Within psychology, emotion is often treated as something private and personal. In contrast, this book tries to understand emotion from the 'outside,' by examining the everyday social settings in which it operates. Three levels of social influence are considered in decreasing order of inclusiveness, starting with the surrounding culture and subculture, moving on to the more delimited organization or group, and finally focusing on the interpersonal setting.

"A thoughtful, scholarly yet accessible account of emotion that speaks to current debates associated with the ‘affective turn’ in disciplines including sociology, cultural studies, geography and psychology... invaluable for anyone wanting to understand contemporary engagements with affect, emotion and feeling." - John Cromby, Loughborough University "A lucid, engaging, and thoroughly insightful review of current social scientific thinking on emotions in social life by a leading scholar in the field... The book is sure to become essential reading for both students and researchers interested in emotion" - Jason Hughes, University of Leicester "A masterful exposition of the links between emotions and social relations... Empirically rich and theoretically deep, this is a highly readable book. - Svend Brinkmann, University of Aalborg This book is a compelling and timely addition to the study of emotions, arguing that emotion is a response to the way in which people are embedded in patterns of relationship, both to others and to significant social and political events or situations. Going beyond the traditional discursive understanding of emotions, Burkitt investigates emotions as a complex and dynamic phenomenon that includes the whole self, body and mind, but which always occur in relation to others.

Emotional expressions are omnipresent, but how do they influence us? This book highlights the pervasive interpersonal effects of emotions.

This volume brings together, for the first time, inquiries into the size and proximity of social networks and emotion in social relationships to advance understanding of how emotion in significant social relationships influences health. The collection integrates knowledge from those with expertise in mapping the nature of emotional experience in human relations with those who are linking social ties to health outcomes, and those who explicate underlying neurobiological mechanisms. The book puts forth the idea that full explication of how emotion, social relationships, and health are woven together demands multidisciplinary inquiry and brings together leading experts from fields of affective science, clinical and social psychology, epidemiology, psychiatry, psychoneuroimmunology, psychoneuroendocrinology, and health to promote the above synthesis.

An idealized view of the lifestyle of a Buddhist monk might be described according to the doctrinal demand for emotional detachment and, ultimately, the cessation of all desire. Yet monks are also enjoined to practice compassion, a powerful emotion and equally lofty ideal, and live with every other human feeling—love, hate, jealousy, ambition—while relating to other monks and the lay community. In this important ethnography of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Jeffrey Samuels takes an unprecedented look at how emotion determines and influences the commitments that laypeople and monastics make to each other and to the Buddhist religion in general. By focusing on "multimoment" histories, Samuels highlights specific junctures in which ideas about recruitment, vocation, patronage, and institution-building are dynamically negotiated and refined. Positing a nexus between aesthetics and affect, he illustrates not only how aesthetic responses trigger certain emotions, but also how personal and shared emotions, at the local level, shape notions of beauty. Samuels uses the voices of informants to reveal the delicately negotiated character of lay-monastic relations and temple management. In the fields of religion and Buddhist studies there has been a growing recognition of the need to examine affective dimensions of religion. His work breaks new ground in that it answers questions about Buddhist emotions and the constitutive roles they play in social life and religious practice through a close, poignant look at small-scale temple and social networks. Throughout, Samuels makes the case for the need to account for emotions in making intelligible the behavior of religious participants and practitioners. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork that includes numerous interviews as well as an examination of written and visual sources, Attracting the Heart conveys the manner in which Buddhists describe their own histories, experiences, and encounters as they relate to the formation and continuation of Buddhist monastic culture in contemporary Sri Lanka. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of religion, Buddhist studies, anthropology, and South and Southeast Asian studies.

This fascinating book explores the bodily expression of emotion in worldwide and culture-specific contexts.

Gerald C. Cupchik builds a bridge between science and the humanities, arguing that interactions between mind and body in everyday life are analogous to relations between subject matter and style in art. According to emotional phase theory, emotional reactions emerge in a 'perfect storm' whereby meaningful situations evoke bodily memories that unconsciously shape and unify the experience. Similarly, in expressionist or impressionist painting, an evocative visual style can spontaneously colour the experience and interpretation of subject matter. Three basic situational themes encompass complementary pairs of primary emotions: attachment (happiness - sadness), assertion (fear - anger), and absorption (interest - disgust). Action episodes, in which a person adapts to challenges or seeks to realize goals, benefit from energizing bodily responses which focus attention on the situation while providing feedback, in the form of pleasure or pain, regarding success or failure. In high representational paintings, style is transparent, making it easier to fluently identify subject matter.