Foundations of Affective Social Learning

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.

Daniel Dukes holds research positions at the Université de Fribourg and the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences, Université de Genève, Switzerland. He also currently holds a Swiss National Science Fund visiting research post at the University of Oxford.

Fabrice Clément is full Professor and co-founder of the Cognitive Science Centre at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.