The Psychology of Emotion

The Psychology of Emotion commences with a discussion of the nature of theory and its appraisal. This is both in general and also in the field of emotion in particular. Theories of emotion are categorized and then considered from several bases. These include: experience, behaviour, physiology, cognition, specific emotions, development, social, clinical, individual differences, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, culture, linguistics, and history. Themes are abstracted including, for example, biology, gender, social, constructionism, and post-modernism. The author presents these theoretical issues, encompassing most current emotion theories, including some of the past, and extends the issues further than the field of psychology. He goes on to make authoritative judgements about the relative merits of the theories and, finally, extracts whatever common themes there might be.