ABSTRACT
The battle between reason and emotion has been a dominant theme in Western cultures for over 2000 years, such that the description of someone as “emotional” or “sentimental” has generally been taken in a negative way. No less an authority than Darwin argued that emotions were vestiges of our evolutionary history and, like the appendix in the gut, were no longer of evolutionary value-at least for Victorian males like himself at the top of the evolutionary tree! Fortunately the view that emotions are evolutionarily degenerate, blinding of reason, purposeless, and that they can lead the sensible Dr Jekyll to be taken over by the murderous Mr Hyde, is a view that has been challenged increasingly in the last 50 years in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. In fact, the dominant view now is that emotions are functional and purposive and have high evolutionary value in social mammals such as ourselves. So what has led to this change in zeitgeist in the approach to emotion? Perhaps we can begin with some illustrations before unpacking the history and theory of emotion in subsequent chapters.
