Emotions refer to people’s behavior and manner of living their life. The best way
to learn from the presented book is, therefore, to relate the results from the cited
research to one’s own life. An attempt to facilitate this is made in the present book
by a challenge to reflect on themes or issues by two reflection questions at the end of
each chapter. Each chapter also ends with proposals for 2–3 research projects. The
majority of these are rather straightforward, but they have scientific merit only to the
extent to which they fulfill the requirements of reliability, validity, and representation.
The book started as a project on children’s socio-emotional development with sup-
port from the Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers’ and Translators’ Association, and was
enlarged and based on a course on emotions for doctoral students at the Universidade
Federal da Paraiba, Joao Pessoa, Brazil in 2013/2014 when the author was a visiting
professor as Bolsista CAPES. The author is indebted to CAPES for the opportunity to
develop a book based on the course and published in Norwegian on “Akademika Forlag”
(ISBN 978-82-321-0263-1) in 2014 with the title “Innføring om emosjoner”. The pre-
sent book is a translation of the Norwegian text with an additional chapter (Chap. 10)
on emotions at the workplace and with several improvements after suggestion from
Springer’s reviewers. Thanks are due to my wife Anne-Lise Løvaas and to Tom Knudsen
at the Institute of Psychology NTNU for great help in preparing the manuscript.