Literature map content
Status: Scaffold v1 — populated from cross-cutting deep-research runs (Prompts 2–5, both LLMs); per-emotion citation rows arrive when EXTRACTED-CITATIONS-2026-05-04.md digest is integrated.
Date: 2026-05-04.
Scope: Positions the emotion-research thread (EM.1..EM.5 in docs/RESEARCH-PROGRAM.md) against modern academic literature in the historiography of emotion, basic-vs-constructionist emotion science, cross-cultural emotion ethnography, affect theory, and the empirical psychology of named emotions. Companion to docs/research/papers/emotion-research-program-public-introduction.md.
Method: Synthesized from 36 deep-research runs preserved at docs/research/emotion-corpus-expansion/external-runs/. Rows below are seeded from the cross-cutting runs (Prompts 2–5); the per-emotion runs (Prompt 1, 30 OpenAI runs) feed sections D and E once EXTRACTED-CITATIONS-2026-05-04.md is reconciled. DOI verification is phased — high-priority rows (★★★ in the digest) resolved first.
Citation style: APA 7 inline; BibTeX keys lastname_year_firstword in emotion-research-program-bibliography.bib.
DOI policy: Same as Christianity-sex-shame thread — verified DOIs or stable URLs only; uncertain coordinates flagged rather than filled by inference.
Column legend:
- Coordinate: the theoretical or empirical construct being positioned
- Claim: specific proposition from cross-cutting deep-research runs or external literature
- Primary source: APA 7 citation
- DOI / URL: verified resolvable identifier (TBV = to be verified)
- Evidence strength: historical-narrative / ethnographic / philosophical-conceptual / small-N empirical / large-N empirical / meta-analytic / systematic review / clinical case-series
- Thread relationship: RQ-anchor / supporting / complicating / contested / gap-filler
- EM RQ link: which research question(s) the row primarily anchors
Corpus sources referenced by code: see docs/research/emotion-corpus-expansion/external-runs/INDEX.md for the 36-run archive; EXTRACTED-CITATIONS-2026-05-04.md for the per-citation digest.
A. Historiography of Western Emotion Vocabulary
The methodological backbone of EM.1 — emotion-naming over time. Rows here position the cross-cutting Prompt 3 runs (OpenAI + Claude) against canonical historiography of emotion.
| # | Coordinate | Claim | Primary source (APA) | DOI / URL | Evidence strength | Thread relationship | EM RQ link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A1 | "Emotives" (vs descriptions) | Emotion-words don't merely describe inner states; they participate in shaping them within emotional regimes. Foundational for treating emotion-naming as historical work. | Reddy, W. M. (2001). The navigation of feeling: A framework for the history of emotions. Cambridge University Press. | TBV (Cambridge UP) | Historical-narrative | RQ-anchor | EM.1 |
| A2 | Emotional communities | Civilizations don't have one emotional style; they contain multiple emotional communities — monasteries, courts, guilds — each with its own valued affects. | Rosenwein, B. H. (2006). Emotional communities in the early Middle Ages. Cornell University Press. | TBV | Historical-narrative | RQ-anchor | EM.1 |
| A3 | "Emotion" itself has a history | The master category emotion arrived in English moral psychology only in the late 18th–19th centuries, displacing passions, affections, sentiments. | Dixon, T. (2003). From passions to emotions: The creation of a secular psychological category. Cambridge University Press. | TBV | Historical-narrative | RQ-anchor | EM.1 |
| A4 | Emotionology | Distinct from emotion: the standards a culture imposes about what people ought to feel. Twentieth-century US moved from Victorian expressiveness toward "American Cool." | Stearns, P. N. (1994). American cool: Constructing a twentieth-century emotional style. NYU Press. | TBV | Historical-narrative | Supporting | EM.1, EM.2 |
