ABSTRACT
Humans are, to say the least, highly emotional animals. We love and hate; we fall into suicidal depressions or experience moments of joy and ecstasy; we feel shame, guilt, and alienation; we are righteous; we seek vengeance. Indeed, as distinctive as capacities for language and culture make us, humans are also unique in their propensity to be so emotional. Other animals can, of course, be highly emotional, but during the course of hominid and human evolution, natural selection rewired our ancestors’ neuroanatomy to make Homo sapiens more emotional than any other animal on earth. Humans can emit and interpret a wide array of emotional states; and in fact, a moment of thought reveals that emotions are used to forge social bonds, to create and sustain commitments to social structures and cultures, and to tear sociocultural creations down. Just about every dimension of society is thus held together or ripped apart by emotional arousal.
