How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

This book has insidiously been changing my life. I find myself engaging differently in some conversations. Definitely reading differently, especially anything to do with communication. There are some books I may want to reread in light of this new perspective. And perspective is all it is: just a reframing of a mental model.

Barrett in no way denies or invalidates emotions; what she does is suggest that they're not as universal as we think. Not across humans, certainly not across species. Affect is more universal, but we build emotions from that plus self-awareness plus the all-important social/cultural environment. It's nature and nurture both, and just like that fruitless debate, people get into trouble when they start looking for gene-for-this or brain-region-for-that. Barrett's model helps us see complex emotions as constructs, which she hopes can change the focus of research and, should those directions prove fruitful, eventually society and even law.

Barrett does seem a little too smitten with her own thesis, a little too certain. I do hope her model pans out, yields new insights, and proves useful. But this is science: it may not.