This book is intended for anyone with an interest in emotions, to show how far conceptualization and research have progressed toward understanding. The book, and we would claim the whole topic, extends across psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, biology, anthropology, sociology, literature, and philosophy. Although some have argued that emotions are too heterogeneous for systematic study, the fact that we can write a textbook shows--we believe--that from a complex field, order is emerging. An introduction to human emotions without a point of view would be dull and largely incomprehensible. The quantity of publications in the field makes it impossible to be exhaustive. We have therefore chosen studies and ideas that we believe are representative, hoping to convey a sufficient image for you to think productively. So, as well as an overall story, there is a story line for each chapter. Where there are controversies we discuss them, or at least indicate them so that you can look at the field from different points of view. But we have also worked to produce a coherent book. Although ours is not the only point of view, we think that by seeing that there is a coherent perspective in this area, you the reader will be able to agree, or to disagree, or to modify it. Knowing that any piece of evidence is not conclusive on its own but that each can provide a step toward exploring an idea, we hope that an integrated picture will take shape for you the reader, with concepts and ideas you can modify and apply to your own interests. We have done our best to be fair-minded in our treatment of evidence, but our knowledge is necessarily incomplete and our views are necessarily biased toward our own interests and conceptualizations. Our interest is in thinking of emotions in cognitive, evolutionary, and developmental terms, in understanding their role in mediating everyday social interaction, and in seeing what goes wrong in the states known as emotional disorders. We see emotions as based on biological processes, elaborated in our close relationships, and shaped by culture. Like the skilled action when you write your signature, an emotion has a biological basis of components and constraints. It also has a history of individual development. It is only fully understandable within an interpersonal and cultural context. We write about emotions in the Western tradition. This does not imply universality of Euro-American assumptions, but we do imagine that most of our readers are either members of that tradition or are conversant with it. We believe that by characterizing and identifying with this tradition, the ideas and findings that have substance within it can be seen clearly. We, and others, can form understandings based in that tradition and then understand better other culturally distinctive ways of thinking.(PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)