Emotional experiences are complex, ever-present and fascinating features of our everyday lives. They are also richly diverse, including emotions such as anger and joy, feelings which can be bodily or existential in nature, as well as moods which attune us to the world. Thus, our emotional experiences, dramatic or modest, nebulous or well-defined, give life and expression to the situations we find ourselves in, revealing and disclosing their significance for us and eliciting responses and action. In the rapidly evolving field of emotion research, this book makes a valuable contribution through its focus on emotional experience from a qualitative psychological perspective.

The book is about how to understand such experiences using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), a qualitative research approach underpinned by phenomenological and hermeneutic theory. Its principal aim is to demonstrate how IPA can be used to deepen and enrich thinking around emotional experiences. To this end, a detailed worked example from a new piece of research is included.

This book is for qualitative emotion researchers, including postgraduates using IPA from a wide range of disciplines in the human and social sciences and humanities. It is also intended for cognitive scientists interested in phenomenology and a first-person science of consciousness. The book will also be of interest to doctoral students, clinicians and practitioners from clinical and counselling psychology and the health sciences who carry out IPA research.