“How Emotions Are Made“ is yet another weird book with a promising title, written by @LFeldmanBarrett for someone without knowledge of science, its methods or branches. Possibly for those of us who skipped biology in school and haven’t read anything about neuroscience ever since?
The message of the book: we don’t know what, where or how #emotions are made. But, the author has a hypothesis, much in line with current fashion: emotions are constructed by #culture (nurture), because languages around the world differ in how they describe them.
The author follows up with a mishmash of contradictions like:
• “We can’t locate the origin of emotions in the brain”, but we know there’s an “interoceptive network.”
• “#Stress doesn’t come from the outside world. You construct it.” But, a few pages later, “fasting and gut flora very much influences our emotions”… so, I suppose, something coming from the outside world?
Any practical advice?
Sure. Construct happy thoughts (even when bombed in a war zone), inherit good genes and real estate, cook healthy food, take a walk in a democracy, keep an FSC-certified #gratitude journal and, of course, #meditate!
This book might have been titled “Science Doesn’t Know How Emotions are Made — But babies learn to name and classify emotions from their caregivers… whose vocabulary size correlates with babies’ emotional granularity, #EQ or whatever you want to call it…
…as long as it’s not essentialist, oh, and our #lifestyle constructs our emotional worlds, like, being poor in a high-crime neighborhood is bad for you, did you know that?”
Worse, the self-contradictory opus is written in a cringe-worthy, kill-joy #style of “Get ready for that twist I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter”.
But mine’s just an opinion of a #trilingual who’d “culturally constructed” 3 variants of each of his emotions.
Augmented by the professional “emotional granularity” of a film director.
And someone who should’ve Google Scholared the author’s publications before reading this book… to skip it altogether. 🤦🏻♂️
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