Robert Plutchik

As the name implies, this book is part of a major series about emotion edited by Robert Plutchik who is a significant contributor in his own right. it's a series of papers by specialists in aspects of emotion and this particular volume (1) is about different "Theories of emotion". They range from biological theories about emotion to the opening paper which regards emotions as socially constructed syndromes or transitory social roles. I found that I am most comfortable with the psycho-evolutionary theories that see human emotions as part of an evolutionary continuum that simply builds on animal emotions. I must confess that I was quite fascinated by Plutchik's circular plotting of emotions so that around (and within) a circle, he plots various emotions and each emotion has a counterpart that is directly opposite. So "interested" is 180 degrees away from "disinterested". The whole system was derived by a panel of judges who had to make their judgements about the words...so it's a bit dodgy though he manages to do the same thing for "personality traits such as :depressed" and "self-confident". And also for psychological diagnosis like "extroverted" and "introverted". Plutchik also explores possible relations between emotions and certain universal problems of adaption for biological individuals. These are labelled as problems of hierarchy, territoriality, identity and temporality. He manages to make it sound almost reasonable.
There is another paper by JP Scott that makes the point that there is no hard and fast rule between sensation and emotion but these grade into each other. And, in humans there are large differences in the expression of emotions and people are very poor at recognising emotions. And I rather liked the paper by Karl H Pribram about the biology of emotions: endocrines, the role of the diencephalon as a prime locus for reception, plus the role of the basal ganglia....in maintaining homeostasis. So, for example, the concentration of salt in thirst. Though, elsewhere, other authors suggest that in the higher animals, anyway, that many emotions result in disturbing physiological conditions rather than maintaining them at a constant level. Overall, an interesting book and an interesting set of papers. I give it three stars.… (altro)