Psychology of Human Emotion

This textbook centers on four main emotion perspectives: basic emotion, social constructivism, cognitive appraisal, and dimensional models.  It strives to provide a clear analysis of each perspective, while pointing out the contributions and limitations of each perspective.  All four perspectives continue to influence each other and to advance our understanding of human emotion.

The goals in writing this textbook were to:

• Share the author's fascination for human emotion with other students and faculty.
• Provide every student equal access and opportunity to learn about human emotion.
• Create an interactive textbook that helps students to test their knowledge and apply concepts to real-life situations.
• Teach students to interpret visual displays of findings in tables and figures.
• Encourage students to determine and defend their own perspective of human emotion.

This textbook was made possible through the support of the Affordable Course Transformation (ACT) program offered through the Provost’s charged and funded Open and Affordable Educational Resources (OAER) Working group at Penn State University. The ACT program was designed to assist instructors in developing Open Educational Resource (OER) textbooks. This book was developed in conjunction with Penn State’s University Libraries and Department of Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT).