Handbook of Affective Sciences

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.

This handbook brings together the most eminent scholars in the area of affective science, who lay out, in fifty-nine original chapters, the latest research and theorise in the field. The book is divided into ten sections: Neuroscience; Autonomic Psychophysiology; Genetics and Development; Expression of Emotion; Cognitive Components of Emotion; Personality; Emotion and Social Processes; Evolutionary and Cultural Perspective on Affect; Emotion and Psychopathology; and Emotion and Health.

This major new volume will be an invaluable resource for researchers that will define affective sciences for the next decade.

Richard J. Davidson is the William James and Vilas Research Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry and the Director of the Laboratory of Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin.

Klaus R. Scherer is emeritus professor of Emotion Psychology at the University of Geneva. He is the director of both the Geneva Interfaculty Center for Affective Sciences and the Swiss National Competence Center on Research on the Affective Sciences.

H. Hill Goldsmith is the Leona Tyler Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin.