Keith Oatley is the author of more than 130 journal articles and chapters, and five books of psychology, which include BEST LAID SCHEMES: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EMOTIONS (1992) and (with Jennifer Jenkins) UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONS (1996).

Keith Oatley is also the author of two novels. The first, THE CASE OF EMILY V., in which Freud and Sherlock Holmes work on the same case in 1904, won the 1994 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel.

His principal appointment is in the Dept. of Human Development and Applied Psychology, University of Toronto, of which he was Chair from 1999-2002.

This new textbook by cognitive scientist and prize-winning novelist Keith Oatley, and developmental psychologist Jennifer M. Jenkins, is the first to fully span the fast-growing field of research on emotions.

UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONS ranges across the disciplines from philosophy and narrative literature through anthropology, evolutionary theory, brain research, psychology, and sociology, covering the entire lifespan, from infancy to adulthood. Its main theme is that emotions have functions: they set priorities among our concerns and they provide the underlying structure and human relatedness from attachment in infancy, to the warmth of family life and of friendships, to the excitements of sexuality.

Emotions sometimes become dysfunctional in orders of depression, anxiety, and excessive aggression, but these disorders can also be understood in terms of how they arise.

The book emphasizes the human value of emotions, with practical concern for clinical problems, education and everyday understanding.