This panel brings together one neuroscientist and three literary scholars to navigate the complex intersections of affect theory in the humanities and neuroscientific research on affect and emotion. Each presenter will offer a 12-minute talk examining this intricate terrain.
Our first presenter, neuroscientist Jannet M Dubinsky, will discuss “The Neuroscience of Affect and Emotions.” Her presentation explores how contemporary neuroscience investigates emotions as complex states of mind and body, shaped by both external and internal contextual influences. These influences include social and individual conditions, as well as accumulated personal and historical experiences. Emotions emerge from cognitive, cortical processing of internal bodily states, communicated through subcortical structures such as the amygdala, which plays a key role in value calculation. Conversely, imagined or remembered mental states can generate emotions that in turn alter bodily states. By comparing mental predictions with incoming sensory or interoceptive signals, the brain assesses whether expectations are met. Circulating hormones also modulate emotional experiences. Dubinsky argues that while neuroscientists have traditionally focused on studying intense emotions, these investigations often fail to generalize across all emotions due to contextual variability and the diverse neural mechanisms that can produce similar behavioral responses.
The second presenter, Yasuko Kase’s paper “Rethinking ‘Fear’ in Trauma Studies” will examine neuroscientific research on "fear" memory, which significantly influenced early trauma studies in the humanities during the 1990s. In neuroscience, fear research has been shaped by Pavlovian conditioning experiments on rats and other non-human animals, in which an unconditioned stimulus, such as a neutral sound, is paired with a conditioned stimulus, such as a foot shock, to elicit an innate freezing response. Studies of the fear response, including Joseph LeDoux’s work, have been used to explain traumatic amnesia—a dissociative state in which conscious awareness of trauma is buried. Bessel van der Kolk, for instance, proposed that traumatic memories are processed as “emotional” nonconscious memory, distinct from “regular” memory. However, Kase contends that recent developments in amygdala research and LeDoux’s revised definitions of fear and emotion necessitate a fundamental reassessment of trauma theory’s explanatory framework.
The third presenter, Inna Livytska will discuss “Narrative Empathy and the Theory of Affect Revisited: The Trouble with Passions.” Her presentation investigates the relationship between narrative empathy and affect theory, exploring how emotions are structured and experienced in literature. While narrative empathy emphasizes readers’ emotional engagement through perspective-taking and emotion scripts that guide responses within stories, affect theory suggests that emotions are fluid, relational, and pre-cognitive, operating beyond narrative constraints. This challenges the traditional assumption that emotions follow structured patterns in storytelling. Livytska raises key questions: How does narrative structure shape emotional perception in the brain? How do emotion scripts differ from affective experiences? Can storytelling bridge cognitive narrative processing with pre-conscious affect? Drawing on interdisciplinary insights from affect theory and neuroscience, Livytska proposes a broader framework for understanding emotions in literature, cognition, and reader engagement.
Our final presenter, Yuqing Liu, will present “Rethinking Affectivity in Virtual Reality Films: Collective Narratives and the Limits of Empathy.” Liu critiques the widely held notion of VR films as "empathy machines" based on the assumption that heightened emotional intensity fosters deeper empathy. While neuroscientific studies often support this idea by measuring VR’s emotional impact through physiological responses, humanistic scholarship challenges this reductionist view, arguing that empathy cannot be quantified purely through measurable data. Liu’s paper explores how VR shapes emotions through spatial design, storytelling, and sensory elements, rather than relying solely on empathy as a metric. By analyzing VR films that engage with social issues, Liu highlights the complex and mediated nature of emotional experiences in immersive media. Ultimately, Liu advocates for a theoretical approach that integrates neuroscience and affect theory to better understand how VR influences emotional engagement.