A Natural History of Human Emotions
Product Description
Using Charles Darwin’s survey of emotions as a starting point, Stuart Walton’s A Natural History of Human Emotions examines the history of each of our core emotionsfear, anger, disgust, sadness, jealousy, contempt, shame, embarrassment, surprise, and happinessand how these emotions have influenced both cultural and social history. We learn that primitive fear served as the engine of religious belief, while a desire for happiness led to humankind’s first musings on achieving a perfect utopia. Challenging the notion that human emotion has remained constant, A Natural History of Human Emotions explains why, in the last 250 years, society has changed its unwritten rules for what can be expressed in public and in private. Like An Intimate History of Humanity and Near a Thousand Tables, Walton’s A Natural History of Human Emotions is a provocative examination of human feelings and a fascinating take on how emotions have shaped our past.
A Natural History of Human Emotions
Midwest Book Review said,
Wrote on September 1, 2010 @ 10:19 pm
Charles Darwin’s survey of emotions serves as a starting point – and a focal point – for Stuart Walton’s A Natural History Of Human Emotions, an insightfully informative examination of the history of human emotions, which considers how these emotions have fueled social and political change over time. Human emotion hasn’t been a constant in as much as society has changed its rules for expression in both public and private and thus emotional honey has come to be valued while other emotions have risen to the foreground to dominate. Chapters use plenty of historical references from Biblical to modern times to chart these changes.
Rating: 5 / 5
michelle34 said,
Wrote on September 2, 2010 @ 12:49 am
Psychology is my what I studied, but somehow I couldn’t keep my attention on reading this book. After months and months of reading a few pages at a time, I finally gave up about a hundred pages into it. I think this book is great for reference or for anyone who really wants to know about the History of Human emotions and how media has affected it, but for the average reader, try something else. Simply put, this book was just boring.
Rating: 3 / 5
Maynard Handley said,
Wrote on September 2, 2010 @ 1:58 am
I was expecting a scientific survey of the emotions, but this is a literary and historical survey.
The historical parts are very interesting but are, unfortunately, the smaller part of the book.
The literary parts I had rather less patience with; they felt rather like amateur Freud, rambling on about (supposedly) univeral patterns of human behavior (where universal apparently means within the western literary tradition), and apparently quite ignorant of any post-WW2 brain science. (For example, how can one seriously discuss obsessive-compulsive disorder, as the book does, without even mentioning that drugs exist that quieten the malady?)
Rating: 2 / 5