Passion and Reason: Making Sense of Our Emotions

332 Pages·1994·18.01 MB·English

by  Richard S. Lazarus

Passion and Reason
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Passion
and
Reason
Making Sense of
Our Emotions
RICHARD S. LAZARUS
BERNICE N. LAZARUS
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1994
Oxford University Press
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and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lazarus, Richard S.
Passion and reason: making sense of our emotions/
Richard S. Lazarus, Bernice N. Lazarus.
p. cm. Includes index.
ISBN 0-19-508757-7
1. Emotions. 2. Affect (Psychology)
3. Adjustment (Psychology)
I. Lazarus, Bernice N.
II. Title.
BF561.L38 1994 152.4 dc20 94-9320
"Dialogue Between Father/Daughter About Death of Dog"
from The Broken Connection by Robert Jay Lifton.
Copyright © 1979 by Robert Jay Lifton.
Reprinted by permission of BasicBooks,
a division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
Printed in the United Stales of America
on acid-free paper
We dedicate this book to our dear family—our son David
Lazarus, his wife Mary, and their children Jessica and
Adam, and our daughter Nancy, her husband Rick Holli-
day, and their children Maiya and Ava Rose. We wish that
their lives be amply filled with the positive emotions—hap-
piness, pride, and love.
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Preface
We wrote this book for a number of reasons. First, very few books have
been written about the emotions for a general audience, which is a shame
because it is such an important psychological topic and, as such, is inher-
ently of great interest to most people. What our book tries to do is unique.
Most existing trade books center on one emotion, such as anger, shame,
envy, or jealousy, but they do not provide a comprehensive analysis of
emotion and each of the major emotions. The public is therefore denied
a readable, yet authoritative, account of a rich subject matter in which it
is vitally concerned.
A second reason is that magazines, newspapers, and Sunday supple-
ments invariably patronize the reader by so oversimplifying their treat-
ments of psychological stress, coping, and the emotions that little can be
learned from them. We had the conviction that a truly interesting and
readable book could be written that would still provide a sophisticated
analysis of our emotional experiences. We were also confident that this
could be done without obscure jargon and excessively technical accounts.
Third, the field of emotion, which includes psychological, sociologi-
cal, and biological theories and research, has suddenly expanded greatly
in the last decade or so. RL had recently written a technical account of
emotion for academics, and in doing so came to believe that there was
latent public interest in the topic if presented in a readable way. Since the
subject matter was potentially so exciting, early on BL wondered out loud
why we should not write about it for nonacademics. The problem was to
present the essential subject matter in a way that would appeal to intelli-
gent readers who would have little patience with academic jargon.
Finally, we believe that this readership deserves better than the flimsi-
est treatment of the emotions. Although such readers would be impatient
with an obscure academic treatise, we believe that the self-help genre,
with its formulaic treatment of complex problems, does a disservice to
intelligent readers. We have tried to offer a balanced approach. Self-
viii PREFACE
knowledge and change—even when desired—don't come easily, as we
hope our book reveals.
Our book is filled with many short stories—brief case studies—of peo-
ple struggling with emotional distress and dysfunction, but it also presents
an authoritative account of how to understand our emotions and cope with
them. These clinical cases are composites of people, some of whom were
seen professionally by RL and some we both have known. Facts and
names were changed to protect privacy.
Although not primarily a "how to" book, we describe how people can
interpret what lies behind their own emotions and those of their loved
ones, and to manage them more effectively. The analysis draws on RL's
approach to the emotions, which has never been applied systematically to
a treatment of the emotions for the lay public.
We are grateful for the efforts of a number of people who helped us
make this book readable and accurate. Foremost in this respect is a non-
psychologist friend, Ted Smith, who pored over every page of the manu-
script, making editorial comments and suggestions for changes. Wonderful
suggestions were also made at every stage of the writing by our editor at
Oxford University Press, Joan Bossert. They deserve our thanks but carry
no responsibility for the limitations of what we have written, the final
version being the result of our own decisions.
Walnut Creek, California R.S.L.
May 1994 B.N.L.
Contents
1. What This Book Is About, 3
I Portraits of the Individual Emotions
2. The Nasty Emotions: Anger, Envy, and Jealousy, 13
3. The Existential Emotions: Anxiety-Fright, Guilt, and Shame, 41
4. Emotions Provoked by Unfavorable Life Conditions: Relief, Hope,
Sadness, and Depression, 67
5. Emotions Provoked by Favorable Life Conditions: Happiness, Pride,
and Love, 86
6. The Empathic Emotions: Gratitude, Compassion, and Those
Aroused by Aesthetic Experiences, 116
II How to Understand the Emotions
7. The Nuts and Bolts of Emotion, 139
8. Coping and Self-Management of Emotion, 152
9. How Biology and Culture Affect Our Emotional Lives, 174
10. The Logic of Our Emotions, 198
III Practical Implications
11. Stress and Emotion, 219
12. Emotions and Our Health, 239