ABSTRACT
This chapter will discuss the philosophical orientations pertaining to emotional and affective life that shape our thinking throughout the book. This involves exploring key events in the history of emotion and technology to demonstrate that concerns about the psychological impacts of mass technologisation of society are not new. Technology has been both a research tool in relation to emotion as well as the focus of psychological research since the earliest days of the discipline (Malin, 2014). Theories of emotion have attempted to address both aspects, with a dominance of individualistic, largely psychophysiological models featuring in psychological research, and approaches attempting to address emotion and affect as more social and distributed processes featuring in studies of the impact of technologies on affective life. Both have increased in line with the rise in use and presence of digital media in society (Ellis & Tucker, 2015). The aim of this chapter is to provide some historical context to research, prior to discussing claims as to the inherent relationality of emotion and technology.
