Q. What inspired your interest in the public expression of emotion?

 I got interested in public emotions through those informal shrines on the streets of my city neighborhoods that began in the late 20th century. All over the city but across the country too, people would leave candles and flowers for someone who had died and I said to myself, “This is something different, something important.” The first time historically that the country did this for a public person was after JFK’s assassination, a highly mediatized event where Dealey Plaza became a place where people wanted to go to remember and to mourn. Many years later, was the death of Princess Diana. Kensington Palace was covered with flowers and people came from all over the world. And again, in the days after 9/11, the posting of photos of the “missing” all over Grand Central and Penn Station. That this grew and expanded as a cultural practice, both locally and on the media, interested me a great deal.

Q. Your book ties emotional change to contemporary performance theory. How so?

Today, many of us dramatize our connection to a death or a tragedy. There’s something different about how we express our emotions—we do this in a public way, take and post photos or videos. It’s new. I grew up in the fifties and there was a formality and restraint to things you did if someone died, right? Even if it was a tragic death.

In short, I think that contemporary life is making actors of all of us. But not in a false, phony sense; rather, in the sense that we want to act things out that we know with conviction and that we feel strongly. This doesn’t mean that we’re overly scripted in what we do. It means that we want to dramatize things and express what we feel with other people in public places in much the same way that actors do; it’s an argument I make in this book.

Q. Don’t some theorists question whether that is real emotion?

I don’t go there in this book, but I do engage my students in those kind of questions. Whether these are real emotions or not, I see an awful lot of people talking today about being “authentic” and pursuing authentic lives and I think this indicates something important about culture and emotion today. For example, I see an authenticity in my students when they talk about the primacy of emotions in their lives. And that impresses me. As a sociologist, I have to listen to them, to pay attention to what they and other people tell me about the meaning of emotions today.

 Q. What is the main argument of your book?

Well, my argument is about the identity of the modern self in history and how many things about being a person have changed today. Whether we think about the person in the 16th century, or the 18th, or the 21st, we meet different kinds of persons with different kinds of experiences and ideas about what a person is, what feelings mean, and so forth.

To sum up: we are cultural and collective beings whose emotions are shaped by the lives we live with others. So my book’s about the changing emotional cultures of the modern and postmodern age. Some of these changes have deep roots in our past, like individualism and Romanticism. Other changes have to do with the economies and digital technologies of today and how these, too, are changing us.

The 20th century saw its share of notorious research abuse cases in the United States.

The Department of Public Health administered a study from 1932 to 1972 in Tuskegee, Ala., of 399 African-American men who were infected with syphilis. The study included the measuring of symptoms in patients deliberately left untreated.

At Yale University in the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram charted the willingness of human subjects to administer a shock as great as 450 volts to what they believed were other humans, when commanded by an authority figure.

The serious ethical questions raised about scientific and medical research was ultimately addressed in the federal Research Act of 1974. By 1979, Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) were mandated to review, approve and monitor all federally funded research involving humans.

Today, IRBs are critical to the function of any research institution or university. Fordham’s IRB works cooperatively with all University faculty, staff and students to ensure that all research conducted using human subjects or research participants meets the federal standards of the 1974 act.

“From the 1930s right through the 1970s, there was a sense that the [human]benefits of science were growing in power and influence,” said E. Doyle McCarthy, chair of Fordham’s IRB and professor of sociology. “But there was also a realization that the public should be aware of how scientific experiments could harm them.

“Limits had to be placed on what researchers could do,” she continued, “and IRB guidelines were developed to assist us in defining the standards of ethical and humane research.”

The first standard is to make certain that research participants are not placed at undue or high risk.

“When the research subjects are, say, patients in a psychiatric hospital or incarcerated young people or members of a racial minority, as in the Tuskegee experiments, they are seen as socially powerless but they also lack power relative to the researcher-scientist,” McCarthy said. “You can only imagine the importance of [protection]when you think of what history has shown us.”

The second broad standard involves ensuring that research participants understand the nature of the research and give their non-coerced, informed consent.

“Research participants have to have full knowledge of what they are doing in order to fully give their consent,” she said.

For example, if a scholar is researching how college students form social groups on Facebook, interviewees must be told what the researcher is actually investigating and are required to sign a consent form that includes information on the research and the investigator.

“The importance of this [standard]becomes clear when you think of human beings as subjects of research for an investigation conducted without their permission, or without knowledge or understanding of what they are doing,” McCarthy said.

Fordham’s 11-member board, carefully culled from the range of faculty and administrative departments, meets routinely during the academic year to review research protocols, approximately 30 projects per month. Its chair is elected by the board and normally serves a three-year term.

McCarthy noted that not all research projects come before the full board; some are expedited and reviewed by local review boards. Research involving vulnerable populations—such as studies of incarcerated youths or patients in hospitals—are typically reviewed by the full board, as is all research receiving external funding.

“When there is funding, there is the added responsibility to the funding agency as well as to the researcher,” McCarthy said. “This type of research is often closer to public policy and public welfare, so there’s an added responsibility when a public institution, such as the National Institutes of Health, is involved.”

The IRB maintains an office at the Lowenstein Center on the Lincoln Center campus, in Room 203C, whose administrator is David Wilber. The IRB soon will be distributing a brochure to inform faculty, staff, and students of its work. The IRB chair and administrator also visit graduate classes to discuss IRB procedures, in part a response to the increased research being done at Fordham by faculty and students.

“There is clearly a greater emphasis and investment in research here at Fordham,” McCarthy said. “There’s no question that in recent years the number of research protocols sent to us has increased.”