Download or read book Evolved Emotions written by Glenn Weisfeld and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Evolved Emotions, Glenn Weisfeld analyzes a comprehensive list of universal emotions, detailing their elicitors, affects, behavioral tendencies, expressions, visceral changes, neural mediations, development over the life span, and presence in other species. This comparative, evolutionary perspective inspires respect for the ancient utility of our emotions and the specific, enduring adaptive value of each one. This book offers novel insights into neglected emotional behaviors such as contact comfort, pain, feeding, disgust, fatigue, sleep, play, amorousness, sex, grief, parental behavior, anger, pride and shame, and humor. This systematic study of universal human emotions offers a framework for understanding all voluntary human behavior, including developmental, personality, gender, and pathological differences, explaining how each normal emotion serves to enhance the biological fitness of the individual.
Download or read book On the Origins of Human Emotions written by Jonathan Turner and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2000-06-01 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language and culture are often seen as unique characteristics of human beings. In this book the author argues that our ability to use a wide array of emotions evolved long before spoken language and, in fact, constituted a preadaptation for the speech and culture that developed among later hominids. Long before humans could speak with words, they communicated through body language their emotional dispositions; and it is the neurological wiring of the brain for these emotional languages that represented the key evolutionary breakthrough for our species. How did natural selection work on the basic ape anatomy and neuroanatomy to create the hominid line? The author suggests that what distinguished our ancestors from other apes was the development of an increased capacity for sociality and organization, crucial for survival on the African savanna. All apes display a propensity for weak ties, individualism, mobility, and autonomy that was, and is today, useful in arboreal and woodland habitats but served them poorly when our ancestors began to move onto the African plain during the late Miocene. The challenge for natural selection was to enhance traits in the species that would foster the social ties necessary for survival in the new environment. The author suggests that the result was a development of certain areas of the primate brain that encouraged strong emotional ties, allowing our ancestors to build higher levels of social solidarity. Our basic neurological wiring continues to reflect this adaptive development. From a sociological perspective that is informed by evolutionary biology, primatology, and neurology, the book examines the current neurological bases of our emotional repertoire and their implications for our social actions.
Download or read book Projections written by Karl Deisseroth and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking tour of the human mind that illuminates the biological nature of our inner worlds and emotions, through gripping, moving—and, at times, harrowing—clinical stories “[A] scintillating and moving analysis of the human brain and emotions.”—Nature “Beautifully connects the inner feelings within all human beings to deep insights from modern psychiatry and neuroscience.”—Robert Lefkowitz, Nobel Laureate Karl Deisseroth has spent his life pursuing truths about the human mind, both as a renowned clinical psychiatrist and as a researcher creating and developing the revolutionary field of optogenetics, which uses light to help decipher the brain’s workings. In Projections, he combines his knowledge of the brain’s inner circuitry with a deep empathy for his patients to examine what mental illness reveals about the human mind and the origin of human feelings—how the broken can illuminate the unbroken. Through cutting-edge research and gripping case studies from Deisseroth’s own patients, Projections tells a larger story about the material origins of human emotion, bridging the gap between the ancient circuits of our brain and the poignant moments of suffering in our daily lives. The stories of Deisseroth’s patients are rich with humanity and shine an unprecedented light on the self—and the ways in which it can break down. A young woman with an eating disorder reveals how the mind can rebel against the brain’s most primitive drives of hunger and thirst; an older man, smothered into silence by depression and dementia, shows how humans evolved to feel not only joy but also its absence; and a lonely Uighur woman far from her homeland teaches both the importance—and challenges—of deep social bonds. Illuminating, literary, and essential, Projections is a revelatory, immensely powerful work. It transforms our understanding not only of the brain but of ourselves as social beings—giving vivid illustrations through science and resonant human stories of our yearning for connection and meaning.
Download or read book How Emotions Are Made written by Lisa Feldman Barrett and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preeminent psychologist Lisa Barrett lays out how the brain constructs emotions in a way that could revolutionize psychology, health care, the legal system, and our understanding of the human mind. “Fascinating . . . A thought-provoking journey into emotion science.”—The Wall Street Journal “A singular book, remarkable for the freshness of its ideas and the boldness and clarity with which they are presented.”—Scientific American “A brilliant and original book on the science of emotion, by the deepest thinker about this topic since Darwin.”—Daniel Gilbert, best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose research overturns the long-standing belief that emotions are automatic, universal, and hardwired in different brain regions. Instead, Barrett shows, we construct each instance of emotion through a unique interplay of brain, body, and culture. A lucid report from the cutting edge of emotion science, How Emotions Are Made reveals the profound real-world consequences of this breakthrough for everything from neuroscience and medicine to the legal system and even national security, laying bare the immense implications of our latest and most intimate scientific revolution.
