, decision-making, and human behavior. Because of ongoing environmental crises, there is a strong need to better understand how emotions shape selection, attention, processing, and effects of environmental communication. Here, I highlight three main areas that contain challenges and opportunities for building a synergistic relationship between the affective sciences and research on strategic environmental communication: (a) identifying the causal effects of emotions in environmental communication; (b) the role of emotions in the durability of environmental messaging effects; and (c) how closing the gap between the laboratory and the field can generate innovative research and more applicable inferences.

Although emotions play a crucial role in understanding and encouraging sustainable behavior and decision-making, many open questions currently remain unanswered. In this review, we advance three broad areas of particular theoretical and applied importance that affective science and emotion researchers could benefit from engaging with: (1) “ sustainable emotions” or empirically testing the possibility of positive reinforcing feedback loops between anticipatory and experienced emotions following the adoption of sustainable behaviors, (2) “ non- Western emotions” or exploring the extent to which people's understanding and experience of climate-relevant emotions differs across non-WEIRD populations, and (3) “ impactful emotions” or the need to carefully differentiate the conceptual and empirical role of emotions in encouraging the adoption of low-impact (e.g., recycling) versus high-impact (e.g., flying less) environmental behaviors.

This article explores interpersonal functions of emotional mimicry under the absence versus the presence of visual contact between the interacting partners. We review relevant literature and stress that previous studies on the role of emotional mimicry were focused on imitative responses to facial displays. We also show that the rules explaining why people mimic facial expressions may be inapplicable when visual signals are unavailable (e.g., people attending an online meeting have their cameras off). Overall, our review suggests that emotional mimicry functionally adapts to whether the perceiver and the expresser can see each other. We, therefore, argue that blocking visual contact between them may provide insight into emotional mimicry's social functions, thereby clarifying its role in fostering affiliation and emotional understanding.