Cultural cognitive ecology is a research tradition separate from biological cognitive ecology, within which research on embodied cognition operates. Culture is characterized as a type of environment characteristic for humans, which, together with the mind, jointly determine human experiences and actions. Its aim is to study cognitive phenomena in their context, which is seen as a biological, social and cultural complex. Emotional processes, understood as a three-component system containing a nervous, motor and subjective component, make up an integral element of these cognitive phenomena. Cultural cognitive ecology can constitute a theoretical framework which allows us to develop intuitions formulated on the basis of the semiotics of emotions and then construct tools for researching popular music culture and pose the questions about how art expresses and evokes emotions.In his late works, Jurij Lotman postulated the idea of a semiotics of emotions which have particular importance during social unrest when collective emotions become an important factor in the historical process, being at the same time a significant regulator of social life. Lotman claimed that „the study of the semiotics of culture therefore leads us to the semiotics of ‘cultural emotions’”. His considerations and intuitions were developed by contemporary social studies and humanities. In the mid-1990s, an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary theoretical position began called the affective turn. The findings of Lotman and later researchers, related to the assumptions of cultural cognitive ecology, built the theoretical and methodological framework for today’s research on Russian culture, which finds itself at a particular moment of instability.