Foundations of Affective Social Learning

Introduces the novel concept of affective social learning to explain how values are socially transmitted.

Written by experts in comparative, developmental, social, cognitive and cultural psychology, this book explains how we learn to value the different objects, people and events in our environment from others' emotions. It reveals why some things are so important to us, but not at all to others.Written by experts in comparative, developmental, social, cognitive and cultural psychology, this book introduces the novel concept of affective social learning to help explain why what matters to us, matters to us. In the same way that social learning describes how we observe other people's behaviour to learn how to use a particular object, affective social learning describes how we observe other people's emotions to learn how to value a particular object, person or event. As such, affective social learning conceptualises the transmission of value from a given culture to a given person and reveals why the things that are so important to us can be of no consequence at all to others.