Emotion: Theory, Research, and Experience, Volume 1: Theories of Emotion, presents broad theoretical perspectives representing all major schools of thought in the study of the nature of emotion. The contributions contained in the book are characterized under three major headings - evolutionary context, psychophysiological context, and dynamic context. Subjects that are discussed include general psycho-evolutionary theory of emotion; the affect system; the biology of emotions and other feelings; and emotions as transitory social roles. Psychologists, sociobiologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, ethologists, and students the allied fields will find the text a good reference material.
This updated edition adds some new definitions of the emotions, new developments in emotional theory, selected additional references, and a new preface. In its basic volume it outlines in detail a model of primary emotions and their mixtures. It also examines the various problems that have plagued research in this area and shows how the model helps to resolve and clarify these issues. Using material from both psychoanalytic and behavioristic sources, as well as other theoretical viewpoints, this book remains a very comprehensive and valuable study. Originally published by Random House in 1962.
Gut Reactions is an interdisciplinary defense of the claim that emotions are perceptions in a double sense. First of all, they are perceptions of changes in the body, but, through the body, they also allow us to literally perceive danger, loss, and other matters of concern. This proposal, which Prinz calls the embodied appraisal theory, reconciles the long standing debate between those who say emotions are cognitive and those who say they are noncognitive. The basic idea behind embodied appraisals is captured in the familiar notion of a "gut reaction," which has been overlooked by much emotion research. Prinz also addresses emotional valence, emotional consciousness, and the debate between evolutionary psychologists and social constructionists.
Emotions are complex and multifaceted phenomena. Although they have been examined from a variety of perspectives, the study of the interaction between cognition and emotion has always occupied a unique position within emotion research. Many philosophers and psychologists have been fascinated by the relationship between thinking and feeling. During the past 30 years, research on the relationship between cognition and emotion has boomed and so many studies on this topic have been published that it is difficult to keep track of the evidence. This book fulfils the need for a review of the existing evidence on particular aspects of the interplay between cognition and emotion. The book assembles a collection of state-of-the-art reviews of the most important topics in cognition and emotion research: emotion theories, feeling and thinking, the perception of emotion, the expression of emotion, emotion regulation, emotion and memory, and emotion and attention. By bringing these reviews together, this book presents a unique overview of the knowledge that has been generated in the past decades about the many and complex ways in which cognition and emotion interact. As such, it provides a useful tool for both students and researchers alike, in the fields of social, clinical and cognitive psychology.
The first comprehensive treatment of active inference, an integrative perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior used across multiple disciplines. Active inference is a way of understanding sentient behavior—a theory that characterizes perception, planning, and action in terms of probabilistic inference. Developed by theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston over years of groundbreaking research, active inference provides an integrated perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior that is increasingly used across multiple disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. Active inference puts the action into perception. This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of active inference, covering theory, applications, and cognitive domains. Active inference is a “first principles” approach to understanding behavior and the brain, framed in terms of a single imperative to minimize free energy. The book emphasizes the implications of the free energy principle for understanding how the brain works. It first introduces active inference both conceptually and formally, contextualizing it within current theories of cognition. It then provides specific examples of computational models that use active inference to explain such cognitive phenomena as perception, attention, memory, and planning.
This is Volume XIV of thirty-eight in a series on the General Psychology. Originally published in 1960, this study offers A Comprehensive Phenomenology of Theories and their Meanings for Therapy.
This work provides a complete theory of the emotional processes, explaining how different emotions are elicited and expressed, and how the emotional range of individuals develops over their lifetime. The author's approach puts emotion in a central role as a complex, patterned, organic reaction to both daily events and long-term efforts on the part of the individual to survive, flourish and achieve. In his view, emotions cannot be divorced from other functions - whether biological, social or cognitive - and express the intimate, personal meaning of what individuals experience. As coping and adapting processes, they are seen as part of the on-going effort to monitor changes, stimuli and stresses arising from the environment.
I should say first of all that the only emotions I propose expressly to consider here are those that have a distinct bodily expression. That there are feelings of pleasure and displeasure, of interest and excitement, bound up with mental operations, but having no obvious bodily expression for their consequence, would, I suppose, be held true by most readers. Certain arrangements of sounds, of lines, of colours are agreeable, and others the reverse, without the degree of the feeling being sufficient to quicken the pulse or breathing, or to prompt to movements of either the body or the face. Certain sequences of ideas charm us as much as others tire us. It is a real intellectual delight to get a problem solved, and a real intellectual torment to have to leave it unfinished. The first set of examples, the sounds, lines, and colours, are either bodily sensations, or the images of such. The second set seem to depend on processes in the ideational centres exclusively. Taken together, they appear to prove that there are pleasures and pains inherent in certain forms of nerve-action as such, wherever that action occur. The case of these feelings we will at present leave entirely aside, and confine our attention to the more complicated cases in which a wave of bodily disturbance of some kind accompanies the perception of the interesting sights or sounds, or the passage of the exciting train of ideas. Surprise, curiosity, rapture, fear, anger, lust, greed, and the like, become then the names of the mental states with which the person is possessed. The bodily disturbances are said to be the "manifestation" of these several emotions, their "expression" or "natural language;" and these emotions themselves, being so strongly characterized both from within and without, may be called the standard emotions. --William James
