Contemporary work on emotional development is pretty intense, and there
are those among developmental psyochologists (Campos and Fisher come to
mind) who are seeking synthetic approaches comning out of experimental
traditions of research.
At the upper end, I warmly recommend the discussion of "litost'" in
Milan Kundera's novel, "the book of laughter and forgetting" which
is recommendable on other grounds and condemable on yet others.
mike
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