This article opens by noting that positive emotions do not fit existing models of emotions. Consequently, a new model is advanced to describe the form and function of a subset of positive emotions, including joy, interest, contentment, and love. This new model posits that these positive emotions serve to broaden an individual's momentary thought-action repertoire, which in turn has the effect of building that individual's physical, intellectual, and social resources. Empirical evidence to support this broaden-and-build model of positive emotions is reviewed, and implications for emotion regulation and health promotion are discussed. Even though research on emotions has this new perspective are featured. My hope is flourished in recent years, investigations that that this article will unlock scientific curiosity expressly target positive emotions remain few about positive emotions, not only to test the and far between. Any review of the psychologi- ideas presented here, but also to build other new cal literature on emotions will show that models that might illuminate the nature and psychologists have typically favored negative value of positive emotions. Psychology sorely emotions in theory building and hypothesis needs more studies on positive emotions, not testing. In so doing, psychologists have inadver- simply to level the uneven knowledge bases tently marginalized the emotions, such as joy, between negative and positive emotions, but interest, contentment, and love, that share a more critically, to guide applications and pleasant subjective feel. To date, then, psycholo- interventions that might improve individual and gy's knowledge base regarding positive emo- collective functioning, psychological welltions is so thin that satisfying answers to the question "What good are positive emotions?" have yet to be articulated. This is unfortunate. being, and physical health. Experiences of positive emotion are central to Why Have Positive Emotions human nature and contribute richly to the quality of people's lives (Diener & Larsen, Been Marginalized? 1993; Myers & Diener, 1995). But how? In At this point, it might be useful to inspect

The adaptive value of emotions in nature indicates that they might also be useful in artificial creatures. Experiments were carried out to investigate this hypothesis in a simulated learning robot. For this purpose, a non-symbolic emotion model was developed that takes the form of a recurrent artificial neural network where emotions both depend on and influence the perception of the state of the world. This emotion

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ABSTRACT: A primary interest of the field of infant mental health is in the early conditions that place infants at riskfor less than optimal development. The fundamental problem of what constitutes normal and abnormal development is now a focus of developmental psychology, infant psychiatry, and developmental neuroscience. In the second part of this sequential work, I present interdisciplinary data to more deeply forge the theoretical links between severe attachment failures, impairments of the early development of the right brain’s stress coping systems, and maladaptive infant mental health. In the following, I offer thoughts on the negative impact of traumatic attachments on brain development and infant mental health, the neurobiology of infant trauma, the neuropsychology of a disorganized/disoriented attachment pattern associated with abuse and neglect, trauma-induced impairments of a regulatory system in the orbitofrontal cortex, the links between orbitofrontal dysfunction and a predisposition to posttraumatic stress disorders, the neurobiology of the dissociative defense, the etiology of dissociation and body–mind psychopathology, the effects of early relational trauma on enduring right hemispheric function, and some implications for models of early intervention. These findings suggest direct connections between traumatic attachment, inefficient right brain regulatory functions, and both maladaptive infant and adult mental health.

Evolutionary psychology is an attempt to unify the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences theoretically and empirically within a single, mutually consistent, seamless scientific framework. The core of this enterprise is the integration of principles and findings drawn from evolutionary biology, cognitive science, anthropology, economics, and neuroscience with psychology in order to produce highresolution maps of human nature. By “human nature, ” evolutionary psychologists mean the evolved, reliably developing, species-typical computational architecture of the human mind, together with the physical structures and processes (in the brain, in development, and in genetics) that give rise to this informationprocessing architecture. For evolutionary psychologists, all forms of knowledge about brains and behavior are relevant, but the pivotal step is using these facts to form accurate models of the information-processing structure of psychological mechanisms.

People’s wanting and liking reactions reflect not only high-level beliefs, but also the operation of rudimentary biopsychological processes. Previous studies suggest that the following wanting and liking processes may be relevant to political behavior: irrational wanting (where wanting is triggered by activation of the brain dopamine system and becomes dissociated from liking); unconscious liking and wanting (where evaluative judgments and behavior are modified without awareness of the eliciting affective stimuli or of the underlying affective response); and fluency-based liking (where preferences are influenced by the ease of stimulus processing). This review suggests how conceptual and methodological tools from affective neuroscience and psychophysiology can refine our understanding of basic affective and motivational processes that shape political attitudes and choices. KEY WORDS: affect, choice, emotion, preference, neuroscience Citizens participate in the political process not only with their heads, but also their hearts. They are either enthusiastic about candidates or disgusted by them, engaged in or indifferent to elected officials ’ decisions, trusting or afraid of the government, passionate about social justice or hateful toward certain groups, hopeful or scared about the future, “mad as hell ” or confident about the economy. Social scientists who appreciate these observations have long been interested in understanding the functions of emotion and motivation in political behavior

and the Emotions Evolutionary psychology is an approach to the psychological sciences in which principles and results drawn from evolutionary biology, cogni-tive science, anthropology, and neuroscience are integrated with the rest of psychology in or-der to map human nature. By "human nature," evolutionary psychologists mean the evolved, reliably developing, species-typical computa-tional and neural architecture of the human mind and brain. According to this view, the functional components of this architecture were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ances-tors, and to regulate behavior so that these adaptive problems were successfUlly addressed (for discussion, see Cosmides & Tooby, 1987; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psy-chology is not a specific subfield of psycholo-gy, such as the study of vision, reasoning, or so-cial behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it-including the emotions. The analysis of adaptive problems that arose ancestrally has led evolutionary psychologists to apply the concepts and methods of the cogni-tive sciences to scores of topics that are relevant to the study of emotion, such as the cognitive processes that govern cooperation, sexual at-traction, jealousy, aggression, parental love, friendship, romantic love, the aesthetics of landscape preferences, coalitional aggression,

We propose a methodological framework for the study of emotional control based on extensive computer simulations with artificial agents implementing emotional control mechanisms and demonstrate the methodology with simulations experiments in an artificial environment. Specifically, a biologically plausible schema-based model of basic forms of fear and anger is proposed and tested with respect to a variety of parameter ranges.