Emotions

The chapter starts by tracing the evolution of the concept of emotion from Greek antiquity to the twentieth century. Most of these perspectives envision emotion as unhealthy, non-adaptive, or dysfunctional. They also make a radical dichotomy between body and mind. Instead, current views see emotions as a dynamic system composed of psychophysiological, behavioral, and expressive, cognitive, and experiential responses. The chapter focuses in particular on the appraisal and action tendency stages. The differences between mood and emotion are then examined. The first part ends by detailing two central functions served by emotions—communication and attention orientation, and by highlighting the importance of emotion regulation. The second part of the chapter focuses on the interactions between emotion and memory at the individual level. It first describes the general finding that emotions have a positive effect on memory, which is known as the Emotion-Enhanced Memory (EEM) effect. It examines how EEM is affected by valence and age. Then, it reports some memory biases in relation to emotional situations. The next section shows the impact of personality traits on the memory for emotional information. The last section is dedicated to current limits and future directions for the research on emotion and memory. Finally, the third part examines emotion and memory at the collective level. It details how emotion can impact collective memory in three different ways, which are (1) the formation, (2) the transformation, and (3) the transmission of collective memory.