Although people have been making decisions for many thousands of years, it was only since John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern wrote Theory of Games and Economic Behavior and Herb Simon wrote of satisficing and bounded rationality, that researchers started to analyze and understand how people make decisions. The mid- and late twentieth century saw an expansion in what is known about the making of decisions, but more recently new areas within decision theory have come under scientific study. This final chapter is forward-looking and considers possible future directions for understanding human decision making and also for the development of decision theory. Among these future directions are emotion, culture, artificial intelligence, and intuition itself.

There is growing evidence that language plays an important role in emotion because it helps people acquire emotion concept knowledge. In this chapter, we argue that language plays a mechanistic role in emotion because emotion concept knowledge, once acquired, is used by the brain to predictively and adaptively regulate a person’s subjective emotional experiences and behaviors. Building on predictive processing models of brain function, we argue that the emotion concepts learned via language during early development “seed” the brain’s emotional predictions throughout the lifespan. We review constructionist theories of emotion and their support in behavioral, physiological, neuroimaging, and lesion data. We then situate these constructionist predictions within recent neuroscience research to speculate on the neural mechanisms by which emotion concepts “seed” emotional experiences.

Psychiatric disorders are highly comorbid and are not separated by sharp biological boundaries. Understanding the common mechanisms that explain symptom overlap in mental disorders is therefore clearly needed. Here, we briefly review impaired emotional processing and emotional dysregulation in affective disorders, with a special focus on unipolar depression. Affective disorders are characterized by abnormal emotion intensity, changes in the temporal dynamics of emotion and difficulties to influence the trajectory of emotions. Disruptions in emotion processing and emotional regulation are underlined at the neural level by abnormal interactions between cortical and limbic structures in terms of increased variance in functional connectivity. Emotional processes are also tightly linked to cognitive processes, which constitute main targets for therapeutic interventions in affective disorders.

Decades of research demonstrate cultural variation in different aspects of emotion, including the focus of emotion, expressive values and norms, and experiential ideals and values. These studies have focused primarily on Western and East Asian cultural comparisons, although recent work has included Latinx samples. In this chapter, we discuss why studying culture is important for studies of emotion and what neuroscientific methods can contribute to our understanding of culture and emotion. We then describe research that uses neuroscientific methods to explore both cultural differences and similarities in emotion. Finally, we discuss current challenges and outstanding questions for future research.

This chapter introduces peripheral physiological measures of emotion as important tools for studying emotion in affective neuroscience. It examines responses across three systems: skeletal muscle activity, autonomic nervous system (cardiovascular and electrodermal), and respiration. It surveys measurement modalities, derived metrics, their neural control, timescales of expected response, and prominent findings in recent literature, linking them to central nervous system activity throughout. The chapter concludes by highlighting outstanding questions and future challenges in the field of peripheral physiological measures of emotion.

Emotionally or motivationally significant stimuli tend to attract, divert, or hold attention more readily than neutral stimuli. These effects arise during numerous tasks, varying as a function of stimulus type or emotional cue. Their neural substrates involve enhanced activity of sensory cortices under direct influence of emotional or reward processing systems, including the amygdala, in combination with other top-down or bottom-up biases that together serve to prioritize behaviorally relevant information for access to conscious awareness. Other indirect influences act through interactions of emotional and motivational systems, with cortical or subcortical networks controlling attention, including executive functions and neuromodulatory pathways. These data reveal that attentional processes encompass multiple biasing signals that can modulate stimulus processing, based not only on space or object representations, as traditionally considered, but also value-based representations. Such mechanisms of emotional attention or affect-driven biases may operate preattentively, involuntarily, or non-consciously, yet nonetheless be regulated by current goals or context.

Over the last thirty years, affective neuroscience has become a royal road to our understanding of emotion and other affective phenomena, being both a core discipline of the affective sciences, and an engine for the rise of affectivism. After a brief discussion of the role of human affective neuroscience in affectivism, the chapter addresses some terminological and taxonomy-related issues before suggesting a consensual definition of emotion. Next, five major families of theories of emotions are presented in relation to five components of emotion. This review illustrates the fact that different families of theories typically focus on different components – even if each family also often considers some of the other components to a lesser extent. Whereas expression is central to basic emotion theory, action tendencies are central to motivational theories, autonomic reaction is central to bodily/interoceptive theories, feeling is central to constructionist theories, and the role of cognition in emotion-elicitation is central to appraisal theories.

The chapter examines how anthropologists can produce ethically engaged and scientifically rigorous results in their work with people living at society’s social, political, and economic margins. It builds on long-term participatory research with street-involved youth in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and elucidates affect-focused methodologies to build empathetic relationships with collaborators and to develop critical theoretical insights. The chapter argues against compartmentalizing the researcher’s affect, feelings, and emotions, which is thought to characterize a rigorous scientific approach. The affect, feelings, and emotions experienced in this challenging work are an invaluable source of ethnographic data, allowing greater theoretical insight into emotional economies, where street-involved youths’ careful arrangements of emotives in social interactions create attention, trust, concern, care, or cooperation. Affect, as forms of discourse and governmentality, can construct orders of feeling, found as emotives present in laws, billboards, and news headlines. These matter for discursive changes implemented by governments to sanitize cities of unwanted communities.