| A5 | Acedia → sloth → depression | The shift is not linear or one-to-one. Acedia, tristitia, desperatio were distinct medieval categories, increasingly indistinguishable in modern translation. Modern depression emerged 1780s–1880s as melancholia was reconfigured from a disorder of judgment to a disorder of mood. | Kendler, K. S. (2017). The genealogy of major depression: Symptoms and signs of melancholia from 1880 to 1900. Molecular Psychiatry, 22(11), 1539–1553. + Lazikani, A. (2018). Cultivating the heart: Feeling and emotion in twelfth- and thirteenth-century religious texts. University of Wales Press. | TBV | Historical-narrative + medical-historical | RQ-anchor | EM.1 |
| A6 | Nostalgia from condition to mood | Hofer's 1688 medical diagnosis of homesickness as condition; loosened from place to time over the 19th–20th c.; Boym's reflective/restorative distinction canonical. Susan Matt's research traces the loss of homesickness as a serious adult emotion. | Boym, S. (2001). The future of nostalgia. Basic Books. + Matt, S. J. (2011). Homesickness: An American history. Oxford UP. | TBV | Historical-narrative | Supporting | EM.1 |
| A7 | Trauma → PTSD | Originally Greek for bodily wound; psychic-injury usage from late-19th-c. work on hysteria; PTSD codified in DSM-III (1980). Young: PTSD inseparable from diagnostic procedures and institutional supports. Leys: longer conceptual lineage through hysteria, war neurosis, psychoanalysis. | Leys, R. (2000). Trauma: A genealogy. University of Chicago Press. + Young, A. (1995). The harmony of illusions: Inventing post-traumatic stress disorder. Princeton UP. | TBV | Historical-narrative + critical | RQ-anchor | EM.1 |
| A8 | Panic → panic disorder | "Panic" once described battlefield terror, crowd contagion, divine fright; panic disorder formulated in Research Diagnostic Criteria 1975, codified DSM-III 1980. Donald Klein's imipramine work pivotal. | Klein, D. F. (1981). Anxiety reconceptualized. In D. F. Klein & J. G. Rabkin (Eds.), Anxiety: New research and changing concepts. Raven Press. | TBV | Historical-narrative + clinical | Supporting | EM.1 |
| A9 | Disenfranchised grief | Doka's 1989 naming made publicly speakable losses the dominant ritual repertoire couldn't validate (death of ex-partner, abortion, stigmatized relationship, pet, pregnancy). Once named, the experience could be discussed without first being justified. | Doka, K. J. (1989). Disenfranchised grief: Recognizing hidden sorrow. Lexington Books. | TBV | Historical-narrative + clinical | RQ-anchor | EM.1 |
| A10 | Solastalgia / ecological grief | Albrecht's solastalgia names distress over environmental loss while remaining at home. Cunsolo & Ellis consolidated ecological grief as grief in relation to climate-linked losses. Often disenfranchised (per A9). | Albrecht, G. (2005). 'Solastalgia': A new concept in health and identity. PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, 3, 41–55. + Cunsolo, A., & Ellis, N. R. (2018). Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nature Climate Change, 8(4), 275–281. | TBV | Historical-narrative + empirical | Supporting | EM.1 |
| A11 | Therapeutic culture's reshaping | Therapeutic discourse became central to modern identity, saturating American culture from the clinic to mass media. Furedi: vulnerability redefined as core feature of personhood. Lane: ordinary shyness pathologized into social anxiety disorder. | Illouz, E. (2008). Saving the modern soul: Therapy, emotions, and the culture of self-help. University of California Press. + Furedi, F. (2004). Therapy culture: Cultivating vulnerability in an uncertain age. Routledge. + Lane, C. (2007). Shyness: How normal behavior became a sickness. Yale UP. | TBV | Historical-narrative + cultural-criticism | RQ-anchor | EM.1, EM.2 |
| A12 | Emotional capitalism | Therapeutic speech does not merely heal; it meshes with workplaces, consumer culture, media, dating, managerial norms. The modern lexicon contains terms simultaneously intimate and organizational: burnout, boundaries, validation. | Illouz, E. (2007). Cold intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism. Polity. | TBV | Cultural-criticism | Supporting | EM.1, EM.5 |
