Landmarks in Emotion Research: A Guided Tour of Classic and Contemporary Studies

This unique book guides readers round 50 landmark studies in the psychology of emotion. It explores questions including what gives emotion its distinct emotional quality, whether our faces always reveal what we are feeling, and how we can be in control of our emotions. The book traces a route through both classic and contemporary studies, covering factors that make different emotions different, causal processes, emotion regulation, the perception and production of facial expressions, interpersonal and group processes, and emotion concepts. Each section presents a series of studies which complement and build on those discussed earlier. Each study is carefully discussed for students to understand the key methods, results, conclusions, limitations, and impacts for the field. Parkinson provides expert guidance through the key points, taking a fresh look at the research methods and results, presenting alternative approaches and interpretations, and assessing how the findings have advanced or hindered progress in the field. Offering a clear orientation to the psychological literature on emotion, this book will be highly relevant for undergraduate and graduate students of psychology, particularly those taking courses on emotion, social psychology, and cognitive psychology.

Table of Contents:
Introduction. Section 1. Starting points. Section 2. Differences. Section 3. Causes. Section 4. Regulation. Section 5. Facial expression I: Perceived meanings. Section 6. Facial expression II: Signalling in social contexts. Section 7. Interpersonal processes. Section 8. Group processes. Section 9. Concepts. Section 10. Future directions.

About the Author :
Brian Parkinson is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Oxford and has been researching emotion since he was an undergraduate at Manchester University. He has authored more than a hundred chapters and journal articles and he is currently an Editor-in-Chief of the journal Emotion Review.

Review :
'Brian Parkinson invites you to an adventure! Like a detective, he identifies, examines, and evaluates key pieces of evidence that, together, build the science of emotion. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand how and why we understand emotions as we do'. --Maya Tamir, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 'The threads of research in the study of emotion are often woven into an uncomplicated but overly simplistic canvas. Brian Parkinson invites you to a detailed, slow reading of a comprehensive sample of these threads. He unveils the hidden side of that canvas: the researchers’ struggles, the participants’ perplexities, and the perennial conundrums posed by the elusive phenomenon hidden behind the word “emotion”'. --José-Miguel Fernández-Dols, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid 'In his unprecedented new book Landmarks in Emotion Research, Brian Parkinson reviews most of the foundational studies in affective science. He dissects the procedures and outcomes of each, and then gracefully and even-handedly determines when the findings support the claims and when they do not. Taking a participant’s eye view, he illustrates how the social contexts and role demands of experiments can often explain findings without resorting to fancy theories, and he does so with clear everyday examples that amuse and convince. This book is both highly analytical and extremely accessible. Although it’s intended for advanced undergraduates, its potential beneficiaries include graduate students and seasoned researchers. Landmarks in Emotion Research is an eye-opening delight'. --Alan Fridlund, University of California at Santa Barbara