[Elster, Jon (1996), Rationality and the Emotions,

Emotions are a neglected topic, and the neglect of economists is second to none. I find this surprising. I take it that economics is concerned with the best ways of promoting human satisfaction in a world of scarce resources. With one exception, all human satisfaction comes in the form of emotional experiences. The exception is the hedonic satisfaction produced by the senses, such as the taste of sweetness on the tongue or the feeling of wind on your face after a long climb. Such sensations differ from emotions in that no prior cognition is necessary to produce them. I do not have to recognise the wind as wind to enjoy the sensation. By contrast, to qet angry when my Albanian host offers me a cup of tea by passing it under his left arm I have to know that in Albania this is considered an insult. For infants, sensations may be the most important source of satisfaction. For most adults, I believe, they definitely take second place to emotional experiences. If one grants the truth of that claim, or even of the weaker claim that emotional experiences are important sources of human satisfaction, we would expect economists to have thought about them a great deal, We would expect them to have studied the ways in which people organise their life to maximize emotional satisfaction, to have identified sources of suboptimal emotion-seeking behaviour, and to have suggested ways of improving this behaviour.