Download or read book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings written by Randolph M. Nesse, MD and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A founder of the field of evolutionary medicine uses his decades of experience as a psychiatrist to provide a much-needed new framework for making sense of mental illness. Why do I feel bad? There is real power in understanding our bad feelings. With his classic Why We Get Sick, Dr. Randolph Nesse helped to establish the field of evolutionary medicine. Now he returns with a book that transforms our understanding of mental disorders by exploring a fundamentally new question. Instead of asking why certain people suffer from mental illness, Nesse asks why natural selection has left us all with fragile minds. Drawing on revealing stories from his own clinical practice and insights from evolutionary biology, Nesse shows how negative emotions are useful in certain situations, yet can become overwhelming. Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Low moods prevent us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but they often escalate into pathological depression. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environment and our ancient human past. And there are good evolutionary reasons for sexual disorders and for why genes for schizophrenia persist. Taken together, these and many more insights help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering, and show us new paths for relieving it by understanding individuals as individuals.
Download or read book Emotions and Life written by Robert Plutchik and published by Amer Psychological Assn. This book was released on 2003 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emotions are powerful forces influencing our everyday behaviour. People laugh, cry, fall in love, or blow up buildings under the influence of emotions. Most of the current diagnoses of mental disorders involve one or more emotions that have gone awry. Yet until recently, emotions have not received the attention they deserve in college and university psychology courses. There are many reasons for this neglect; they concern linguistic, experiential, historical and philosophical issues, and all are explored in depth in this work. The book attempts to shed light on the nature and function of emotions, drawing on the latest theories in evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, as well as the older, established motivational and psychodynamic traditions. Author Robert Plutchik demonstrates the fundamental importance of emotions to all living creatures, and their crucial role in ensuring both bodily and genetic survival.
Download or read book Emotional written by Leonard Mlodinow and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We’ve all been told that thinking rationally is the key to success. But at the cutting edge of science, researchers are discovering that feeling is every bit as important as thinking. You make hundreds of decisions every day, from what to eat for breakfast to how you should invest, and not one of those decisions would be possible without emotion. It has long been said that thinking and feeling are separate and opposing forces in our behavior. But as Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of Subliminal, tells us, extraordinary advances in psychology and neuroscience have proven that emotions are as critical to our well-being as thinking. How can you connect better with others? How can you make sense of your frustration, fear, and anxiety? What can you do to live a happier life? The answers lie in understanding your emotions. Journeying from the labs of pioneering scientists to real-world scenarios that have flirted with disaster, Mlodinow shows us how our emotions can help, why they sometimes hurt, and what we can learn in both instances. Using deep insights into our evolution and biology, Mlodinow gives us the tools to understand our emotions better and to maximize their benefits. Told with his characteristic clarity and fascinating stories, Emotional explores the new science of feelings and offers us an essential guide to making the most of one of nature’s greatest gifts.
Download or read book Mama s Last Hug Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves written by Frans de Waal and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller and winner of the PEN / E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award "Game-changing." —Sy Montgomery, New York Times Book Review Mama’s Last Hug is a fascinating exploration of the rich emotional lives of animals, beginning with Mama, a chimpanzee matriarch who formed a deep bond with biologist Jan van Hooff. Her story and others like it—from dogs “adopting” the injuries of their companions, to rats helping fellow rats in distress, to elephants revisiting the bones of their loved ones—show that humans are not the only species with the capacity for love, hate, fear, shame, guilt, joy, disgust, and empathy. Frans de Waal opens our hearts and minds to the many ways in which humans and other animals are connected.
Download or read book Why We Feel written by Victor S. Johnston and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 1999-04-08 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new theory explains why we have feelings--and why we need them to survive.
Download or read book Descartes Error written by Antonio Damasio and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-09-27 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Descartes famously proclaimed, "I think, therefore I am," science has often overlooked emotions as the source of a person’s true being. Even modern neuroscience has tended, until recently, to concentrate on the cognitive aspects of brain function, disregarding emotions. This attitude began to change with the publication of Descartes’ Error in 1995. Antonio Damasio—"one of the world’s leading neurologists" (The New York Times)—challenged traditional ideas about the connection between emotions and rationality. In this wondrously engaging book, Damasio takes the reader on a journey of scientific discovery through a series of case studies, demonstrating what many of us have long suspected: emotions are not a luxury, they are essential to rational thinking and to normal social behavior.
