This concluding statement neatly sums up the rationale behind communication studies Professor Sally Planalp’s latest work, “Communicating Emotion: Social, Moral, and Cultural Processes,” and precisely captures her passion for the subject.

In “Communicating Emotion,” Planalp pulls together key writing and research on emotions to help dispel misconceptions that stand in the way of understanding our own emotions and communicating those feelings effectively.

Through the lens of emotion, the book also illuminates the complexity and dynamics of the communication process in general. Her purpose, she says, was to help legitimize emotion in everyday lives and conversation and demonstrate its pervasive significance.

Emotion does not just belong to the field of psychology, Planalp says. “Communicating Emotion” reflects her extensive background reading in philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, business and communications. It is intended for advanced undergraduates, graduate students and professionals.

Planalp, who has spent her professional life studying interpersonal communication, was drawn to questions of emotional communication because, as she says, “thinking does not explain everything, and emotions are complex forces that very few people understand well.”

Each chapter in “Communicating Emotion” deals with a different false dichotomy that occurs in everyday and scholarly thinking about emotion. For example, reason and emotion often are held to be mutually exclusive. On the contrary, Planalp writes, each is dependent on the other.

Various chapters concern how important emotion is in everyday communication, how and why emotion is communicated, whether emotional communication is spontaneous or strategic, how we construct meaning from emotional communication, the simultaneously personal and social nature of emotion, how emotional messages contain moral meanings and how well emotion can be understood across cultures and historical periods.

Planalp liberally spices these chapters with examples from recognizable, personal situations, thereby bringing out the varied and complicated ways in which emotions flavor life and our understanding of ourselves and others.