Emotion and Adaptation

This is not late-night, send-me-off-to-sleepy-time reading, even for those with Ph.D's, and Lazarus can be fairly accused of being almost schizoid in his formalistic, intellectual disconnection from the affective content here. Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis and Albert Bandura go down a -lot- easier when it comes to the thought-emotion-behavior triad. Nevertheless, E & A is simply -required- reading for anyone self-righteous enough to call him- or herself as "philosophical cognitivist." Lazarus may tax your patience, but the breadth -and- depth of his explorations of ideas more recently dealt with by the millennial "neuropsychologists" like Cozolino, Gazzaniga, Kasniak, LeDoux, Panksepp and Watt is plain -epic-. The reader will encounter nothing less than edifyingly detailed examinations of the "spectrum of cognition," the "core relational themes" of 19 well-defined emotional states, the mechanisms of learning, the societal conditioning of emotional reaction, and the single best description of how cognitive/behavioral therapy works I have yet encountered. Lazarus's final thoughts may well illuminate the matters of faulty premises vs. faulty logic better than the best of the "critical thinkers." The masters' candidate looking for a platform from which to develop an impressive thesis on the rational-emotive or cognitive/behavioral methods that continue to dominate in the era of HMO "production imperative" will find -plenty- to chew on here. And anyone who aspires to call him- or herself "doctor" in this day and age may think again after encountering such a humbling intellectual adventure.