Emotions affect us constantly in our daily lives, plunging us into despair or lifting us to peaks of ecstasy, accompanying and sometimes provoking our successes and failures. We have all made mistakes under the influence of a powerful emotion, and yet we have also avoided errors because we have listened to our own emotions and those of others. Joy, anger, sadness, fear, shame, jealousy, desire, excitement are the inevitable companions of our existence, for better and for worse. Whether we regard our emotions as positive or negative forces, whether we see them as aids in decision making or as obstacles in the reasoning process, we cannot escape from them. They influence our choices, our relations with others, and our health. Should we express our emotions? How can we use them? How can we improve our understanding of the emotions of others? How does the transition from emotion to passion occur? The study of passions and the emotions is attracting a growing number of scientists from different fields: psychologists, biologists, ethnologists and sociologists. By observing children and adults, men and women, city-dwellers and hunter-gatherers, they have contributed to our understanding of the emotions. This book is not only a guide to help readers find their way in the myriad of recent findings about the emotions, it is also a practical handbook. For each one of the major emotions, the authors have listed the practical advice that they give to their patients and that they try to apply in their own lives.

Christophe André and François Lelord are psychiatrists. Together they wrote Comment Gérer les Personnalités Difficiles and L’Estime de Soi. Christophe André is he author with Patrick Légeron of La Peur des Autres.