The theory of accommodation is concerned with motivations underlying and consequences arising from ways in which we adapt our language and communication patterns toward others. Since accommodation theory's emergence in the early l970s, it has attracted empirical attention across many disciplines and has been elaborated and expanded many times. In Contexts of Accommodation, accommodation theory is presented as a basis for sociolinguistic explanation, and it is the applied perspective that predominates this edited collection. The book seeks to demonstrate how the core concepts and relationships...

This volume brings together critical analysis of the phenomenon called interpersonal expectations--a sub-area of social psychology that studies how the expectations of one person affects the behavior of another in an interactive setting. It is divided into three major sections: (1) real-world applications of research on interpersonal expectations, such as in the courtroom, classroom and operating room; (2) the mediation of interpersonal expectations through verbal and nonverbal behavior; and (3) the emerging methodological and statistical techniques for understanding the implications of...

Silvan Tomkins was one of the most influential theorists on emotion and emotional expression. Over a period of forty years--until his death in 1991--he developed a set of original, important ideas about the nature of affect and its relationship to cognition and personality. Tomkins dealt with fundamental questions in a fresh and provocative way, establishing affect as a separate, biological system, and providing compelling data on discrete affect expressions. Virginia Demos has undertaken the enormous task of compiling Professor Tomkins' papers and writing connective material for this volume,...

When people are in a certain mood, whether elated or depressed, that mood is often communicated to others. When we are talking to someone who is depressed it may make us feel depressed, whereas if we talk to someone who is feeling self-confident and buoyant we are likely to feel good about ourselves. This phenomenon, known as emotional contagion, is identified here, and compelling evidence for its effects is offered from a variety of disciplines--social and developmental psychology, history, cross-cultural psychology, experimental psychology, and psychopathology. The authors propose a simple...

Emotions cannot be understood independently of the social relationships and groups where they occur since the social world is defined by emotion and emotions are defined by the social world. This book examines the interplay of emotions and social relationships by analyzing the ways in which relationships generate emotions, the role of relationships and social life in constraining people's emotions, and how emotions constitute social relationships.

How human emotions are 'constructed' from individuals' embodied experiences in different cultural settings.

The central argument of this book is that emotion is meaningful and meaning is emotional. The modern world is forcing us to understand emotion in order to cope with new problems such as road rage and epidemic levels of depression, as well as age-old problems such as homicide, genocide and racial tension. This book draws on scholarly research to address, explain and legitimize the role that emotion plays in everyday interaction and in many of the pressing social, moral, and cultural issues that we face today.

This reference work provides broad and up-to-date coverage of the major perspectives--ethological, neurobehavioral, developmental, dynamic systems, and componential--on facial expression. The text reviews Darwin's legacy in the context of Izard and Tomkins' new theories as well as Fridlund's recently proposed Behavioural Ecology theory. Other contributions explore continuing controversies on universality and innateness, and update the research guidelines of Ekman, Friesen and Ellsworth. This book anticipates emerging research questions, such as the role of culture in children's understanding...

In this ground-breaking book, Anna Wierzbicka brings psychological, anthropological and lingusitic insights to bear on our understanding of the way emotions are expressed and experienced in different cultures, languages, and social relations. The expression of emotion in the face, body and modes of speech are all explored and Wierzbicka shows how the bodily expression of emotion varies across cultures and challenges traditional approaches to the study of facial expressions. This book will be invaluable to academics and students of emotion across the social sciences.

For ages, women have been considered as the emotional sex. The aim of this book is to investigate this stereotype. A wide range of emotions, such as anger, pride, shame, sadness, and joy, and emotional expressions, such as smiling and laughing are covered in the various chapters. The purpose of each chapter is to show whether sex differences have been found in psychological research in relation to one of these aspects of emotion, in which situations these differences were especially strong, and how (the absence of) these differences can be explained. This book is the first in its field to...