B. Basic-Emotion vs Constructionist Debate (EM.2)
| # | Coordinate | Claim | Primary source (APA) | DOI / URL | Evidence strength | Thread relationship | EM RQ link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| B1 | Basic emotions theory | Stable, species-typical affective kinds with distinct facial expressions and physiological signatures. Anchored in Ekman's cross-cultural facial-expression studies. | Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6(3–4), 169–200. | TBV | Empirical (cross-cultural) | RQ-anchor | EM.2 |
| B2 | Constructionist (Barrett) | Emotions are context-sensitive products assembled in real time from more basic psychological ingredients (core affect, conceptual knowledge, cultural learning). | Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. | TBV | Theoretical + empirical-review | RQ-anchor | EM.2 |
| B3 | Neurobiological (Damasio) | Emotions are bodily-state-driven; feelings are perceptions of those states. Resists pure historicism but distinct from Ekman's basic-emotion program. | Damasio, A. R. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. Harcourt. + Damasio, A. R. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain. Harcourt. | TBV | Theoretical + clinical | Supporting | EM.2 |
| B4 | Cognitive appraisal | Emotions arise from evaluations (appraisals) of events relative to goals, beliefs, and norms. Lazarus and Frijda foundational. | Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and adaptation. Oxford UP. + Frijda, N. H. (1986). The emotions. Cambridge UP. | TBV | Theoretical + empirical | Supporting | EM.2 |
| B5 | Affect theory (Massumi) | Affect as preconscious intensity prior to recognized emotion; nonrepresentational force. Distinct from Berlant's tracking of public moods (Cruel Optimism). | Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Duke UP. + Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke UP. | TBV | Theoretical | Contested | EM.2 |
| B6 | Critique of affect theory | Some affect theory privileges preconscious intensity in ways that make historical evidence harder to handle. Cognitive-appraisal traditions keep judgment, evaluation, meaning at the center. | Leys, R. (2011). The turn to affect: A critique. Critical Inquiry, 37(3), 434–472. | TBV | Theoretical-critical | Contested | EM.2 |
C. Cross-Cultural Emotion Ethnography (EM.3)
| # | Coordinate | Claim | Primary source (APA) | DOI / URL | Evidence strength | Thread relationship | EM RQ link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Ifaluk emotion vocabulary | The Micronesian island of Ifaluk has a vocabulary that does not map onto Anglocentric primaries; emotions are distributed across moral and relational territory. Foundational anti-essentialist ethnography. | Lutz, C. A. (1988). Unnatural emotions: Everyday sentiments on a Micronesian atoll and their challenge to Western theory. University of Chicago Press. | TBV | Ethnographic | RQ-anchor | EM.3 |
| C2 | Hypocognition (Tahitian) | Some cultures have fewer names for some feelings; what isn't named tends to be less elaborated in everyday discourse. Distinct from claim that the feeling doesn't exist. | Levy, R. I. (1973). Tahitians: Mind and experience in the Society Islands. University of Chicago Press. | TBV | Ethnographic | RQ-anchor | EM.3 |
| C3 | Inuit emotional control | The Utku Inuit display ethic emphasizes equanimity and the suppression of anger; relevant for cross-cultural variation in emotion expression vs experience. | Briggs, J. L. (1970). Never in anger: Portrait of an Eskimo family. Harvard UP. | TBV | Ethnographic | RQ-anchor | EM.3 |
| C4 | Balinese emotional comportment | Indigenous distinctions between bali and cuek — feeling traces on the body — that don't reduce to Anglocentric "embodied emotion." | Wikan, U. (1990). Managing turbulent hearts: A Balinese formula for living. University of Chicago Press. | TBV | Ethnographic | Supporting | EM.3 |
