Handbook of Affective Sciences 1/e 2009

Oxford University Press USA

1224 pages | 279x216mm

978-0-19-537700-2 | Paperback | 21 May 2009

 

The Handbook of Affective Sciences is a comprehensive road map to the burgeoning area of affective sciences, which now spans several disciplines. Helping to delineate this emerging field, this volume brings together, for the first time, the various strands of inquiry and latest research in the scientific study of emotion and related affective phenomena.

In recent years, scientists have made considerable advances in understanding how brain processes shape emotions and are changed by human emotion. There have also been major methodological advances in objectively measuring different parameters of emotion, ranging from expressive behavior to physiology to subjective experience using experience sampling. Drawing on a wide range of research and methods of inquiry-neuroimaging techniques, neuropsychological assessment, clinical research, and laboratory paradigms designed to assess the cognitive and social constituents of emotion-scientists are beginning to understand the many factors that shape emotion and the vast range of functions that are affected by emotion. As a result, researchers are gaining insight into such compelling questions as how people experience life emotionally, why people respond so differently to the same experiences, what the face can tell us about internal states, how emotion in significant social relationships influence health, and whether there are basic emotions common to all humans.