The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition

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Harvard University Press, Apr 15, 2019 - Psychology - 368 pages

Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel.

Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were hard at work. If we want to properly understand the evolution of the mind, we must explore this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel.

Emotions saturate every thought and perception with the weight of feelings. The Emotional Mind reveals that many of the distinctive behaviors and social structures of our species are best discerned through the lens of emotions. Even the roots of so much that makes us uniquely human—art, mythology, religion—can be traced to feelings of caring, longing, fear, loneliness, awe, rage, lust, playfulness, and more.

From prehistoric cave art to the songs of Hank Williams, Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel explore how the evolution of the emotional mind stimulated our species’ cultural expression in all its rich variety. Bringing together insights and data from philosophy, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology, The Emotional Mind offers a new paradigm for understanding what it is that makes us so unique.

 

Contents

The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition
1
1 Why a New Paradigm?
21
Reassessing Teleology
43
3 Social Intelligence from the Ground Up
74
4 Emotional Flexibility and the Evolution of Bioculture
91
5 The Ontogeny of Social Intelligence
122
6 Representation and Imagination
153
7 Language and Concepts
184
The Social Structure of Civilization
204
9 Religion Mythology and Art
264
Notes
317
References
365
Acknowledgments
413
Index
417
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