Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

$28.00 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-1546-9

$112.00 cloth ISBN 978-1-5179-1545-2

290 pages
45 b&w photos
5 1/2 x 8 1/2

August 2023

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OPEN ACCESS EDITION AVAILABLE on University of Minnesota Press’s Manifold Platform.

Reviews can be found in The British Journal for the History of Science and The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences.

Examines how our understanding of emotion is shaped by the devices we use to measure it

Since the late nineteenth century, psychologists have used technological forms of media to measure and analyze emotion. In The Affect Lab, Grant Bollmer examines the use of measurement tools such as electrical shocks, photography, video, and the electroencephalograph to argue that research on emotions has confused the physiology of emotion with the tools that define its inscription.

Bollmer shows that the psychological definitions of emotion have long been directly shaped by the physical qualities of the devices used in laboratory research. To investigate these devices, The Affect Lab examines four technologies related to the history of psychology in North America: spiritualist toys at Harvard University, serial photography in early American psychological laboratories, experiments on "psychopaths" performed with an instrument called an Offner Dynograph, and the development of the "electropsychometer," or "E-Meter," by Volney Mathison and L. Ron Hubbard.

Challenging the large body of humanities research surrounding affect theory, The Affect Lab identifies an understudied problem in formulations of affect: how affect itself is a construction inseparable from the techniques and devices used to identify and measure it. Ultimately, Bollmer offers a new critique of affect and affect theory, demonstrating how deferrals to psychology and neuroscience in contemporary theory and philosophy neglect the material of experimental, scientific research.

“Moving compellingly through a series of instruments drawn from the histories of experimental psychology, psychiatric photography, and spiritualism, Grant Bollmer provides an important materialist rebuke to the liberatory strain in affect theory, which frequently treats affect as ‘an eternal truth of the body rather than a momentary fragment.’”

“The Affect Lab argues that beneath affect theory lies media. Far from being natural or biological—and, most fundamentally, far from being universal—affect is the product of the concrete technical operations that are necessary to access it in the first place. By challenging affect theory to examine its own technical basis, The Affect Lab will reboot the field for our times and, in the process, fundamentally change our views of how affect operates and the roles it plays in lived experience.”

“Where the book shines is in the case studies. With vivid detail, each of these invites the reader into a fascinating moment in the history of the science of emotion... Bollmer’s book offers a far-reaching and engaging study of four moments in the history of the emotions. It highlights as yet underappreciated connections between traditions of spiritualism, aesthetics, education, therapy and measurement. It is not a comprehensive survey – but it is not meant to be. This is, in some ways, a strength of the work insofar as it opens up space for further investigation. This book will be of interest to anyone working in the history and philosophy of the human sciences, and especially to anyone curious about how measurement shapes our lives.”

“As a whole...the work builds to a thoughtful and compelling case to take seriously the ways we measure in our construction of what we think affect and emotion is, and the somewhat provocatively chosen examples provide an entertaining and enjoyable entry point to the very human origins of how we think about who we are.”