Emotion Explained

What produces emotions? Why do we have emotions? How do we have emotions? Why do emotional states feel like something? This book seeks explanations of emotion by considering these questions.

Emotion continues to be a topic of enormous scientific interest. Emotion Explained describes the nature, functions, and brain mechanisms that underlie both emotion and motivation. However it goes beyond examining brain mechanisms of emotion, by proposing a theory of what emotions are, and an evolutionary, Darwinian, theory of the adaptive value of emotion. It also shows that there is a clear relationship between motivation and emotion. The book also examines how cognitive states can modulate emotions, and in turn, how emotions can influence cognitive states. It considers the role of sexual selection in the evolution of affective behavior. It also examines emotion and decision making, with links to the burgeoning field of neuroeconomics. The book is also unique in considering emotion at several levels- the neurophysiological, neuroimaging, neuropsychological, behavioral, and computational neuroscience levels.

Edmund T. Rolls is Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow and Tutor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He read preclinical medicine at the University of Cambridge, and now performs research in neuroscience at Oxford. His research links neurophysiological and computational neuroscience approaches to human functional neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies in order to provide a fundamental basis for understanding human brain function and its disorders. He is author of The Brain and Emotion (1999, Oxford University Press), with A.Treves of Neural Networks and Brain Function (1998, Oxford University Press), and with G.Deco of Computational Neuroscience of Vision (2002, Oxford University Press).