The interesting and intriguing title of this book will tempt readers who wish to broaden their personal perspectives. The book is essentially the proceedings of Emotional Animals, Sensitive Humans, an interdisciplinary symposium organized by the editors, at Keio University, in 2009. The premise of the meeting was that bringing together representatives from a range of different disciplines and with a variety of perspectives would produce additional insight.

The book focuses in particular on the nature of emotions and the possibility of emotions in preverbal children and nonverbal animals. Eleven eclectic and interesting chapters represent research papers from different perspectives, grouped into three parts: animal studies; emotions in humans; and the relationship between emotions, memory, and judgment. The chapters take their methods primarily from psychology, but extend to biology and molecular biology, systems and robotics, and information processing. The researchers and their methods are unified by an interest in cognition and a focus on emotions. Subjects include fish, birds, mammals, and human children, in areas such as play, the role of language, aesthetics, education, memory, and emotional mechanisms.

The chapters vary in length and depth. Some are discursive, some are detailed, a few are extremely engaging and of very high quality, and some are over-referenced, making it hard to identify the key sources in the literature. The papers are sandwiched between a short introduction on emotion, including the shared definition of “emotion” that forms the core issue in the field (the theme of definitions is returned to frequently in various chapters), and a short conclusion summarizing the papers in a paragraph or so and giving recommendations for further research. A key perspective that was new to me is that both animals and humans have and show emotions, but only humans have a conscious awareness of their emotions and the emotions of others.

The book is necessarily exploratory given the emerging nature of the field. As one of the papers observes: “Clearly, the scientific study of emotions is a bit of a mess.” Readers can sense the authors’ different personal and disciplinary perspectives. If the disciplinary barriers were overcome at the conference, this must have inevitably stimulated vigorous debate after the talks.

While the book will be of real value as a platform for researchers to understand the individual perspectives, it captures little of the discussions and cross-disciplinary integration that must have gone on at the meeting itself. The recommendations for further research are also disappointing.