| Summary: | "The psychology of pleasantness and unpleasantness is at present a potential body of knowledge rather than an actual one. The purpose of the present volume is to remedy the ghost-like state of the psychology of pleasantness and unpleasantness by bringing its facts together into a single orderly structure. The first chapter defines a systematic variable, hedonic tone, whose positive and negative values correspond respectively to pleasantness and unpleasantness. The second chapter discusses experimental methods. Chapters three to ten deal with the relation of hedonic tone to stimuli, to motivating factors, to memory, to muscular responses and to the nervous system. A final chapter is devoted to the theory of hedonic tone. The effort throughout has been to state the facts with a minimum of interpretation. Conclusions are separated from the results which underlie them, and the results themselves are placed in their experimental settings. Whatever value the work may have should thus prove relatively independent of personal systematic bias"--Introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).
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