This volume is part of a series edited by Paul Ekman and Klaus Scherer designed to present important works on emotion. Silvan Tomkins's contributions to our understanding of the role of affect in human experience constitute just such a body of work. Going well beyond Darwin's earlier insights, Tomkins constructed a comprehensive theory of the biological basis of affects, their distinctive function within the human being, their interactions with other important human mechanisms such as cognition, perception, memory, and motor functions, their importance in human motivation, their contribution to unique personality configurations, which he called scripts, and their involvement in cultural meanings and values, such as ideologies. His work has provided the conceptual and methodological underpinnings for the recent resurgence of research on emotion, as manifested, for example, by the widespread use of facial affect coding systems developed by Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard, both deeply influenced by Tomkins's ideas. Yet many young researchers do not seem to be aware of Tomkins's seminal contributions.

This current obscurity is somewhat perplexing since he received considerable recognition during his career (see Foreword). He taught at Harvard, was a professor at Princeton for nearly two decades, and spent his final years before retirement at Rutgers. He published over 50 articles, authored 7 books, edited 5 others, and, at the time of his death, left several unfinished manuscripts. But in spite of this distinguished career, his ideas have not been widely read or accepted by psychologists.