Emotions

Emotions are at the core of human actions. Joy, desire, and pride motivate us, whereas fear and mourning thwart us, while surprise and wonderment unsettle us. Love, anger, and disgust shape our very being and society in a sustained way.

The Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, the world's largest interdisciplinary research centre on emotions, studied these ten emotions from various aspects. How is love related to economy, surprise to music, joy to creative art, and grief to psychology, neurosciences, philosophy, literature, and cinema?

Roughly a third of the book features the social arena of these emotions, showing people who have to cope with them in the photographs of contemporary artists. People in groups and individually, in public or private spaces—motivated or unsettled, left alone with their emotions or jointly living them out.

Readers are confronted with the great variety of our emotional worlds, scientifically, visually and, of course, always filled with intense feelings!