Humans don’t feel emotions, either. Emotions are just a bunch of feelings that English-speaking Westerners put in a box around 200 years ago. Emotions are a modern idea – a cultural construction. The notion that feelings are something that happens in the brain was invented in the early 19th century.

…it’s difficult to pin down the types of feelings that do and don’t constitute emotions. There are almost as many definition of emotions as there are people studying them. Emotion is just a newer box. A box with poorly defined edges, I might add.

We might all feel similar things, but the way we understand and express those feelings changes from time to time and from culture to culture. Those important differences are where the history of emotion, and this book, live.