A new theory of how the brain constructs emotions that could revolutionize psychology, health care, law enforcement, and our understanding of the human mind.
Emotions feel automatic to us; that's why scientists have long assumed that emotions are hardwired in the body or the brain. Today, however, the science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. This paradigm shift has far-reaching implications not only for psychology but also medicine, the legal system, airport security, child-rearing, and even meditation.
Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose theory of emotion is driving a deeper understanding of the mind and brain, and what it means to be human. Her research overturns the widely held belief that emotions are housed in different parts of the brain, and are universally expressed and recognized. Instead, emotion is constructed in the moment by core systems interacting across the whole brain, aided by a lifetime of learning.
Are emotions more than automatic reactions? Does rational thought really control emotion? How does emotion affect disease? How can you make your children more emotionally intelligent? How Emotions Are Made reveals the latest research and intriguing practical applications of the new science of emotion, mind, and brain.
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7 March 2017
Dimensions
17.15 x 13.97 x 1.27 cm
ISBN-10
1469292084
ISBN-13
978-1469292083
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Product description
About the Author
Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D., is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Psychiatry and Radiology. She received a National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award for her groundbreaking research on emotion in the brain, and is an elected member of the Royal Society of Canada. She lives in Boston.
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Customer Reviews: 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,852 ratings
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EQ Expert
5.0 out of 5 stars If you are interested in EQ this is must read
Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on 13 October 2018
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Book Review: 'How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain’
By Lisa Feldman Barrett
If you are interested in the field of Emotional Intelligence this is a must read. While Goleman’s book popularised the subject, this book completely revolutionises one’s thinking about emotions. More importantly Lisa Feldman Barrett is an actual scientist unlike so many who write on the topic yet she has a clear, concise writing style that makes this book a pleasure to read. As someone who went to Cambridge and studied Natural Sciences may I take my hat off to the author for writing this book. I would rank it with Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
As a writer and blogger on emotional intelligence I have already raised doubts on a number of popular beliefs. For example I believe Amygdala Hijacks are rubbish. I don’t believe separate parts of the brain are the source of emotional footprints. I have attended a lecture by Paul Ekman and paid for and did his course on micro-expressions. Yet for the life of me I totally fail to read facial emotions. At the 2016 Emotional Intelligence Congress in Oporto all the 300 papers and presentations except one used the Salovey-Meyer model of emotional intelligence. My paper did not. As a result, I considered myself to be an outsider crying in the wilderness. No more.
Feldman argues and demonstrates how many of our most basic beliefs about emotion are myths. A face does not speak for itself and our facial expressions can be misleading. Gender bias plays a crucial role in misunderstanding people women are not more emotional than men. There are not dedicated emotion circuits in the brain and the seven core emotions of Paul Ekman as used in “Inside Out” are a myth. Emotions are not already built in your brain. They are constructed by our brains as we mature.
While Feldman does allow for some emotional activity to be genetic she spends little time in this area. I believe in this she is wrong. Temperament is our genetic emotional pre-disposition. I am a strong believer in the 7MTF/Humm model of temperament that proposes our temperament depends on our position on the spectrum of seven genetic mental illnesses. I think her book is weakest when she suggests depression and autism are socially caused.
If you want to get a taste of Feldma’s work there are several good lectures on YouTube. The first I would recommend is Wired talk that lasts 17 minutes: The Three Big Myths About Emotions, Gender and Brains | Lisa Feldman Barrett. The second is a one-hour lecture that summarises her work Lisa Feldman Barrett: Emotion inside out. However, you really need to read the book to understand her theory.
Finally, Feldman graciously credits Ekman for his work in her acknowledgements. How he feels about her is open to conjecture, but her demolition of his work is pretty thorough.
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Manan.cm.au
5.0 out of 5 stars Complex scientific evidence & simplistic Zen conclusion
Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on 7 May 2021
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A relatively difficult read and worth every difficulty. Lisa uses scientific evidence and gets help from philosophy, psychology and even religion ( If Bhuddism is one) to establish the hypothesis that emotions are created by us as a choice. This is sharply in contrast to popular theory of emotions being a manifestation of someone's else behaviour in us.
Adler, Zen Bhuddists and Taoist have been propanent of this belief for centuries. Really great to see modern day scientific evidence following up in year old traditional thoughts.
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Deniz Uzun
4.0 out of 5 stars Good read, thought provoking
Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on 22 September 2019
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The book suggests a paradigm shift about many things we assumed about emotions, very thought provoking.
One star off for the subpar print quality, some of the illustrations in the book look like low resolution Internet print outs...
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Felicio Santos
5.0 out of 5 stars Get ready to have your existing concepts challenged
Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on 29 June 2019
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It's a long book, but you can't defy concepts with few words, and don't worry the text is extremely joyful and captive, and you can always buy the audio narrative and hear on your commute. I bought thinking to improve my emotions' handling, and ended improving the wordview as whole.