“Visual psychological anthropology” is a bridging of psychological and visual anthropology. Its approach combines longitudinal person-centered ethnographic strategies with the methods of contemporary ethnographic filmmaking to cinematically represent individuals, their personal relationships, their central concerns, and the array of culturally, politically, and historically situated pressures that act on them. Based on the premise that it is through the expression of emotion, scaffolded by and contextualized within a film narrative, that participant subjectivity will emerge onscreen, VPA leans on a creative, collaborative, and iterative process throughout fieldwork, filmmaking, editing, and screening. The chapter reviews the historical roots for VPA, outlines its theory and describes its practice, as illustrated through examples from Java and Bali on topics such as mental illness, neurodiversity, trauma, stigma, mourning, and gender. The authors advocate for the relevance of psychological anthropology insights to the craft of visual anthropology and the utility of film, as a mode of research inquiry and as a translational ethnographic product, for psychological anthropologists.

This chapter explores the phenomenon of embodiment, or how bodies vary because of their embeddedness in different cultural, social, and material landscapes. Understanding embodiment entails studying the influences of the social–cultural world on bodies, and the influences of biological processes on social, semiotic, and experiential worlds. Drawing on anthropological, feminist, and disability studies scholarship, and those in contemporary biological sciences, we offer some tools for thinking about how bodily states and processes are affected by their perception, representation, and treatment within people’s lived worlds, and vice versa. A processual, “bio-looping” model helps to explain how transformations of body and world in complex embodiment might work. Emerging empirical work in the biological sciences provides evidence for the deep entanglements of social and biological systems. The intersections among meaning and perception (“interoceptive affordances”) highlight how meaning shapes perception of bodily processes and sensations. Canna’s study of demonic possession illustrates how interoceptive affordances contribute to embodied experiences and ways of being in the world.

This chapter presents a coherent picture of culture as emerging from a distinctive human mind architecture. I consider the mental processes that characterize the components of mind, and the inherently constituting and structured knowledge that represents its content. Grounded in a necessary and eclectic theory of cognition, I propose that culture consists of mental models shared within a community, or cultural models. Both the undeniably universal nature of numerous mental activities and the significantly idiosyncratic contents of an individual cultural mind find a plausible account within this theoretical approach. I explore three fundamental issues related to the investigation of culture as a mental phenomenon. The first regards a brief survey of theories about human cognition – both architecture and processes – that are of value and consequence to the anthropological enterprise. The second concerns the theorizing about the mental organization of knowledge. The thirdcovers the nature and value of cultural model theory in the contemporary anthropological landscape. I close by suggesting the concept of cultural model as a salient and necessary unit of analysis for anthropology.

This chapter discusses how individuals approach the end of life within their particular social worlds. Focusing on the subjective processes of traversing transitions between life, death, and an afterlife, psychological anthropology analyzes how such transitions are simultaneously singular and shared, embodied and historical. The chapter highlights five themes. It shows how the end of life is a period in which personhood may be particularly unstable, giving rise to ethical demand to make, remake or unmake personhood. The chapter shows how narrative approaches shed light on the temporalization of living in the face of finitude. The chapter discusses how person-centered approaches reveal that the singularity of loss often exceeds moral and social attempts to contain grief. It discusses political subjectivity in psychological anthropology that highlights how historical inequality and violence settle in embodied disorders, hauntings, and abandonment. Discussing questions of empathy and emotion, the chapter concludes by drawing attention to the potential of ethnographic studies of dying and afterlives to theorize the limits and possibilities of understanding others.

This chapter takes the anthropology of emotion and affect as its central problem, with a particular focus on socialization processes. It starts with an overview of how psychological anthropologists have approached the topic of emotion since the 1980s and outlines the social–anthropological understanding of emotion before it considers the “affective turn” in the social sciences and humanities and its impact on anthropology. In the second part of the chapter special attention is paid to the socialization of emotions, first from a cross-cultural and second from a transcultural perspective. Using the example of the socialization of emotions in transcultural settings, it discusses the extent to which the notion of “affect” enhances our understanding of how the transformation of socially learned emotion repertoires might work.

This chapter focuses on Cicero’s treatment of the emotions in Books 3 and 4, and more specifically on his account of the dispute between the Stoics and the Peripatetics. At first sight, the dispute seems uncomplicated: the Stoics advocate the complete absence of emotions whereas the Peripatetics hold that emotions should rather be moderated or controlled. But Cicero’s stress on the idea that emotions are beliefs seems to come at the expense of other central parts of the theory of emotions, most prominently the theory of action.  I argue that these features of his presentation serve him in securing a thesis that he is keen to defend in Book 5: that virtue guarantees happiness and that this happiness is invulnerable to the accidents of fortune.

This chapter considers more platform-specific forms, exploiting possibilities such as the ready integration of emoji on X/Twitter or the integration with audio and video on TikTok. We focus on the expression of emotional meanings and stance, and also pay attention to the co-construction of memetic discourse by multiple discourse participants in online exchanges. Overall, we suggest that the easy transfer across platforms and modes reveals a kind of memetic mindset in which discourse takes shape online, even where this does not necessarily involve fully formed or identifiable memes in a strict sense.

Values permeate every aspect of our lives, shaping individual actions and giving meaning, direction and scope to our work environments and organisational cultures. Defining positive behaviours and identifying unprofessional, disrespectful or negative behaviours shape and define every aspect of our work and personal lives. Values also have an emotional component: when we act in accordance with our values, we experience positive emotions; conversely, when we act against our values or are placed in situations that compromise our values, we experience emotional dissonance. It is this emotional component that drives us to seek values alignment in our personal and professional lives.