In the 1920s, industrial psychologists studied the efficiency of female workers at the Hawthorn Plant, a telephone factory in Chicago. They studied the effect of lighting, rest breaks, and what the workers ate. But they also tried to study the emotional ecology of the test room, how friendships, trust, and bad tempers affected productivity. A new scientific understanding of motivation and behaviour was pioneered by them, a theory that is ubiquitous in today’s optimization-obsessed age, namely the idea that emotions (our own and others’) can be isolated, manipulated, and monetized. Under observation, however, immigrant, working-class women showed far less transparency than white male psychologists had imagined. This article makes a plea for the value of the emotionally unfamiliar. We live in a world where emotional transparency is a highly prized ideal, whether in the (dangerously misguided) promise of AI facial recognition software, or in the healing potential of empathy and communication. But the reality of human emotions is that they are just as often mysterious, shy, and hard to read, and what at first feels like emotional affinity can, on closer inspection, dissolve into mysteries. As a historian of emotion, Watt-Smith is always compelled by these mysteries, and she invites us to be, too. In this article, she will look at shifting emotional landscapes past and present, exploring how emotional styles, languages, practices, symbols, and rituals change, sometimes very dramatically, across times and places. Defamiliarizing emotions in this way reminds us of the necessity of holding diverse experiences in mind when we speak about what emotions are and do. In an age where we are growing accustomed to the flattening and universalizing of emotional experience under capitalism, coming face to face with the emotional unfamiliar reminds us that feelings have distinct and sometimes highly idiosyncratic ways of eluding us too.
Keywords: human emotions, emotionally unfamiliar, mystery, emotional landscapes, defamiliarizing emotions
