The prestigious academic publisher Palgrave has published the book that resulted from the international workshop "Taking the Pulse of Our Times: Media Therapy and Emotions," which the Emotional Culture and Identity project of the Institute for Society and Culture (ICS) hosted at the University of Navarra in November 2014. Claudia Wassmann, a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute from 2013 to 2015 within the Emotional Culture and Identity project and a current ICS collaborator, served as editor of the book.

This research received funding from a Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme (grant number PIEF-GA-2012-327538).

The book contains a collection of interdisciplinary reflections on emotional cultures in contemporary societies. Professor Wassmann and eight other experts in psychology, communication, history and philosophy set out to show how film and television productions reflect reality and, in turn, how they shape it. From anger management to fear of aging to the coverage of terrorist attacks and "therapeutic news," this collection sheds light on the emotional preferences, "emotional styles," and "emotional regimes" that changed the course of twentieth century.

Changes in emotional regimes

Ana Marta González, the scientific coordinator of ICS, commented on the book saying, "It provides very important material for understanding the most significant changes in our emotional regimes." Moreover, Michael Geyer, from the Department of History at the University of Chicago, noted that, "the volume provides space for making bold forays into a new world, a world of transdisciplinarity in European research."

The workshop, "Taking the Pulse of Our Times: Media, Therapy and Emotions," was organized by ICS's Emotional Culture and Identity project, which is funded by Zurich Insurance. The event brought together experts in communication, English literature, history and psychology from 5 different countries, including Germany, Canada, the United States, Spain and Britain, in order to reflect on emotions and identity in contemporary Western societies through film and television productions.

Claudia Wassmann is a medical doctor trained at the Free University of Berlin and she received a PhD in the History of Science from the University of Chicago. In the United States, she developed her postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and, before studying history, she was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is currently developing a project entitled Scientific Concepts of Emotion and Cultural Identities in Medicine, Social Science, and Film within the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Aix Marseille.