David D. Franks - Böcker

This volume focuses on theory and research which lends insight into how emotions are distributed, experienced and structured within five broadly conceived institutional areas. These are: medical and health care; family; work and leisure; education; and clinical/counselling. The text seeks to offer the student of social psychology, developmental psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and cognitive anthropology insight into the role that emotional experience plays in understanding society and culture at the close of the 20th century. The volumes in this series illustrate how social organization and private, emotional experience are different phases of the social process. They show the steps by which emotional experience is shaped by social structural, macro-level processes.

This series aims to illustrate how social organization and private, emotional experience are different phases of the social process. It shows the steps by which emotional experience is shaped by social structural process and how these processes are changed by individuals' emotional experience.

This series aims to illustrate how social organization and private, emotional experience are different phases of the social process. It shows the steps by which emotional experience is shaped by social structural process and how these processes are changed by individuals' emotional experience.

As a career sociologist I ?rst became interested in neurosociology around 1987 when a graduate student lent me Michael Gazzaniga’s The Social Brain. Ifthe biological human brain was really social, I thought sociologists and their students should be the ?rst, not the last, to know. As I read on I found little of the clumsy reductionism of the earlier biosociologists whom I had learned to see as the arch- emy of our ?eld. Clearly, reductionism does exist among many neuroscientists. But I also found some things that were very social and quite relevant for sociology. After reading Descarte’s Error by Antonio Damasio, I learned how some types of emotion were necessary for rational thought – a very radical innovation for the long-honored “objective rationalist. ” I started inserting some things about split-brain research into my classes, mispronouncing terms like amygdala and being corrected by my s- dents. That instruction helped me realize how much we professors needed to catch up with our students. I also wrote a review of Leslie Brothers’ Fridays Footprint: How Society Shapes the Human Mind. I thought if she could write so well about social processes maybe I could attempt to do something similar in connection with my ?eld. For several years I found her an e-mail partner with a wonderful sense of humor. She even retrieved copies of her book for the use of my graduate students when I had assigned it for a seminar.

As a career sociologist I ?rst became interested in neurosociology around 1987 when a graduate student lent me Michael Gazzaniga’s The Social Brain. Ifthe biological human brain was really social, I thought sociologists and their students should be the ?rst, not the last, to know.

This series aims to illustrate how social organization and private, emotional experience are different phases of the social process. It shows the steps by which emotional experience is shaped by social structural process and how these processes are changed by individuals' emotional experience.

Until recently, a handbook on neurosociology would have been viewed with skepticism by sociologists, who have long been protective of their disciplinary domain against perceived encroachment by biology. But a number of developments in the last decade or so have made sociologists more receptive to biological factors in sociology and social psychology. Much of this has been encouraged by the coeditors of this volume, David Franks and Jonathan Turner. This new interest has been increased by the explosion of research in neuroscience on brain functioning and brain-environment interaction (via new MRI technologies), with implications for social and psychological functioning. This handbook emphasizes the integration of perspectives within sociology as well as between fields in social neuroscience. For example, Franks represents a social constructionist position following from G.H. Mead’s voluntaristic theory of the act while Turner is more social structural and positivistic. Furthermore, thishandbook not only contains contributions from sociologists, but leading figures from the psychological perspective of social neuroscience.