Handbook of Emotions (Second Edition) Michael Lewis & Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones (Eds.). New York: Guilford Press (www.guilford.com). 2000, 720 pp., $69.95 (hardcover).
For much of the time that cognitive-behavioral approaches to emotional disorders have flourished, theorists and clinicians have regarded emotion as little more than an epiphenomenon. However, over the past decade, a dramatic increase in emotion research, has begun to change this perception of emotion. Researchers are asking questions about emotion processes and mechanisms from biological, neuroanatomical, developmental, cognitive, social, clinical, and cultural viewpoints, as well as from an integrative perspective that combines elements of all of these approaches. Increased interest in emotion is likely to stem from two main reasons. First, emotion plays a central role in human experience. Second, recent advances in scientific techniques have expanded and refined our ability to study emotion.
Given the recent flurry of emotion research, the second edited edition of the Handbook of Emotions by Lewis and Haviland-Jones (2000) represents a timely and broad collection of contemporary issues in the emotion literature. The volume contains 43 chapters that are divided into seven sections with contributors representing a distinguished group of experts in the field. This scholarly edition begins with Interdisciplinary Foundations, which includes essays on the philosophy of emotions, evolutionary perspectives of emotion, social models of emotions, and emotions in art and the humanities. Biological and Neurophysiological Approaches features discussions on emotions in the mammalian brain, psychophysiological aspects of emotion, and facial expression and vocal communication of emotion. Developmental Changes includes the emergence of human emotions and an examination of emotional development from a social context viewpoint. Social and Personality Issues examines, for example, emotional expression in groups, and gender and emotion. Cognitive Factors includes articles on emotion and memory, current directions in emotional intelligence research, and cognitive and social construction of emotions. Health and Emotions explores a particularly emerging area of emotion research and includes such topics as emotions and immunity, and emotion and physical health. The final section features a host of articles relating to discrete emotions such as sadness, fear and anxiety, anger, and happiness.
Several sections (and the chapters therein) of this text are especially relevant to the readership of the Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy. For example, within the section entitled Developmental Changes, Izard and Ackerman (chapter 16 of this volume) provide a detailed but accessible review of work describing the emergence of emotions, as well as distinctions between dimensional and discrete models of emotion. …