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Courtney Coombs
3.0 out of 5 stars The Theory is Better Than the Book
Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on 12 February 2018
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I heard Barrett interviewed on Invisibilia and her model of constructed emotions made so much sense to me personally, the traditional view never seemed right. The first few chapters are interesting and focused on the point, but then about halfway through it just repeats itself or discusses unrelated topics. Which is a shame because I think the idea is very important, it's just hidden in a mediocre book.
3 people found this helpful
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Mike Adams
5.0 out of 5 stars The ONLY popular psychology book with a modern and correct brain model - essential reading.
Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on 25 August 2018
This is the ONLY psychology book I've found that correctly incorporates the new brain insights from AI and neuroscience. And it calls out past psych brain models for what they are - pseudo-science. Our emotions are constructed in the neocortex in the same way we construct other components of our reality like 'chair' and the colour 'red'.
This truly is a ground-breaking psychology book, it's a shame that it loses its way a bit in the last half as another reviewer has commented but it's a six-star book, just for the first half! Highly recommended.
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3 people found this helpful
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Harriet Adams
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on 5 December 2017
Enthralled - now to be able to navigate glitches and successfully download the rest of the book :)
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Amazon buyer
5.0 out of 5 stars Mind-blowing
Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on 28 June 2021
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Would open your eyes to a world of research backing up the construction of emotions that occur in our culture. If you (like me, and many others) believed that there were "biological fingerprints" for any emotion, this difficult and fascinating read convinces you to change your mind.
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rita
3.0 out of 5 stars new descartian generation
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 11 January 2019
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In my generation, we are well aware of the importance of the mind, but Barret is selling this idea to the extreme.
For her, there is no reaction, no sensory channel reception, no awareness of sensory input. Everything is prediction, even an unexpected smell. It takes her to page 64 to accept less minded sensory input reception processes, and such acknowledgement bears almost no echo in her writings. She denies cause effect and fails to see that she is putting the prediction and the mind as the cause (of everything). This is the new descartian generation of Western intellectuals with little experiential sensorial training. For me, it is sort of a stretch to see sensory reception (which of course involves the nervous system, and may be tainted eventually by simulation and 'illusion') as prediction, and self-awareness as prediction.
In brief, her brain is, as she says, locked in her skull. My brain is a sensorial organism permanently in inter-relation with everything else, being changed and changing.
(on the upside, despite her bias and her crusade against Ekman tainting her reasoning, she is well acquainted with the literature)
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Stiven Skyrah
5.0 out of 5 stars Challenging a normal attitude to emotions
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 2 November 2019
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I have to give this book 5 stars based on its audacity and ambition alone.
The author fearlessly challenges some of the fields (affective psychology/neuroscience) most revered and respected theorists and researchers, including Jack Panksap, Antonio Damassio, Joseph LeDoux, Paul Ekman and even Charles Darwin.
That's mad ballsy.
The book is a virtual slaughterhouse of sacred cows.
I have reservations about much of the authors assertions. It's hard not to, because she challenges so much of the current gospel.
That being said, I have the strong intuition that the this work represents a legitimate challenge to the old paradigm.
It will be interesting to read the inevitable pushback.
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28 people found this helpful
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AM Hodge
5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely Fascinating
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 18 August 2018
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I thoroughly enjoyed this very well written book. Her writing style is quite easy to read although she is introducing some very difficult and challenging concepts. As an avid, though lay, reader of books on neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, her explanations in this book upend everything I thought I knew about the brain and the mind. There is some repetition, but personally I found this to be helpful because the book feels like the construction of a 3-D jigsaw puzzle, so having some ideas repeated helps to orient you to how things fit together.
Definitely not a one time read and then put it aside. If you are interested in this topic, then in my view, this is one of the best books available and for that reason I would wholeheartedly recommend it.
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Philip M
4.0 out of 5 stars An articulate book, very interesting but hard work. Prepare for a second read!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 12 September 2019
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This is not an easy book to read. Several times I considered giving up, but I really wanted to understand the subject so I continued. And I am glad I did, the second half of the book was not only illuminating, but also truly interesting. There were many fascinating examples of studies and case histories, a very enlightening insight into criminal law (both in the US and the UK) concerning unconscious actions, and an insight into suggestions that animals might experience emotions.
As I intimated earlier, the first half of the book was very hard work. Admittedly some of the concepts are very complex and hard to grasp. I felt that the author was determined to drive home every detail of her considerable research into the roles of prediction and prediction error in the formation of our emotions in order to thoroughly dismantle the long-held classical view of “essential” emotions generated by specific regions of the brain. This is completely understandable since developing a prediction theory of the brain’s function has clearly been a major part of her professional career.
And this book is very convincing of her theories. The author is talented, articulate and dedicated and this book is probably one of the most thorough modern analyses of how emotions are created. It is definitely worth devoting time to several readings.
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5t4n5 Dot Com
3.0 out of 5 stars Ho hum ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 16 December 2019
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A very interesting look into how Lisa currently believes our brains create our emotions. Lisa pushes well against the tide of established beliefs and makes a fairly good case for her theories.
But, we’ll probably throw this one on the “scrap-head-of-wild-scientific-ideas-that-came-and-went” in a few years time, along with all the other thoughts that currently suit the zeitgeist.
Interesting though.
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