The Affect Lab: The History and Limits of Measuring Emotion - Hardcover

Bollmer, Grant

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1517915457 ISBN 13: 9781517915452

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2023

Synopsis

Examines how our understanding of emotion is shaped by the devices we use to measure it

 

Since the late nineteenth century, psychologists have used technological forms of media to measure and analyze emotion. In The Affect Lab, Grant Bollmer examines the use of measurement tools such as electrical shocks, photography, video, and the electroencephalograph to argue that research on emotions has confused the physiology of emotion with the tools that define its inscription. 

 

Bollmer shows that the psychological definitions of emotion have long been directly shaped by the physical qualities of the devices used in laboratory research. To investigate these devices, The Affect Lab examines four technologies related to the history of psychology in North America: spiritualist toys at Harvard University, serial photography in early American psychological laboratories, experiments on “psychopaths” performed with an instrument called an Offner Dynograph, and the development of the “electropsychometer,” or “E-Meter,” by Volney Mathison and L. Ron Hubbard. 

 

Challenging the large body of humanities research surrounding affect theory, The Affect Lab identifies an understudied problem in formulations of affect: how affect is a construction inseparable from the techniques and devices used to identify and measure it. Ultimately, Bollmer offers a new critique of affect and affect theory, demonstrating how deferrals to psychology and neuroscience in contemporary theory and philosophy neglect the material of experimental, scientific research.

 

 

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About this title

About the Author

Grant Bollmer is senior lecturer of digital media at the University of Queensland. He is author of Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection;Theorizing Digital Cultures; and Materialist Media Theory.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1517915457
• ISBN 13: 9781517915452
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304