Download or read book After Darwin Animals Emotions and the Mind written by Angelique Richardson and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2013-11-10 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘What is emotion?’ pondered the young Charles Darwin in his notebooks. How were the emotions to be placed in an evolutionary framework? And what light might they shed on human-animal continuities? These were among the questions Darwin explored in his research, assisted both by an acute sense of observation and an extraordinary capacity for fellow feeling, not only with humans but with all animal life. After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind explores questions of mind, emotion and the moral sense which Darwin opened up through his research on the physical expression of emotions and the human–animal relation. It also examines the extent to which Darwin’s ideas were taken up by Victorian writers and popular culture, from George Eliot to the Daily News. Bringing together scholars from biology, literature, history, psychology, psychiatry and paediatrics, the volume provides an invaluable reassessment of Darwin’s contribution to a new understanding of the moral sense and emotional life, and considers the urgent scientific and ethical implications of his ideas today.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Evolution and the Emotions written by Laith Al-Shawaf and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-25 with total page 1425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this Handbook, Laith Al-Shawaf and Todd K. Shackelford have gathered a group of leading scholars in the field to present a centralized resource for researchers and students wishing to understand emotions from an evolutionary perspective. Experts from a number of different disciplines, including psychology, biology, anthropology, psychiatry, and others, tackle a variety of "how" (proximate) and "why" (ultimate) questions about the function of emotions in humans and nonhuman animals, how emotions work, and their place in human life. Comprehensive and integrative in nature, this Handbook is an essential resource for students and scholars from a diversity of fields wishing to build upon their theoretical and empirical understanding of the emotions.
Download or read book The Emotional Foundations of Personality A Neurobiological and Evolutionary Approach written by Kenneth L. Davis and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A CHOICE Magazine Outstanding Academic Title of 2018. A novel approach to understanding personality, based on evidence that we share more than we realize with other mammals. This book presents the wealth of scientific evidence that our personality emerges from evolved primary emotions shared by all mammals. Yes, your dog feels love—and many other things too. These subcortically generated emotions bias our actions, alter our perceptions, guide our learning, provide the basis for our thoughts and memories, and become regulated over the course of our lives. Understanding personality development from the perspective of mammals is a groundbreaking approach, and one that sheds new light on the ways in which we as humans respond to life events, both good and bad. Jaak Panksepp, famous for discovering laughter in rats and for creating the field of affective neuroscience, died in April 2017. This book forms part of his lasting legacy and impact on a wide range of scientific and humanistic disciplines. It will be essential reading for anyone trying to understand how we act in the world, and the world’s impact on us.
Download or read book Learning and Emotion Evolutionary processes written by Peter J. Livesey and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book The Primordial Emotions written by Derek A. Denton and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an accessible and groundbreaking new look at the evolution of consciousness. It traces its origins back to early man's primordial emotions--those elicited from basic needs such as hunger and thirst.
Download or read book Feeling Smart written by Eyal Winter and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2014-12-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Which is smarter -- your head or your gut? It's a familiar refrain: you're getting too emotional. Try and think rationally. But is it always good advice? In this surprising book, Eyal Winter asks a simple question: why do we have emotions? If they lead to such bad decisions, why hasn't evolution long since made emotions irrelevant? The answer is that, even though they may not behave in a purely logical manner, our emotions frequently lead us to better, safer, more optimal outcomes. In fact, as Winter discovers, there is often logic in emotion, and emotion in logic. For instance, many mutually beneficial commitments -- such as marriage, or being a member of a team -- are only possible when underscored by emotion rather than deliberate thought. The difference between pleasurable music and bad noise is mathematically precise; yet it is also something we feel at an instinctive level. And even though people are usually overconfident -- how can we all be above average? -- we often benefit from our arrogance. Feeling Smart brings together game theory, evolution, and behavioral science to produce a surprising and very persuasive defense of how we think, even when we don't.
Download or read book The Evolution of Emotional Communication written by Eckart Altenmüller and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-01-24 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we think that we can understand animal voices - such as the aggressive barking of a pet dog, and the longing meows of the family cat? Why do we think of deep voices as dominant and high voices as submissive. Are there universal principles governing our own communication system? Can we even see how close animals are related to us by constructing an evolutionary tree based on similarities and dissimilarities in acoustic signaling? Research on the role of emotions in acoustic communication and its evolution has often been neglected, despite its obvious role in our daily life. When we infect others with our laugh, soothe a crying baby with a lullaby, or get goose bumps listening to classical music, we are barely aware of the complex processes upon which this behavior is based. It is not facial expressions or body language that are affecting us, but sound. They are present in music and speech as "emotional prosody" and allow us to communicate not only verbally but also emotionally. This groundbreaking book presents a thorough exploration into how acoustically conveyed emotions are generated and processed in both animals and man. It is the first volume to bridge the gap between research in the acoustic communication of emotions in humans with those in animals, using a comparative approach. With the communication of emotions being an important research topic for a range of scientific fields, this book is valuable for those in the fields of animal behaviour, anthropology, evolutionary biology, human psychology, linguistics, musicology, and neurology.
