Klaus R. Scherer - Böcker

Appraisal theory has become one of the most active aproaches in the domain of emotion psychology. The appraisal process consists of the subjective evaluation that occurs during the individual's encounter with significant events in the environment, thus determining the nature of the emotional reaction and experience. The organism's interpretation of events and situations elicits and differentiates its emotional responses, although the exact processes involved and the limits of the theory are still a matter of debate and are currently the object of active research. This volume is intended to become the primary source of information on appraisal for all those interested in emotion, from beginning graduate students to accomplished researchers in emotion psychology.

'Affective computing' is a branch of computing concerned with the theory and construction of machines which can detect, respond to, and simulate human emotional states. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning the computer sciences, psychology, and cognitive science. Affective computing is a rapidly developing field within industry and science. There is now a great drive to make technologies such as robotic systems, avatars in service-related human computer interaction, e-learning, game characters, or companion devices more marketable by endowing the 'soulless' robots or agents with the ability to recognize and adjust to the user's feelings as well as to be able to communicate appropriate emotional signals.A Blueprint for Affective Computing: A sourcebook and manual is the very first attempt to ground affective computing within the disciplines of psychology, affective neuroscience, and philosophy. This book illustrates the contributions of each of these disciplines to the development of the ever-growing field of affective computing. In addition, it demonstrates practical examples of cross-fertilization between disciplines in order to highlight the need for integration of computer science, engineering and the affective sciences. Focusing on a topic at the frontiers of human computer interaction research, this book will be of great interest to students and researchers in psychology, neuroscience, computational neuroscience, computer science, and artificial intelligence.

Publications on emotion (and the affective sciences in general) have exploded in the last decade. Numerous research teams and individual scholars from many different disciplines have published research papers or books about many different aspects of emotions and their role in behaviour and society. However, One aspect of emotional research that has been somewhat neglected, is the way in which emotional terms translate into other languages. When using terms like anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and joy for so-called basic emotions, as well as terms like shame, guilt, pride, regret and contempt for more complex emotions, it is naturally assumed that the emotion terms used for research in the native language of the researchers and translated into English are completely equivalent in meaning. However, this is not generally the case. In many cases there is no direct one to one relationship between an English term and a term in an alternative language. In fact, there can be significant differences in the way that these seemingly similar emotional terms can be applied across various languages, with important implications for how we review and appraise this work.This book presents an extensive cross-cultural and cross-linguistic review of the meaning of emotion words, adopting a novel methodological approach. Based on the Component Process Model, the authors developed a new instrument to assess the meaning of emotion terms. This instrument, the GRID questionnaire, consists of a grid of 24 emotion terms spanning the emotion domain and 142 emotion features that operationalize five emotion components (Appraisals, Bodily reactions, Expressions, Action tendencies, and Feelings). For the operationalization of these five emotion components, very different emotion models from the Western and the cultural-comparative emotion literature were taken into account.'Components of Emotional Meaning' includes contributions from psychological, cultural-comparative, and linguistic perspectives demonstrating how this new instrument can be used to empirically study very different research questions on the meaning of emotion terms. The implications of the results for major theoretical debates on emotion are also discussed. For all researchers in the affective sciences, this book is an important new reference work.

How can an abstract sequence of sounds so intensely express emotional states? How does music elicit or arouse our emotions? What happens at the physiological and neural level when we listen to music? How do composers and performers practically manage the expressive powers of music? How have societies sought to harness the powers of music for social or therapeutic purposes? In the past ten years, research into the topic of music and emotion has flourished. In addition, the relationship between the two has become of interest to a broad range of disciplines in both the sciences and humanities. The Emotional Power of Music is a multidisciplinary volume exploring the relationship between music and emotion. Bringing together contributions from psychologists, neuroscientists, musicologists, musicians, and philosophers, the volume presents both theoretical perspectives and in-depth explorations of particular musical works, as well as first-hand reports from music performers and composers. In the first section of the book, the authors consider the expression of emotion within music, through both performance and composing. The second section explores how music can stimulate the emotions, considering the psychological and neurological mechanisms that underlie music listening. The third section explores how different societes have sought to manage and manipulate the power of music. The book is valuable for those in the fields of music psychology and music education, as well as philosophy and musicology

This book describes a large-scale, cross-cultural study of emotional experience and emotional reaction which was conducted in Israel and seven European countries: the UK, West Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. Until the publication of this book in 1986, most research on emotion has been conducted under laboratory conditions, but the contributors to this study used a questionnaire approach to gather material covering a wide range of topics. Do certain situations elicit emotion-specific responses? Do emotion-specific symptom and reaction patterns exist? Do the common stereotypes of Northern and Southern emotional responses reflect the existence of real cross-cultural differences in emotional experiences and responses? Four emotions were studied - joy, sadness, fear and anger - and the results provide not only a wealth of quantitative data, but also, at the descriptive level, a fascinating overview of the ways in which people experience emotion.

In this book, which was originally published in 1992, Klaus Scherer brought together leading scholars from the social sciences to discuss theoretical and empirical studies of justice. They examined the nature of justice from the perspective of philosophy, economics, law, sociology and psychology, and explored possible lines of convergence. A critical examination of theories of justice from Plato and Aristotle, through Marx, to Rawls and Habermas heads a collection which addresses the role of justice in economics and the law and which evaluates sociological and psychological stances in relation to justice distributive and procedural. All the material is of clear cross-disciplinary interest; and this broad and authoritative survey of thinking on the topic will appeal to all researchers in the area, whatever their background, as well as to those confronting issues of justice in law politics and business.

This sourcebook is intended as a reader in the fullest sense of that word: a work that offers researchers and students alike the opportunity to examine the many different aspects and widely divergent approaches to the study of emotion. The contributors include samples of biological, ontogenetic, ethological, psychological, sociological, and anthropological approaches.