ABSTRACT
The emotions received only limited attention among psychologists until the mid-1980s, when research began to blossom. Emblematic is the publication of the first edition of the Handbook of Emotions in 1993. What was true of psychology was doubly so for economics. From the end of World War II to the late 1980s the topic of emotions was nearly invisible in mainstream economics and represented a niche area of research even among behavioral economists. Illustratively, the comprehensive (more than 600 pages) survey volume on economic psychology by Lea, Tarpy, and Webley (1987) not only did not have a chapter on emotions but did not even list the term in the index. Since then the tide has turned, albeit on a relatively modest scale. A harbinger of renewed interest in emotions among mainstream economists was Robert Frank’s well-received book Passions Within Reason (1988), accompanied by a modest but increasingly visible flow of journal articles exploring various facets of emotion, such as happiness, envy, regret, trust, and fairness. Then the subject of emotion gained wider recognition in the discipline and a certain degree of official sanction when two survey articles appeared in top-line economics journals-by Elster in the Journal of Economic Literature (1998) and Loewenstein in the American Economic Review (2000).
