How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapters 9-11

Chapters 12-13

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Key Figures

Lisa Feldman Barrett

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is an American neuroscientist and psychology professor who currently serves as the Director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory (IASLab) at Northeastern University. She has authored two books on neuroscience: Seven and a Half Lessons About Your Brain and How Emotions Are Made. Her articles for laypeople have been published by the BBC, Cerebrum, Scientific American, Mindful, and BigThink, and she has published over 250 academic articles on brain science and emotion during her career. Barrett’s decades of research in the field make her particularly well suited to explaining the science of emotion. According to her website, she’s one of the world’s most cited scientists and has won numerous awards, including the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in Psychology.

Barbara L. Finlay

Barbara L. Finlay is a neuroscientist and the editor of the academic journal Behavior and Brain Sciences. Barrett cites Finlay as a corroborating opinion on the nature of brain function, as Finlay agrees that assigning certain emotions to specific regions of the brain is inaccurate.

Joseph E. LeDoux

Neuroscientist Joseph E. LeDoux once promoted the notion of “fear learning” in his work The Emotional Brain and Barrett calls him courageous for later reversing his beliefs and arguing for the opposite. Barrett agrees with LeDoux’s current opinion that labeling certain animal behaviors, such as freezing, with a specific emotional state is inaccurate. She uses LeDoux’s research to argue that “fear learning” methods only perpetuate false essentialist ideas about brain function.

Paul Ekman

Neuroscientist Paul Ekman argued that facial expressions represent certain emotional states and are shared by all humans. Barrett repeatedly cites his work, including his 1983 study, which showed that prompting people to make certain facial expressions could change their bodily functions such as heart rate, skin conductance, and arm tension. She argues that while these studies demonstrated a relationship between facial expressions and bodily function, they didn’t reliably find a specific physical “fingerprint” for each emotion, and points out that the study didn’t obtain the same results in a non-Western culture.