How Emotions Are Made – by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett

We’ve previously reviewed Dr. Barrett’s (also good) book Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain, and this one is very different, and of more practical use:

The main thrust of the book is: the bioessentialist model of emotions is flawed; there is also no Platonic perfect form of any given emotion, and in fact emotions are constructed by the brain as a learned adaptive response.

She argues this from the dual vectors of on the one hand hard sciences of affective neuroscience and clinical psychology, and on the other hand sociology and anthropology.

In the category of criticism: Dr. Barrett, a very well-known and well-respected cognitive neuroscientist, is not an expert on sociology and anthropology, and some of her claims there are verifiably false.

However, most of the book is given over the psychophysiology, which is entirely her thing, and she explains it clearly and simply while backing everything up with mountains of data.

The usefulness of this book is chiefly: if we understand that emotions are not innate and are instead constructed adaptive (and sometimes maladaptive) neurological responses to stimuli and associations, we can set about rewiring things a little in accord with what’s actually more beneficial to us. The book also outlines how.

Bottom line: if you’d like to be able to not merely manage emotions as they are, but also prune and/or grow them from the stem up, then this book provides a robustly scientific approach for doing that.

Click here to check out How Emotions Are Made, and get more discerning about yours!