CHARMINE E. J. HÄRTEL
Department of Management
Monash University

Emotions: The Biological Answer to Timeless Threats and Opportunities

The Regulation of Emotion.
Edited by Pierre Philippot and Robert S. Feldman. New York: Erlbaum, 2004. 415 pp. Cloth, $99.95.

The Regulation of Emotion, edited by Pierre Philippot and Robert S. Feldman, is more than its title suggests. It is a journey grounded in psychobiology and evolutionary psychology, uncovering with greater clarity than preceding works how and why the brain functions as it does. The reader comes away understanding not only how the different subdomains of psychology inform but what makes humans unique in the animal world; how emotions operate as one of the body's mechanisms that enable learning and communication; how physiology, emotion, cognition, and thought collaborate; the individual-level, group-level, and species-level functions of variability in emotion regulation strategies; and the health, cognitive, and social consequences of emotion regulation. The reader is left with no doubt that emotions are biologically based reactions that organize a person's responses to important events and that their regulation is subject to individual and cultural differences.