How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

Even if you don't take her positive argument, Feldman Barrett's deconstruction of an essentialist approach to emotions–a platonic ideal of emotions that are universally shared by every person and culture–is absolutely convincing. Mental states depicted as the result of a stochastic cascade of interactions in your body provide a far more useful picture of emotions than our relatively lazy narrative of emotions.

Where it falls apart is when the author ventures further afield from her expertise on distinguishing essentialism from more modern takes on emotion and begins applying this in real world examples. It's not so much that she's wrong about the importance of emotions to jurisprudence and so on, so much as its a case of not being an expert in those fields too. It's like having an expert fishing hook designer tell you how to fish. It seems like it would make sense to have a deep understanding of a part of the activity, but it really doesn't mean such an expert has the necessary contextual knowledge of the applied field to tell you anything profound.

The kicker for me was near the end of the book when Feldman Barrett refers to Steven Pinker's characteristic dismissal of politically correct objections to his statements about black poverty and related issues. It's just inane to say that such a statement makes relative sense within Pjnker's constructed reality–it falls into a rhetorical trap to leave context out of the issue and thereby throw a soft ball on anything that depends on history to make sense of (i.e. racism and most other social and institutional concerns that this research would apply to).