Dacher Keltner

Keith Oatley

Jennifer M. Jenkins

Emotions are an inescapable part of the human experience. They motivate actions and reactions, guide our interpersonal and business relationships, inspire political and societal trends, and influence our sense of self and well-being. Emphasizing the broad practical reach of this field of study, Understanding Emotions draws from neuroscience, psychiatry, biology, genetics, the humanities, economics, and more to provide a strong foundation in core concepts. An easy-to-follow narrative arc encompasses the entire life span, while representative studies provide immediate insight into the real-world implications of important findings. This new Fourth Edition continues to provide clear and concise guidance toward the factors that drive emotion, with new, revised, and expanded discussions that reflect the current state of the field. Detailed coverage of social and anti-social motivations, moral judgment, empathy, psychological disorders, the physiological components of emotion, and many more equip students with the conceptual tools to probe deeper into the material and apply methods and techniques to their own personal lives.

Understanding Emotions

This new textbook is the first book to fully span the fast growing field to research on emotions. It ranges across a broad range of disciplines, covering the entire lifespan from infancy to adulthood. Its main theme is that emotions have functions: they set priorities among our concerns and they provide the underlying structure of human friendships, to the excitements of sexuality. Understanding Emotions is designed as a textbook for second- and third-year university courses, and the text itself is fully supported by introductions and summaries, suggestions for further reading, plus a comprehensive bibliography and a glossary.

Dacher Keltner, Keith Oatley, and Jennifer Jenkins’s Understanding Emotions, 3rd Edition emphasizes the value of emotions and explores the latest research with practical concerns for clinical problems, education and everyday understanding. The text extends across a broad range of disciplines and covers the entire lifespan from infancy to adulthood. It includes sections on the study of emotion, the different elements of emotion, evidence of how emotions govern and organize social life, and emotion and individual functioning, including psychological disorders and wellbeing. Furthermore, the text offers combined chapters on evolutionary and cultural approaches, studies of new expressions (love, desire) as well as new systems of communication (touch, music), findings on emotion and the central nervous systems, and studies on the role of emotion in moral judgment. Discussions of how popular and classical movies emphasize emotions show how to keep an emotion diary to track one’s emotions and interactions. The text includes boxes on emotional intelligence and how to improve it as well as scales of assessing the self. Boxes on emotions in art and literature and positive psychology boxes are also new editions to this issue.

Nancy Stein

Human Emotions: A Reader brings together a collection of articles which give an approach to the fast-growing field of empirical and theoretical research on emotions. The volume includes classic writings from Darwin, James and Freud chosen to show their current significance, together with articles from contemporary research literature. The articles give a broad coverage of the subject and include selections from cross-cultural, biological, social, developmental and clinical areas of study. Human Emotions: A Reader begins with an overall introduction to both the volume and subject area by the Editors. Each of the six sections of the book, and each article are introduced, contextualizing and relating these articles to comparable research. The volume is organized to correspond with the structure and coverage of Understanding Emotions written by Keith Oatley and Jennifer M. Jenkins (also published by Blackwell). It can also be used independently allowing instructors to teach courses on emotions with their own emphases, and giving students access to a range of primary source material in this thought provoking field.

Jennifer M. Jenkins

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