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The Handbook of Affective Sciences is a comprehensive road map to the burgeoning area of affective sciences, which now spans several disciplines. Helping to delineate this emerging field, this volume brings together, for the first time, the various strands of inquiry and latest research in the scientific study of emotion and related affective phenomena. In recent years, scientists have made considerable advances in understanding how brain processes shape emotions and are changed by human emotion. There have also been major methodological advances in objectively measuring different parameters of emotion, ranging from expressive behavior to physiology to subjective experience using experience sampling. Drawing on a wide range of research and methods of inquiry-neuroimaging techniques, neuropsychological assessment, clinical research, and laboratory paradigms designed to assess the cognitive and social constituents of emotion-scientists are beginning to understand the many factors that shape emotion and the vast range of functions that are affected by emotion. As a result, researchers are gaining insight into such compelling questions as how people experience life emotionally, why people respond so differently to the same experiences, what the face can tell us about internal states, how emotion in significant social relationships influence health, and whether there are basic emotions common to all humans. This handbook brings together the most eminent scholars in the area of affective science, who lay out, in fifty-nine original chapters, the latest research and theorise in the field. The book is divided into ten sections: Neuroscience; Autonomic Psychophysiology; Genetics and Development; Expression of Emotion; Cognitive Components of Emotion; Personality; Emotion and Social Processes; Evolutionary and Cultural Perspective on Affect; Emotion and Psychopathology; and Emotion and Health. This major new volume will be an invaluable resource for researchers that will define affective sciences for the next decade.

Background Comorbidity among childhood mental health symptoms is common in clinical and community samples and should be accounted for when investigating etiology. We therefore aimed to uncover latent classes of mental health symptoms in middle childhood in a community sample, and to determine the latent genetic and environmental influences on those classes. Methods The sample comprised representative cohorts of twins. A questionnaire-based assessment of mental health symptoms was used in latent class analyses. Data on 3223 twins (1578 boys and 1645 girls) with a mean age of 7.5 years were analyzed. The sample was predominantly non-Hispanic Caucasian (92.1%). Results Latent class models delineated groups of children according to symptom profiles–not necessarily clinical groups but groups representing the general population, most with scores in the normative range. The best-fitting models suggested 9 classes for both girls and boys. Eight of the classes were very similar across sexes; these classes ranged from a “Low Symptom” class to a “Moderately Internalizing & Severely Externalizing” class. In addition, a “Moderately Anxious” class was identified for girls but not boys, and a “Severely Impulsive & Inattentive” class was identified for boys but not girls. Sex-combined analyses implicated moderate genetic influences for all classes. Shared environmental influences were moderate for the “Low Symptom” and “Moderately Internalizing & Severely Externalizing” classes, and small to zero for other classes. Conclusions We conclude that symptom classes are largely similar across sexes in middle childhood. Heritability was moderate for all classes, but shared environment played a greater role for classes in which no one type of symptom predominated.