Understanding Emotions, 3rd Edition

PREFACE

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to everyone for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted.

Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

As we present the third edition of Understanding Emotions, we are aware and grateful that this has become the standard undergraduate textbook on emotions and are glad to be part of this growing scientific field. Dacher, Keith, and Jenny have continued to enjoy working together, and we thought it was Dacher's turn to take the lead.

According to written and oral traditions, people have been interested in emotions for thousands of years. In most societies emotions are at the center of people's understandings of themselves and others and their relationships, rituals, and public life. In the era of scientific research in psychology, we present here an approach to understanding that can enter ordinary conversation and that takes seriously the rapidly growing body of scientific evidence.

In psychology, emotions have now moved into their proper place, at the center of our understandings of the human mind and of relationships in the social world. Our book, and we would claim the whole topic of emotions, is not just psychology. It extends, too, across neuroscience, psychiatry, biology, anthropology, sociology, literature, and philosophy.

In this edition, we reflect the growing realization that although emotions occur in ...