Foundations of Affective Social Learning: Conceptualizing the Social Transmission of Value(Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction)

Written by experts in comparative, developmental, social, cognitive and cultural psychology, this book introduces the novel concept of affective social learning to help explain why what matters to us, matters to us. In the same way that social learning describes how we observe other people's behaviour to learn how to use a particular object, affective social learning describes how we observe other people's emotions to learn how to value a particular object, person or event. As such, affective social learning conceptualises the transmission of value from a given culture to a given person and reveals why the things that are so important to us can be of no consequence at all to others.

Table of Contents:
A difficult introduction to affective social learning Fabrice Clément and Daniel Dukes; Part I. On the Evolutionary Foundations of Affective Social Learning Processes: Lessons from Comparative Psychology: 1. Social learning among wild orang-utans: is it effective? Caroline Schuppli and Carel van Schaik; 2. Affective social learning and the emotional side of cultural learning in primates Thibaud Gruber and Christine Sievers; Part II. On Human Development and Affective Social Learning: 3. Affective social learning: from nature to culture Paul Harris; 4. Natural pedagogy of social emotions György Gergely and Ildikó Király; Part III. On the Mechanics of Affective Social Learning: 5. Calibrating emotional orientations: social appraisal and other kinds of relation alignment Brian Parkinson; 6. Socio-affective inferential mechanisms involved in emotion recognition Christian Mumenthaler and David Sander; 7. Learning from others' emotions Agneta Fischer; Part IV. Applications of Affective Social Learning: 8. Chastening the future: what we learn from others' regret Antony Manstead, Magdalena Rychlowska and Job van der Schalk; 9. Insights from culture and emotion research for affective social learning: emotional enculturation and acculturation Jozefien De Leersnyder; Conclusion: laying the foundations of affective social learning Fabrice Clément and Daniel Dukes.

About the Author :
Daniel Dukes holds research positions at the Université de Fribourg and the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences, Université de Genève, Switzerland. He also currently holds a Swiss National Science Fund visiting research post at the University of Oxford. Fabrice Clément is full Professor and co-founder of the Cognitive Science Centre at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

Review :
'It may seem obvious that learning from others is grounded in emotional connections, but for the longest time social learning was considered a mere variant of individual learning. This volume breaks this tradition as it convincingly argues, from many areas of expertise, that emotional closeness is key to how humans and other primates learn from each other.' Frans de Waal, Director of the Living Links Center, Scotland, and C. H. Candler Professor of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta 'Uniquely dedicated to understanding how emotional expressions enable observers to learn about their (social) environment, this volume highlights the intrinsically social constitution of emotions. By bringing together diverse theoretical perspectives and empirical approaches from different research traditions, this book offers a rich picture of the emerging research on affective social learning.' Gerben A. van Kleef, Universiteit van Amsterdam, the Netherlands