A Natural History of Human Emotions

by Stuart Walton

Using Charles Darwin’s survey of emotions as a starting point, Stuart Walton’s A Natural History of Human Emotions examines the history of each of our core emotions—fear, anger, disgust, sadness, jealousy, contempt, shame, embarrassment, surprise, and happiness—and how these emotions have influenced both cultural and social history. We learn that primitive fear served as the engine of religious belief, while a desire for happiness led to humankind’s first musings on achieving a perfect utopia. Challenging the notion that human emotion has remained constant, A Natural History of Human Emotions explains why, in the last 250 years, society has changed its unwritten rules for what can be expressed in public and in private. Like An Intimate History of Humanity and Near a Thousand Tables , Walton’s A Natural History of Human Emotions is a provocative examination of human feelings and a fascinating take on how emotions have shaped our past.

Genres: History, Psychology, Science, Nonfiction

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Amy Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really frustrated by this book. I was willing to think with an open mind about how our emotions would be related to evolution, but he takes his own opinions as facts to build his argument without a sense of transparency that they are opinions. Felt like he'd missed the boat on recent ideas about history. It's not really a history either, but a pulling of a few quotes. What really got me to stop reading it was I didn't feel any good coming from it.