ABSTRACT
The arts have been associated with the emotions for millennia. In the 5th century BCE, the Greek philosopher Plato linked poetry to the arousal of emotion, while in the Hindu tradition, Bharata in his Natya Shastra (Bharata 1987) made comparable claims for theater between the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE. Nor is the association only an ancient one. In the 18th century, the philosopher Jean-Baptiste Dubos argued that the function of art was to elicit the emotions as a means of warding boredom (Dubos 1748).