| C5 | NSM / Natural Semantic Metalanguage | A method for comparing emotion vocabularies without privileging any one language as the reference frame; uses ~60 universal semantic primes. | Wierzbicka, A. (1999). Emotions across languages and cultures: Diversity and universals. Cambridge UP. | TBV | Linguistic-anthropological | RQ-anchor | EM.3 |
| C6 | Indigenous + decolonial framings | Emotion studies that work from indigenous knowledge frameworks rather than treating them as comparison cases. Kimmerer's emotional relation to land; Krenak; Akomolafe. | Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions. + Krenak, A. (2020). Ideas to postpone the end of the world. House of Anansi. | TBV | Philosophical + indigenous-knowledge | RQ-anchor | EM.3 |
| C7 | Buddhist soteriological grammar | Dukkha / sukha / karuṇā sit in a field of cultivation, ethics, and release — not an inventory of private feelings. Emotions treated as object-directed mental states within a discipline of transformation. | Heim, M. (2017). Emotion in classical Indian philosophy. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. + relevant translations of Visuddhimagga and Abhidharma texts. | TBV | Philosophical-conceptual | RQ-anchor | EM.3 |
| C8 | Sufi fanāʾ / baqāʾ | Stations and states (maqamat and ahwal) in Sufi tradition that name spiritual transformations rather than emotions in the modern Western sense. | (TBC — Schimmel, A. (1975). Mystical dimensions of Islam. UNC Press; primary Sufi sources via Ibn ʿArabī, al-Ghazālī.) | TBV | Philosophical-textual | Supporting | EM.3 |
| C9 | Confucian ren + xin (heart-mind) | Ren as relational virtue, not detachable feeling; xin refusing the Western cognition–emotion split. | (TBC — primary translations: Mencius, Analects, Xunzi.) | TBV | Philosophical-textual | Supporting | EM.3 |
| C10 | Yoruba ọkàn + ìwà | Ọkàn tied to courage and emotion; ìwà names character, being, and the regulation of social relations. Affect inseparable from moral personhood, destiny, communal life. | (TBC — primary sources via Yoruba philosophical scholarship; Wiredu, K. (Ed.). (2004). A companion to African philosophy. Blackwell.) | TBV | Philosophical-textual | Supporting | EM.3 |
| C11 | Affective-anthropology methodology | Methods for documenting emotion when "how do you feel" doesn't translate. Mahmood on Egyptian piety; Abu-Lughod on Bedouin sentiment. | Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton UP. + Abu-Lughod, L. (1986). Veiled sentiments: Honor and poetry in a Bedouin society. University of California Press. | TBV | Ethnographic + methodological | Supporting | EM.3 |
D. Per-Emotion Canon and Contested Anchors (EM.2, EM.4, EM.5)
Rows below populated from EXTRACTED-CITATIONS-2026-05-04.md (extraction in progress). Per-emotion §A (foundational texts) and §3 (contemporary debates) feed this section.
Provisional sub-structure:
- D1 — Anger (Audre Lorde / Soraya Chemaly vs psychoanalytic tradition)
- D2 — Shame (Tomkins, Nathanson, Brené Brown vs Helen Block Lewis vs Michael Lewis)
- D3 — Grief (Bowlby, Worden, Doka vs Stroebe–Schut dual process; complicated/disenfranchised typology)
- D4 — Anxiety (LeDoux's neurobiology vs cognitive-behavioral models vs Sartre's nausea)
- D5 — Joy (positive psychology vs phenomenological joy vs religious gaudium)
- D6 — Love (Greek typology vs attachment theory vs bell hooks)
- D7 — Desire (Lacan vs Berlant Cruel Optimism vs evolutionary/sexual)
- D8 — Awe (Keltner & Haidt; Piff/Stamkou; vs religious sublime)
- D9..D30 — remaining emotions
Each row will follow the column structure above. The agent's digest at docs/research/emotion-corpus-expansion/external-runs/EXTRACTED-CITATIONS-2026-05-04.md provides ★/★★/★★★ priority marks the LLMs themselves assigned per Prompt 1 §2.
E. Memoir, Therapy Transcript, and First-Person Source Density (EM.4)
Sources from Prompt 2 (source discovery, OpenAI + Claude — convergent rows) and Prompt 5 (therapy-transcript discovery, Claude). Populates EM.4 — what classes of source material are dense in emotion-articulation, which are sparse, which are gaps.
