How Emotions Work

About this book

"Jack Katz develops new methods for examining the sources and workings of our emotional life with unprecedented directness and clarity.". "Katz fills the book with real-life emotions - crying under the pressure of police interrogation, road rage on California freeways, laughter in a funhouse, eight-year-olds shame facedly striking out at baseball games - where the rise and fall of emotions can be observed without the artificial influence of the research process. By using videotapes, interviews, ethnographic description, participant observation, and the insights of novelists, Katz studies emotions as physical and embodied - vibrantly, "under the radar" of a person's perceptual reach - rather than as remembered and recounted. Katz illustrates his methods with photographs and video stills that demonstrate the embodiment of emotion.". "The portrait that emerges is one in which people are much more sensually, intimately, and aesthetically bound up in the landscapes of their lives than previous scientific studies would suggest. In fact, Katz argues that emotions are most directly understood as transformations of the ongoing aesthetic foundations of the self."--BOOK JACKET.