The Handbook of Affective Sciences is a comprehensive road map to the burgeoning area of affective sciences, which now spans several disciplines. Helping to delineate this emerging field, this volume brings together, for the first time, the various strands of inquiry and latest research in the scientific study of emotion and related affective phenomena. In recent years, scientists have made considerable advances in understanding how brain processes shape emotions and are changed by human emotion. There have also been major methodological advances in objectively measuring different parameters of emotion, ranging from expressive behavior to physiology to subjective experience using experience sampling. Drawing on a wide range of research and methods of inquiry-neuroimaging techniques, neuropsychological assessment, clinical research, and laboratory paradigms designed to assess the cognitive and social constituents of emotion-scientists are beginning to understand the many factors that shape emotion and the vast range of functions that are affected by emotion. As a result, researchers are gaining insight into such compelling questions as how people experience life emotionally, why people respond so differently to the same experiences, what the face can tell us about internal states, how emotion in significant social relationships influence health, and whether there are basic emotions common to all humans. This handbook brings together the most eminent scholars in the area of affective science, who lay out, in fifty-nine original chapters, the latest research and theorise in the field. The book is divided into ten sections: Neuroscience; Autonomic Psychophysiology; Genetics and Development; Expression of Emotion; Cognitive Components of Emotion; Personality; Emotion and Social Processes; Evolutionary and Cultural Perspective on Affect; Emotion and Psychopathology; and Emotion and Health. This major new volume will be an invaluable resource for researchers that will define affective sciences for the next decade. Reviews "Overall, the real strength of this book is the comprehensive coverage of a wide range of different approaches to the study of emotion. It is an up-to-date manual that every researcher interested in emotion should display proudly." --Psychological Medicine
"This handbook will bring about the long-needed integration of the fragmented scholarship in the study of emotion, which advances in neuroscience have recently made possible. The combination of breadth, depth, and clarity will make this volume indispensable to students and to scholars for years to come." --Daniel Kahneman, Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Princeton University
"The Handbook of Affective Sciences is the most comprehensive, authoritative, and up-to-date review available of issues pertaining to emotion. It will be an indispensable reference for anyone interested in understanding the nature of emotions and their relations to other psychological constructs." --Robert J. Sternberg, President, American Psychological Association
"This volume defines a new field. Although 'affective science' draws on studies of emotion, it includes much more than what has traditionally been addressed under that rubric. This emerging discipline promises not only to forge crucial links between psychology and neuroscience, but also to build strong bridges between research in the laboratory and practice in the clinic. This book should be on the shelf of anyone seriously interested in psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, or neurology." --Stephen M. Kosslyn, John Lindsley Professor of Psychology, Harvard University --- from the publisher | 
