LISA FELDMAN BARRETT, PhD, is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. 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. Barrett is the author of How Emotions are Made and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.
"Barrett's is a singular book, remarkable for the freshness of its
ideas and the boldness and clarity with which they are
presented."
--Scientific American "Chock-full of startling, science-backed
findings...an entertaining and engaging read."
--Forbes "Fascinating...a thought-provoking journey into emotion
science."
--The Wall Street Journal "Fascinating... If you want to read
emotions better, read this book."
--Harper's Bazaar "I have never seen a book so devoted to
understanding the nature of emotions...the book is down-to-earth
and a delight to read. With a high level of knowledge and
articulate style, Barrett delivers a prime example of modern prose
in digestible chunks."
--Seattle Book Review, 5 Stars "Most of us make our way through the
world without thinking a lot about what we bring to our encounters
with it. Lisa Feldman Barrett does--and what she has to say about
our perceptions and emotions is pretty mind-blowing."
--Elle "Drawing on neuroscience and experimental psychology to
overturn the assumption that emotions are innate and universal,
this book describes them as 'goal-based' concepts designed to help
us categorize experience...Upbringing has the biggest influence,
but we can all reshape our mental makeup and learn new concepts.
The latter part of the book considers how doing so can affect our
health, the law, and our relationship with the natural world. As
Barrett frequently repeats, 'You are an architect of your
experience.'"
--The New Yorker, "Briefly Noted" "A neuroscientist offers an
enjoyable guide to a revolutionary scientific theory of emotion and
its practical applications."
--Shelf Awareness "Prepare to have your brain twisted around as
psychology professor Barrett takes it on a tour of itself... Her
enthusiasm for her topic brightens every amazing fact and theory
about where our emotions come from...each chapter is chockablock
with startling insights. ...Barrett's figurative selfie of the
brain is brilliant."
-- Booklist, STARRED "A well-argued, entertaining disputation of
the prevailing view that emotion and reason are at odds...Highly
informative, readable, and wide-ranging."
--Kirkus Reviews, STARRED review "Barrett (psychology, Northeastern
Univ.) presents a new neuroscientific explanation of why people are
more swayed by feelings than by facts. She offers an unintuitive
theory that goes against not only the popular understanding but
also that of traditional research: emotions don't arise; rather, we
construct them on the fly. Furthermore, emotions are neither
universal nor located in specific brain regions; they vary by
culture and result from dynamic neuronal networks. These networks
run nonstop simulations, making predictions and correcting them
based on the environment rather than reacting to it. Tracing her
own journey from the classical view of emotions, Barrett
progressively builds her case, writing in a conversational tone and
using down-to-earth metaphors, relegating the heaviest neuroscience
to an appendix to keep the book accessible. Still, it is a lot to
take in if one has not been exposed to these ideas before. VERDICT
The theories of emotion and the human brain set forth here are
revolutionary and have important implications. For readers
interested in psychology and neuroscience as well as those involved
in education and policy."
--Library Journal, STARRED review "This meticulous,
well-researched, and deeply thought out book reveals new insights
about our emotions--what they are, where they come from, why we
have them. For anyone who has struggled to reconcile brain and
heart, this book will be a treasure; it explains the science
without short-changing the humanism of its topic."--Andrew Solomon,
best-selling author of Far From the Tree and The Noonday Demon "A
brilliant and original book on the science of emotion, by the
deepest thinker about this topic since Darwin."--Daniel Gilbert,
best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness "Ever wonder where
your emotions come from? Lisa Barrett, a world expert in the
psychology of emotion, has written the definitive field guide to
feelings and the neuroscience behind them."--Angela Duckworth,
best-selling author of Grit "We all harbor an intuition about
emotions: that the way you experience joy, fear or anger happens
automatically and is pretty much the same in a Kalahari
hunter-gatherer. In this excellent new book, Lisa Barrett draws on
contemporary research to offer a radically different picture: that
the experience of emotion is highly individualized,
neurobiologically idiosyncratic, and inseparable from cognition.
This is a provocative, accessible, important book."--Robert
Sapolsky, author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers and A Primate's
Memoir "Everything you thought you knew about what you feel and why
you feel it turns out to be stunningly wrong. Lisa Barrett
illuminates the fascinating new science of our emotions, offering
real-world examples of why it matters in realms as diverse as
health, parenting, romantic relationships and national
security."
