Prosocial Motives, Emotions, and Behavior: The Better Angels of Our Nature serves as a well-organized primer for anyone interested in factors governing prosocial behaviors. Importantly, it also highlights why behaving prosocially is beneficial not only to the recipient but also to the provider, even when that deed is as simple as forgiveness. The broad goal of this book is to integrate what is known about prosocial behavior. The editors do a magnificent job making this edited work tell a

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... e story. The book is organized such that the principles of prosocial behavior are clearly explained at the start and the later applications of those fundamental concepts become expected by the end. In the editors' words, this book looks at "various levels of analysis from the neural to the societal" (p. 4). It also makes a clear argument for why prosocial behaviors are an important area of research. At the outset, contributing authors address the philosophical quandary of whether altruistic behavior is truly altruistic if one benefits from performing such behavior. Many of the authors also address whether one should benefit from performing prosocial acts. It appears that the answer is yes, one can and should benefit from behaving prosocially. In fact, Simpson and Beckes (Chapter 2) suggest that "far from being competitive and antagonistic, our most reproductively successful ancestors may have been among the most cooperative and resourceful individuals within their groups" (pp. 50-51). This is a welcomed juxtaposition against the lay understanding of "survival of the fittest." A diversity of definitions is reflected in this work, yet the reader will come away with a coherent and integrated understanding of empathy, altruism, and prosocial behavior. The care taken to address the theoretical perspectives on empathy and altruism helps diminish the need to continuously reconcile the meaning of these terms when one is dealing with other complex issues that authors raise later in the book. While the word emotion is in the title, and one of the sections of the book is titled Prosocial Emotions, the book largely addresses complex emotions such as compassionate love, gratitude, forgiveness, and generosity. The strength of focusing on these emotions is that it introduces these emotions as positive, prosocial emotions that should be examined further (perhaps by affective neuroscientists). It also expands our vocabulary of positively valanced emotions. The weakness of focusing only on these emotions is that the specific roles of basic emotions (e.g., happiness, sadness, fear) are not thoroughly discussed. Though it is but one factor (as a couple of authors discuss), it would be useful to understand the role that various emotions play in prosocial behaviors. For example, the results of a recent experiment indicate that the ability to accurately recognize fear predicts prosocial behavior (i.e., donating time and money to a