Provisional sub-structure (rows fill after digest reconciliation):
- E1 — Confessional memoir (Augustine onward; Anaïs Nin, Sontag, May Sarton, Mary Karr, Vivian Gornick)
- E2 — Illness memoir (Susan Sontag Illness as Metaphor; Audre Lorde The Cancer Journals; Anne Boyer The Undying; Helen Macdonald H is for Hawk)
- E3 — Grief memoir (C. S. Lewis A Grief Observed; Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking; Helen Macdonald)
- E4 — Spiritual / exit memoir (Jeanette Winterson; Mary Karr; addiction-recovery)
- E5 — Therapy-transcript canon (Yalom, Phillips, Grosz, Malcolm, Bollas, Casement, Rogers, Perls)
- E6 — Psychoanalytic case literature (Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan, Bion, Bowlby, Mahler, Kernberg, Kohut)
- E7 — Oral-history archives (StoryCorps, ACT UP, Holocaust testimony, Mass Observation, Library of Congress)
- E8 — Documentary film (Errol Morris, The Up Series, Stories We Tell; Whisper-transcribable)
F. Empirical Psychology of Named Emotions (EM.2, EM.5)
Populated after digest reconciliation. Per-emotion §3 (contemporary debates) of Prompt 1 runs surface specific empirical findings — moral incongruence (Grubbs on shame around pornography use), sex-guilt mediation (Woo on religious sexual desire), purity-culture outcomes — that complement the historiographic backbone in §A and the constructionist/essentialist debate in §B.
Provisional anchors:
- F1 — Shame and pornography use (Joshua Grubbs, moral incongruence)
- F2 — Sex guilt mediating religiosity → desire (Jessica Woo)
- F3 — Loneliness as public-health crisis (Vivek Murthy 2023 advisory; Eric Klinenberg)
- F4 — Burnout as occupational phenomenon (Freudenberger; WHO ICD-11)
- F5..Fn — additional empirical anchors per emotion
G. Honest Gaps
Each LLM in the bring-back was asked to flag what it was uncertain about. Convergent gaps across LLMs are highest priority for future bring-back rounds and for editorial work on the magazine.
Provisional list (consolidated from §8 Where you are uncertain across all 36 runs):
- G1 — Acedia → depression is a non-linear migration; the field's secondary literature is uneven on the medieval theological vocabulary's specificity.
- G2 — Cross-tradition comparison (dukkha, ren, fanāʾ, ọkàn, ìwà) is necessarily schematic; each term belongs to longer textual traditions than any single research-program review can carry.
- G3 — The constructionist/essentialist line is not perfectly neat (Damasio is not Ekman; affect theory contains multiple, not always compatible projects).
- G4 — "Late" emotions (e.g., Sunday-evening dread) sit at the boundary between colloquial idiom and stabilized historical object.
- G5 — Mid-20th-c. Eastern European and post-Soviet confessional emotion-articulation suspected to exist but undercited in Anglophone discourse.
- G6 — Non-Western primary case material (memoir, therapy transcripts, oral history) is dramatically thinner than the Anglophone corpus; this is a corpus-building priority, not just a research observation.
Additional gaps populate after digest reconciliation.
Cross-thread relationships
This thread connects to existing Vela research in several places. Each connection is a research opportunity, not a settled mapping.
- Christianity-sex-shame thread ↔ EM.1 (acedia → depression overlap; Sehnsucht as Romantic religious affect; the therapeutic culture's rerouting of sin-grammar into clinical-grammar).
- Text-aesthetic thread ↔ EM.5 (the editorial bar; what counts as "honest emotional writing" overlaps with what counts as "beautiful sentence" in non-trivial ways).
- Desire research (RQ1..RQ12) ↔ EM.2 (the desire-as-emotion question; Vela's existing operationalization of desire as a behavioral construct sits inside the constructionist/essentialist debate).
- Boudoir Studios Program ↔ EM.4 (memoir adjacent: studio testimony as a first-person source class).
These links are listed for orientation; they are not empirical claims yet.