A key text for academics and researchers in a huge variety of disciplines, this book gathers the wisdom of researchers from many of them. Neurobiologists, philosophers, sociologists, developmental, physiological and social psychologists as well as social anthropologists are all represented in this wide-ranging volume, working together to establish an integrative model of emotion research. In the last two decades, interest in the emotions has increased significantly in various disciplines such as psychology, neurobiology, social anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy and linguistics. Although the individual disciplines are studying overlapping issues in relation to emotions, the scientific approaches to these issues have often remained unrelated. This gap is especially obvious between the sciences and the humanities, where cooperative approaches hardly exist. All branches concerned realize that this missing interdisciplinary cooperation is a shortcoming and are thus demanding that the interaction between the disciplines should increase. And here is one text at least that goes a long way to solving the impasse.

PD Dr. phil. Birgitt Röttger-Rössler teaches Social Anthropology at the University of Göttingen. She studied social and physical anthropology as well as Malay languages and literatures at the Universities of Goettingen, Zurich, Cologne and Bonn. Her main research focuses on the cultural patterning of emotions as well as on gender relations, life history and autobiographical narrating; Indonesian and Malay literatures. She has accomplished several research projects concerning these topics and has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia, mainly in Sulawesi and Sumatra.

Hans Joachim Markowitsch is Professor of Physiological Psychology at the University of Bielefeld. He studied psychology and biology at the University of Konstanz, had professorships for biopsychology and physiological psychology at the Universities of Konstanz, Bochum, and Bielefeld and was offered chairs of psychology and neuroscience at Australian and Canadian Universities. His research centers on the neural and psychic bases of memory disorders, consciousness, emotion, and free will. He is author, co-author or editor of more than a dozen books and has written more than 450 scientific articles and book chapters