The Laws of Emotion PDF
Preview The Laws of Emotion
The Laws of Emotion The Laws of Emotion Nico H. Frijda ~ ~ ~~o~;~~n~~;up NEW YORK AND LONDON Copyright© 2007 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other means, without prior written permission of the publisher. First published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, lnc., Publishers This edition published 2013 by Routledge Routledge Routledge Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group 711 Third Avenue 27 Church Road New York, NY 10017 Hove East Sussex BN3 2FA Routledge is an imprint oft he Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Cover design by Jan Bons & Tomai Maridou CIP information for this book can be obtained by contacting the Li- brary of Congress JSBN-13: 978-0-805-82597-8 (hardcover) lSBN-13: 978-0-805-82598-5 (paperback) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 For David and for Roos Contents Preface ix 1 Laws 1 2 Passion 25 3 Pleasure 63 4 Appraisal 93 5 Concerns 123 6 Strength 153 7 Time 175 8 "Feelings" 199 9 Sex 227 vii viii CONTENTS 10 Revenge 259 11 Commemorating 283 References 305 Preface This book resulted from pondering emotions, after I wrote my 1986 book The Emotions. It reflects several papers that I wrote since, one of which inspired the title of this volume, and of chapter 1. What made me ponder, and motivated me to write this book, is the desire to understand emotions at the level of underlying mechanisms. Most of the work on the psychology of emotions moves at what Dennett called the intentional or phenomenological level of analysis. One talks about feelings, appraisals, motives or concerns, without too much analytical reflection on the pro- cesses that might underlie those phenomena. That left me unsatisfied. Small wonder. Not all basic emotion processes are well explored; the issues are difficult. So I tried to conceive how to fill the gaps that analysis at the intentional level leaves. Seeking to fill the gaps may be useful for additional reasons than probing into the processes under- lying emotional phenomena. It tries to construct an alternative for two cur- rent ways of explaining emotions. Going below the intentional level is mostly being undertaken in one of two ways. The first consists of evoking evolution. Emotional phenomena are there because evolution made them be there, for supposed reasons of variable plausibility. Evolutionary expla- nations can rather easily be found, and they only probe into these distal evolutionary processes. They do not examine how these distal processes ix
Description:The list of books you might like
