This is an outstanding textbook which summarises progress on research in the affective sciences up to about the year 2001. It is a remarkable piece of scholarship and the authors are to be congratulated on having the vision, determination and drive to carry through this project. The individual chapters are well written, but one of the great strengths of the book is that each section is introduced by an overview that draws together the main themes and each has been written with great clarity. There is also evidence of strong editorship in that the volume does not suffer from the usual problems of multi-authored texts with excessive overlap and repetition, and if there are contradictions these are highlighted rather than ignored.

The volume has an excellent introduction which sets the scene and explains the difficult task the authors had in deciding which areas to cover. The introduction contains working definitions of the various phenomena that were targets of enquiry within this handbook (emotions, mood, attitudes, affective style and temperament). The authors make the point that affective science is at the stage that cognitive psychology/neuroscience was at 20 years ago and which is now the most rapidly growing and largest multidisciplinary field in behavioural science today. One can imagine that the publication of this handbook may lead to a similar growth in affective science research.

The book starts with a review of the relevant neuroscience research, followed by accounts of the impact of genetics and development on affect. There are strong sections on the expression and cognitive components of emotion. Finally, the text deals with emotion and affect in their evolutionary, cultural and social contexts as well as their links with ‘health’ and with ‘psychiatry’. Psychiatrists are often uncertain about what psychologists do and are particularly puzzled by the psychology questions in the MRCPsych examinations. Although this volume will not solve the former problem nor provide many answers for the latter, it reveals that conceptually and scientifically psychology research is well advanced and making a real impact on our understanding of complex and ramified topics.

Inevitably with such a large canvas there is some unevenness. I would have liked to have seen a lot more on the genetic underpinnings of emotion and affect but perhaps the editors have given this topic appropriate emphasis given the quality of the available evidence base. There has to be some delay in publication (perhaps not surprisingly, given the size and complexity of the volume) and the most recent references are to the year 2001. The field is expanding so rapidly that I urge the editors to start a new edition, constantly updating in a manner akin to painting the Forth Bridge.