--Peggy Orenstein, author of Girls & Sex "After reading How
Emotions Are Made, I will never think about emotions the same way
again. Lisa Barrett opens up a whole new terrain for fighting
gender stereotypes and making better policy."--Anne-Marie
Slaughter, author of Unfinished Business "What if everything you
thought you knew about lust, anger, grief, and joy was wrong? Lisa
Barrett is one of the psychology's wisest and most creative
scientists and her theory of constructed emotion is radical and
fascinating. Through vivid examples and sharp, clear prose, How
Emotions are Made defends a bold new vision of the most central
aspects of human nature." --Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy
and How Pleasure Works "Lisa Barrett writes with great clarity
about how your emotions are not merely about what you're born with,
but also about how your brain pieces your feelings together, and
how you can contribute to the process. She tells a compelling
story."--Joseph LeDoux, author of Anxious and Synaptic Self "How
Emotions Are Made offers a grand new conception of emotions--what
they are, where they come from, and (most importantly) what they
aren't. Brain science is the art of the counterintuitive and Lisa
Barrett has a remarkable capacity to make the counterintuitive
comprehensible. This book will have you smacking your forehead
wondering why it took so long to think this way about the
brain."--Stuart Firestein, author of Failure: Why Science is So
Successful and Ignorance: How It Drives Science "How Emotions Are
Made is a provocative, insightful, and engaging analysis of the
fascinating ways that our brains create our emotional lives,
convincingly linking cutting edge neuroscience studies with
everyday emotions. You won't think about emotions in the same way
after you read this important book."--Daniel L. Schacter, author of
The Seven Sins of Memory "Lisa Barrett masterfully integrates
discoveries from affective science, neuroscience, social
psychology, and philosophy to make sense of the many instances of
emotion that you experience and witness each day. How Emotions are
Made will help you remake your life, giving you new lenses to see
familiar feelings--from anxiety to love--anew."--Barbara
Fredrickson, author of Positivity and Love 2.0 "How Emotions are
Made is a tour de force in the quest to understand how we perceive,
judge and decide. It lays the groundwork to address many of the
mysteries of human behavior. I look forward to how this more
accurate view of emotion will help my clients in athletics and
trading."
--Denise K. Shull, MA, Founder and CEO of The ReThink Group "With
How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett has set the terms of
debate for emotion theory in the 21st century. In clear, readable
prose, she invites us to question both lay and expert
understandings of what emotions are--and she musters an impressive
body of data to suggest new answers. Barrett's theory of how we
construct emotions has major implications for law, including the
myth of dispassionate judging. Her 'affective science manifesto for
the legal system' deserves to be taken seriously by theorists and
practitioners alike."
--Terry Maroney, Professor of Law and Professor of Medicine, Health
and Society, Vanderbilt University "Every lawyer and judge doing
serious criminal trials should read this book. We all grapple with
the concepts of free will, emotional impulses, and criminal intent,
but here these topics are exposed to a new scrutiny and old
assumptions are challenged. The interface of law and brain science
is suddenly the area we ought to be debating."
--Baroness Helena Kennedy, QC House of Lords, U.K. "Extraordinarily
well written, Lisa Barrett's How Emotions are Made chronicles a
paradigm shift in the science of emotion. But more than just a
chronicle, this book is a brilliant work of translation,
translating the new neuroscience of emotion into understandable and
readable terms. Since that science has profound implications in
areas as disparate as police shootings and TSA profiling, the
translation is critical for scientists and citizens, lawmakers and
physicians. (For example, what if there is no meaningful scientific
difference between premeditated murder, the product of rational
thought, which we consider most culpable, and the lesser offense of
manslaughter, a 'crime of passion?') Emotions do not reside in
dedicated brain areas, constantly at war with areas charged with
cognition or perception, as Pixar caricatured it in Inside out, let
alone the brain described by Descartes or Plato or other
philosophers. Nor does the brain passively retrieve data from
"outside" to which it reacts. The brain constructs the reality it
perceives, and the emotions it (and we) experience, using core
brain systems, not specialized circuits. And it does so in concert
with other brains, with the culture surrounding it. The
implications of this work ('only' challenging two thousand year old
assumptions about the brain) and its ambitions are nothing short of
stunning. Even more stunning is how extraordinarily well it
succeeds."--Nancy Gertner, Senior Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law
School, and former U.S. federal judge for the United States
District Court of Massachusetts
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