When looking at the Oxford Companion to Consciousness (Bayne et al., 2009) for Reference Reviews recently (RR 2010/205), I expressed my disagreement with Oxford University Press's policy of calling this series of excellent compact encyclopaedias “companions” when they are not at all companionable. Possibly because, like most reference librarians, I have spent so much of my life guiding beginners around the literature in subjects where my own knowledge is fairly limited, I like books to start off by explaining what they are about. The golden rule of teaching seems to me to apply to companionable books: start by giving readers a brief summary of what you are going to tell them. Then tell them in detail. Then briefly summarise what you have told them, with guidance for further study and guidance on how to look back for odd details hidden in among what you have already told them. These stark books do no such thing.
This Companion, like the others, is arranged purely in English alphabetical order, starting on page 1 with Achievement Motivation and running through to page 419 Zygomatic Muscle (the muscle used to smile). This does make for difficulties. “Affect” is not a commonly used English noun. Collins English Dictionary gives us only as its fourth definition of affect: “4. n. Psychol. The emotion associated with an idea or set of ideas”. It does seem odd that, in an encyclopaedia devoted to the topic of the affective sciences there is no single entry explaining what all the contributors would accept as a common‐denomination definition of “Affect”. There are entries on Affect, Philosophical Perspectives (two columns of clear exposition by Louis Charland), on Affect, Psychological Perspectives, on the Affect‐as‐Information Model and on Affect Bursts, but no general introduction to the subject of the sort that might be found in a preface. There is a virtually blank page headed Note to the Reader that could well have been utilised for this purpose. At the other end of the book we find the references, consisting of all the publications cited by any of the contributors but no general bibliographic guide to further reading on the topic of affect, and then, rather curiously, an index of names but no index of subjects that may have been touched on in entries on other topics. If I was starting out as a psychology student, say, or was a reasonably well educated member of the general public that had heard the term “affect” used and wanted to find out about it, I can well imagine myself going into a library and pulling out this book, hoping that it would give me a start. If I did, I would be disappointed. This is a book for readers who already have some expertise in some aspect of the topic and want to delve further, not a companion that will start a journey with a beginner, and lead him or her on to the point where a different guide is needed.
Affect is a very important topic, and, until recently, has been a sadly underrated one. Half a century ago psychology was dominated by behaviourist ideas and was mainly concerned with running rats around in mazes, on the assumption that the only thing that a rat would want to do was to maximise its reward, and therefore, by extrapolation, the only thing that humans want to do is to maximise their rewards for any form of behaviour. Philosophy similarly was dominated by followers of Bertrand Russell's dictum that the study of logic is the basis of all philosophy, rather than by followers of Russell's distinctly a‐logical humanistic and ethical teaching. The increasingly complex structures of symbolic logic ruled the roost, with moral philosophy tucked into a backwater. Even to this day the bulk of economists insist, in the teeth of all the evidence, on the accuracy of mathematical models based on the assumption that humans will simply try to maximise the reward, as measured in monetary terms, from any sort of activity. Recent years have seen major changes in all of these disciplines, including a wider recognition of the fact that they are interrelated. When I was at university an economist who suggested that emotional factors should be taken into consideration would have been laughed out of court. Now, recently, there have been several Nobel prizes awarded to behavioural economists. Part of the reason for this has been the massive development of computer sciences. Computers can, of course, be programmed to simulate the emotions. Computers can also be programmed to recognise human emotional states (we recently reviewed the Encyclopedia of Biometrics, much of which was devoted to that topic (RR 2010/226)) but no computer has yet passed the Turing test. It is quite possible that in the near future there will be computers that genuinely feel emotions, rather than just simulate them, but at the moment, emotion rather than logic is what makes us distinctively human. Another factor has been the slow seepage of psychoanalytic ideas into popular culture. Expressing emotions has become fashionable in a way that would have been unthinkable in the Western world 50 years ago. A third factor, I think, has been the change in employment patterns in modern society. Both the proponents of industrial society and its Marxist critics assumed mass employment. A cotton mill with 3,000 operatives or a telephone exchange with people all doing the same thing at the same time has to be managed in an impersonal logical fashion. An office with a dozen staff all doing different things, but all able to communicate instantly through e‐mail or Facebook, has to be treated as a collection of individuals with their own quirks and desires.
This book has therefore appeared at a very apposite time. It is, as mentioned, a single‐volume encyclopaedia rather than a companion, made up of brief descriptive signed articles, ranging from a paragraph to two or three pages in length. The two Swiss editors have done an admirable job of bringing together a collection of around 300 experts from a range of disciplines – predominantly psychologists and philosophers, but also including information scientists, neuroscientists, ethnologists, psychiatrists, etc from a number of different countries – mainly it has to be said, from Western Europe and the USA. This geographical spread probably does reflect the centres of academic interest in the study of the emotions, but I would have liked to see more evidence of cross‐cultural research. I eventually tracked down a very helpful three‐page essay on the topic under the heading Universality of Emotions, a page on Linguistics and Emotion and another on Cultural Specificity, but I am sure that there is more to be said.
This brings me to my main criticism of this otherwise excellent book. It does not have an index, and the cross‐referencing is not good enough to bring related topics together. The article Cultural Specificity is not cross‐referred to Universality of Emotions, nor is there any see reference to it from Cross‐Cultural or Trans‐Cultural. Similarly, I found a whole page on serotonin transporter polymorphism as a sub‐heading under the heading Genetics of Affect. I also found half a dozen brief mentions of serotonin under various other headings, but found no easy way to link them all together. On the whole, however, the choice of headings is good. At least the Mind‐Body Problem is where it belongs under M rather than under the Hard Problem in Science, which is where the Oxford Companion to Consciousness put it.
Once you find them, the entries are of a consistently high standard. I have not been able to fault any of them, either for accuracy or for clarity. It seems to me that someone with a graduate level of expertise in any of the disciplines concerned ought to be able to make sense of any of the others – a linguist ought to be able to gain an understanding of basic neurochemistry, while an information scientist ought to be able to comprehend the current state of knowledge on, say, animal vocalisation. The emotions are an open‐ended subject. There is no real limit to what could have been included. I would have liked to see something on affect in the arts, a comprehensive article on cross‐cultural variations and, perhaps, more on different schools of psychology – we recently reviewed an entire two‐volume Encyclopedia of Positive Psychology (RR 2009/306) devoted to a psychological approach that has grown up with Western changes in attitude towards the expression of the emotions. I have not noticed any major scientific omissions though. This book can therefore be recommended as an extremely useful resource for the cross‐disciplinary study of emotion.
Most university libraries would benefit from having a copy of this compact encyclopaedia. Most universities cater for academic work in psychology and/or philosophy, as well as all the other disciplines involved. The emotions are of increasing academic interest at the moment, and university studies are increasingly cross‐disciplinary. Clinical medical libraries probably already have more detailed resources on the affective disorders, such as Stein et al. (2005) or Rutherford et al. (2004), but may wish to bear this in mind as a useful back‐up for psychiatrists or clinical psychologists wanting to broaden their horizons. I am less sure about recommending it to public libraries. Although the level of popular interest in personal emotional states is extremely high, the academic tone of this book and its lack of companionability make it less likely to appeal to the general reader. I cannot off‐hand suggest any suitable alternative, however (here, again, I wish there was a companionable list of suggestions for further reading and useful web‐sites in this book, rather than an indigestible mass of references), so it might be worth bearing this in mind in default of anything more orientated towards the general reader.
