Evolved Emotions

In Evolved Emotions, Glenn Weisfeld analyzes a comprehensive list of universal emotions, detailing their elicitors, affects, behavioral tendencies, expressions, visceral changes, neural mediations, development over the life span, and presence in other species. This comparative, evolutionary perspective inspires respect for the ancient utility of our emotions and the specific, enduring adaptive value of each one. This book offers novel insights into neglected emotional behaviors such as contact comfort, pain, feeding, disgust, fatigue, sleep, play, amorousness, sex, grief, parental behavior, anger, pride and shame, and humor. This systematic study of universal human emotions offers a framework for understanding all voluntary human behavior, including developmental, personality, gender, and pathological differences, explaining how each normal emotion serves to enhance the biological fitness of the individual.

This detailed look at the panoply of human and non-human emotions takes an explicitly evolutionary approach to understanding emotions in many different arenas of human experience. This makes sense because the author is an evolutionary psychologist and ethologist who has published widely on a variety of subjects centered around adolescence, marriage and sexuality, and power hierarchies, often from a cross-cultural perspective. Weisfeld (Wayne State Univ.) is author or coeditor of numerous books including Psychology of Marriage: An Evolutionary and Cross-Cultural View (CH, Nov'18, 56-1297). In this quite readable and accessible volume, he first outlines his evolutionary approach to the study of emotions, then offers an account of the physiological and neurophysiological underpinnings of emotion, describing what he considers to be all of the basic emotions and their evolutionary functions. This account is similar to but much broader than Paul Ekman's (Emotions Revealed, 2003). . . It is. . . a pleasure to read so far-ranging a survey of emotions from one so erudite. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers., Emotions make us do what we have to do. It is entirely logical, therefore,to put them in an evolutionary perspective to see where they come from andwhat purpose they serve. In doing so, Glenn Weisfeld offers a fresh, enlighteninglook at something we experience every day., Too often behavioral science is based on cognition, as if we consciously strive to increase our utility functions. In this wise work, Glenn Weisfeld shows the importance of physiologically-based emotions as motivators, describing the evolutionary commonalities of emotional behavior in humans and animals. A great and readable antidote for those drugged by the idea that we are essentially rational actors., This is an outstandingly insightful book about the most important part of ourselves: feelings. They guide our perceptions, thoughts and behaviors, and lead us through life. Glenn Weisfeld takes a very scholarly and up-to-date approach in discussing how evolution shaped this part of the human condition. He describes the adaptive values of a rich array of emotions regulated by a complex network of physiological, biochemical, and neurobiological mechanisms and, by stating that pathologies do occur, avoids the trap of adaptationism. A balanced piece of work by an internationally highly esteemed human ethologist.

Glenn Weisfeld is professor of psychology at Wayne State University