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 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 The Evolution of Emotion written by Paul F. Kisak and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of the evolution of emotions dates back to the 19th century and has come to be known as "sensusology." Evolution and natural selection has been applied to the study of human communication, mainly by Charles Darwin in his 1872 work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin researched the expression of emotions in an effort to support his theory of evolution. He proposed that much like other traits found in animals, emotions also evolved and were adapted over time. His work looked at not only facial expressions in animals and specifically humans, but attempted to point out parallels between behaviors in humans and other animals. According to modern evolutionary theory, different emotions evolved at different times. Primal emotions, such as fear, are associated with ancient parts of the brain and presumably evolved among our premammal ancestors. Filial emotions, such as a human mother's love for her offspring, seem to have evolved among early mammals. Social emotions, such as guilt and pride, evolved among social primates. Sometimes, a more recently evolved part of the brain moderates an older part of the brain, such as when the cortex moderates the amygdala's fear response. Evolutionary psychologists consider human emotions to be best adapted to the life our ancestors led in nomadic foraging bands.
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 and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the world's most respected psychiatrists provides a much-needed new evolutionary framework for making sense of mental illness With his classic book Why We Get Sick, Randolph Nesse established 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 with fragile minds at all. 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 excessive. Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Low mood prevents us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but it often escalates into pathological depression. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environments and our ancient human past. Taken together, these insights and many more help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering, and show us new paths for relieving it. Good Reasons for Bad Feelings will fascinate anyone who wonders how our minds can be so powerful, yet so fragile, and how love and goodness came to exist in organisms shaped to maximize Darwinian fitness.
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 The Emotional Lives of Animals revised written by Marc Bekoff and published by New World Library. This book was released on 2024-04-09 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A seminal exploration of animal emotion, sentience, and cognition, revised and expanded to incorporate a surge of new science When award-winning scientist Marc Bekoff penned the first edition of this book in 2007, he predicted that over time our understanding of animal cognition and emotion would grow “richer, more accurate, and possibly different.” Since then, not only has the field seen an explosion of new and startling research, but the popular interest in the subject has grown as well, spawning countless podcasts, articles, and bestselling books. Bekoff skillfully blends extraordinary stories of animal joy, empathy, grief, embarrassment, anger, and love with the latest scientific research confirming the existence of emotions that common sense and experience have long implied. Filled with light humor and compassion, The Emotional Lives of Animals is a clarion call for reassessing both how we view and how we treat animals.
Download or read book Emotion written by Dylan Evans and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Darwin to "Star Trek", Evans offers a lively look at the science of emotions and finds that whether we live in the shadow of Times Square or in the depths of the rain forest, all humans feel disgust, joy, surprise, anger, fear, and distress. 20 halftones.
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 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 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times best-selling author and primatologist Frans de Waal explores the fascinating world of animal and human emotions. Frans de Waal has spent four decades at the forefront of animal research. Following up on the best-selling Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, which investigated animal intelligence, Mama’s Last Hug delivers a fascinating exploration of the rich emotional lives of animals. Mama’s Last Hug begins with the death of Mama, a chimpanzee matriarch who formed a deep bond with biologist Jan van Hooff. When Mama was dying, van Hooff took the unusual step of visiting her in her night cage for a last hug. Their goodbyes were filmed and went viral. Millions of people were deeply moved by the way Mama embraced the professor, welcoming him with a big smile while reassuring him by patting his neck, in a gesture often considered typically human but that is in fact common to all primates. This story and others like it form the core of de Waal’s argument, showing that humans are not the only species with the capacity for love, hate, fear, shame, guilt, joy, disgust, and empathy. De Waal discusses facial expressions, the emotions behind human politics, the illusion of free will, animal sentience, and, of course, Mama’s life and death. The message is one of continuity between us and other species, such as the radical proposal that emotions are like organs: we don’t have a single organ that other animals don’t have, and the same is true for our emotions. Mama’s Last Hug opens our hearts and minds to the many ways in which humans and other animals are connected, transforming how we view the living world around us.
Download or read book What Emotions Really Are written by Paul E. Griffiths and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul E. Griffiths argues that most research on the emotions has been as misguided as Aristotelian efforts to study "superlunary objects" - objects outside the moon's orbit. Such subjects exist, of course, but studying them as a group produces no useful results because they share no traits other than an arbitrarily defined location. Similarly, Griffiths show that "emotion", as currently defined, groups together psychological states of very different, and thus not comparable, kinds. According to Griffiths, theoretical research on emotions took a wrong turn by not fully exploring the relevant empirical evidence. Griffiths provides a detailed overview of this material, drawing on ethology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and anthropology of the emotions. He identifies and assesses the relative merits of three main theoretical approaches - affect program theory, evolutionary psychology, and social constructionism.
Download or read book Handbook of Cognition and Emotion written by Tim Dalgleish and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2000-11-21 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited by leading figures in the field, this handbook gives an overview of the current status of cognition and emotion research by giving the historical background to the debate and the philosophical arguments before moving on to outline the general aspects of the various research traditions. This handbook reflects the latest work being carried out by the key people in the field.
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 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 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals written by Charles Darwin and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" is Charles Darwin's third major work of evolutionary theory, following "On the Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man." In this book, Darwin concerns the biological aspects of emotional life. For example, he explores the animal origins of such characteristics as the lifting of the eyebrows in moments of surprise and the raising of the upper lip in an aggressive sneer.
Download or read book Earth Emotions written by Glenn A. Albrecht and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As climate change and development pressures overwhelm the environment, our emotional relationships with Earth are also in crisis. Pessimism and distress are overwhelming people the world over. In this maelstrom of emotion, solastalgia, the homesickness you have when you are still at home, has become, writes Glenn A. Albrecht, one of the defining emotions of the twenty-first century. Earth Emotions examines our positive and negative Earth emotions. It explains the author's concept of solastalgia and other well-known eco-emotions such as biophilia and topophilia. Albrecht introduces us to the many new words needed to describe the full range of our emotional responses to the emergent state of the world. We need this creation of a hopeful vocabulary of positive emotions, argues Albrecht, so that we can extract ourselves out of environmental desolation and reignite our millennia-old biophilia—love of life—for our home planet. To do so, he proposes a dramatic change from the current human-dominated Anthropocene era to one that will be founded, materially, ethically, politically, and spiritually on the revolution in thinking being delivered by contemporary symbiotic science. Albrecht names this period the Symbiocene. With the current and coming generations, "Generation Symbiocene," Albrecht sees reason for optimism. The battle between the forces of destruction and the forces of creation will be won by Generation Symbiocene, and Earth Emotions presents an ethical and emotional odyssey for that victory.
