Il sentimento della paura nell’immaginario collettivo: il caso Disney-Pixar = The feeling of fear in the collective imaginary: The Disney Pixar example

Abstract

The feeling of fear in the collective imaginary: The Disney Pixar example. The contemporary scientific debate, in particular starting from the last decade of the last century, has been, often, about a rampant colonization of cognitive sciences. It’s known that the disciplines linked to this scientific field tend to explain the human behavior starting from the analysis of the process that happens in the brain. Thanks to the new techniques of brain studies (like fMRI) it’s possible to establish a material base, which lends itself to the empiric experimentation, to scientific studies of topics like awareness, feelings and emotions, traditionally associated to the purely metaphysical research. Between the basic emotions, or primary emotions, there is fear. In recent years there’s been huge publishing productions of scientific articles on this topic -And it’s easy to understand considering this big paradigmatic change happening- orienting the thoughts towards a different perspective of cognitive type. The object of this work is to comprehend in which terms the emotion of fear is been defined and told in the scientific contemporary debate, with a particular attention to the sociological approach. To be more specific, this work intend to analyze in which measure the way the sociological stories can be placed into an even bigger cultural movement in which the Mithological references that are feeding the contemporary imaginary are changing deeply. Additionally, once highlighted the strength and the limits of some of the proposals coming from the cognitive sciences, we propose a reading - and so an additional possible story telling alternative- of the feeling of fear open and amplified end and a more articulated inter-disciplinary approach. Between the objectives the proposals tends to, we would at the end try to stimulate a more intense opening between the different cognitive sciences and the Sociology of the cultural and communicative processes.