Human Emotions

by Carroll E. Izard

In recent years-especially the past decade, in sharp contrast to preceding decades-knowledge in the field of emotions has been steadily increasing. This knowledge comes from many different Emotion is a truly interdisciplinary subject. Workers in the fields of physiology, neurology, ethology, physiological psychology, personality and social psychology, clinical psychology and psychiatry, medicine, nursing, social work, and the clergy are all directly concerned with emotion. Professions such as law and architecture have an obvious concern with emotions as they affect human motives and needs. The various branches of art, especially the performing arts, certainly deal with the emotions, especially with the expression of emotions. Constantine Stanislavsky, the Russian theatrical genius, revolu­ tionized modem theater by developing a training method for actors and actresses that emphasized creating genuine emotion on the stage, the emotion appropriate to the character and the life situation being depicted. Indeed, one can hardly think of any human activity that is not related in some way to the field of emotion. Since the contributions to the subject of emotions come from so many different disciplines, it is difficult to find the important common themes that can yield an understanding of the field as a whole. This volume will attempt to make that task easier, but I recognize that no one can treat all of the diverse material expertly and in detail. My aim will be to represent all important types of contributions and perhaps point the way for further and more intensive study of special topics.

Genres: Psychology

495 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 1977

About the author

Carroll Ellis Izard is an American psychologist known for his contributions to Differential Emotions Theory (DET),[1] and the Maximally Discriminative Affect Coding System (MAX). DET maintains that universally recognizable innate, basic emotions emerge within the first 2 to 7 months of post-natal life "without facial movement precursors" (Izard, et al., 1995), and argues for congruence of emotion expression and subjective experience (Izard & Abe, 2004). He also proposed the facial feedback hypothesis according to which emotions which have different functions also cause facial expression which in turn provide us with cues about what emotion exactly a person is feeling.