Living With Feeling:Emotional Health in History, Philosophy, and Experience. (360G-Wellcome-108727_Z_15_Z)

The Living with Feeling' project will fund three established scholars, three early-career researchers, and three PhD students to conduct an intensive, inter-disciplinary, collaborative exploration of the newly prominent notion of emotional health'. The project will connect the history and philosophy of medicine and emotions with contemporary science, medical practice, phenomenology, and public policy, exploring three overlapping meanings of emotional health': 1. The emotional dimensions of the medical encounter between patients and doctors, including the experiences of those suffering from chronic conditions,and the roles of empathy and compassion within this relationship. 2. The emotional factors influencing physical and mental health, focussing on emotions as contributory factors to both illness and wellness, engaging historically with recent findings in neuroscience, immunology, psychotherapy, and public health. 3. Emotional flourishing, understood as a state of healthy balance in an individual's emotions; including historically and politically contingent assumptions about meta-emotional capacities such as empathy, self-control, self-esteem, mindfulness, and resilience. Research topics will include: the use of the passions as medical treatments; the anatomy of anger as a modern emotion; relationships between religious, philosophical and scientific forms of therapy; time-management and de-cluttering as emotional technologies; the rise of the psychologist parent; and the roles of imitation, contagion, and mirror neurons in emotional health.