Emotion and Motivation, Fourth Edition, blends unprecedented scholarship with a friendly and accessible writing style that makes the study of these subject areas both interesting and relevant. This text includes both classic and cutting-edge research to reflect thinking about the area of emotion and motivation. Emotion and Motivation, Fourth Edition, encourages critical thinking by openly tackling ongoing controversies, contradictory findings, methodological limitations, and even replication failures in a balanced and constructive way. While highly rigorous, the text is also student-friendly, with a light, humorous tone. With real-world stories and an intuitive structure, Emotion and Motivation addresses questions undergraduates are most likely to ask: Why do we have emotions? How do they affect our lives? What motivates human behavior? How can we improve well-being?

The challenges in teaching this course include engaging students with a very wide range of relevant backgrounds (from none, to extensive understanding of neuroscience) and the difficult task of linking theoretical constructs in emotion to neural activity as well as to social and cultural phenomena. Essentially, Emotion and Motivation, Fourth Edition answers students' questions about why we have emotions and what motivates our behaviors through current research in the field. This text makes the study of emotions and motivation compelling at the biological level, and also directly and personally relevant.

The text uses a style of writing that seeks to engage the students with a friendly, conversational tone, without sacrificing scholarly content, and integrates motivation and emotion for a course aiming to teach both." - Brent Dean Robbins, Point Park University