Heart to Heart
How Your Emotions Affect Other People

Positions emotion in the social world by arguing that its central function is to align relations between people.

Brian Parkinson (Author)

9781108484503, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 November 2019

430 pages
23.5 x 15.6 x 2.4 cm, 0.81 kg

'In this comprehensive, theoretically rich, accessible treatise, Parkinson (Univ. of Oxford, UK) challenges and reverses traditional psychological and individualistic accounts of emotions' origins. In a wholesale paradigmatic shift, he presents an approach to their understanding that is interpersonal, interactive, relational, and fundamentally social in nature, beginning from birth … The overall result is a thought-provoking study that will certainly extend emotion research into several new directions for years to come.' J. R. Mitrano, Choice

Do emotions happen inside separate hearts and minds, or do they operate across the spaces between individuals? This book focuses on how emotions affect other people by changing their orientation to what happens in the social world. It provides the first sustained attempt to bring together literature on emotion's social effects in dyads and groups, and on how people regulate their emotions in order to exploit these effects in their home and work lives. The chapters present state-of-the-art reviews of topics such as emotion contagion, social appraisal and emotional labour. The book then develops an innovative and integrative approach to the social psychology of emotion based on the idea of relation alignment. The implications not only stretch beyond face-to-face interactions into the wider interpersonal, institutional and cultural environment, but also penetrate the supposed depths of personal experience, making us rethink some of our strongly held presuppositions about how emotions work.

1. What's at the heart of emotions?
2. Words and concepts
3. Facial activity and emotion expression
4. Explaining emotional influence
5. Regulating emotions
6. Social functions
7. Groups, teams, and crowds
8. Working with emotions
9. Reorientation
References.

Subject Areas: The self, ego, identity, personality [JMS], Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Psychology: emotions [JMQ], Social, group or collective psychology [JMH], Psychology [JM], Sociology [JHB]