What is an Excitement?

In presenting a preliminary genealogy of excitement in terms of the operational history of emotion inside the laboratory, this chapter challenges the contemporary dominant emphasis on the intellectual history of post-World War II emotion. This intellectual perspective often presents post-War emotion in terms of the legacies of nineteenth-century emotions, i.e., in terms of a history of Darwin's and James’ (and Freud's) emotions. The argument of this chapter is that important aspects of post-War emotion and of post-war constructs of the relationships between “emotion,” “excitement,” “intensity,” “activation,” and physiological “arousal” emerged from early-twentieth-century laboratory enactments of emotion – i.e., from the study of adrenaline and “emotional excitement.” Hence this chapter provides an altogether new prehistory of “noncognitive” emotion science ranging from the work of Zajonc in the 1980s to mirror-neuron research today. The essay thus forms an essential prehistory to contemporary neuroscientific research as discussed in chapters 2 and 3.