Scholars

Founder of academic sociology; gives Vela the vocabulary for what a community does to the person inside it — effervescence, anomie, the sacred/profane line.

Names how authority is held and how it decays — charismatic authority and its routinization — the load-bearing frame for reading early-church leadership.

The genealogist of power-through-visibility; gives Vela biopower and the panopticon — how surveillance becomes self-surveillance, central to the Christianity-and-shame arc.

The leading voice of constructionist emotion theory; emotions as situated constructions rather than basic kinds — the spine of Vela's emotion-research lens.

Reattached feeling to the body and to reason; the somatic-marker hypothesis grounds Vela's somatic-charge thread in writing and emotion work.

The basic-emotions position constructionism reads against; the discrete-kinds account of emotion that frames the field's central debate.

Affect theory's originator; named shame as a primary affect distinct from guilt — load-bearing for Vela's shame-family work and the Augustine pillar.

Social identity theory and the minimal-group paradigm; the experimental account of in-group/out-group formation behind the Galatians group-dynamics reading.

Moral foundations theory; the six-foundation account of moral intuition that Vela cites for the dispositional contrast to situational moral experience.

Interpersonal neurobiology; the window of tolerance gives Vela the arousal-band vocabulary behind the Pennebaker exercise and trauma-writing rationale.

Historian of emotion; emotional communities reframes feeling as plural and period-specific — foundational for Vela's emotion-historiography frame.

Network science of behavior change; complex contagion explains why some adoptions need multiple reinforcing ties — the spine of the network-mediated-adoption thesis.