Emotional Advantage

“Emotional Advantage is such an uplifting answer to our challenging times. In its pages, you will find encouragement, support, and new perspectives. Randy Taran offers an antidote to emotional overwhelm—a powerful way to discover how useful your emotions can be in guiding you towards your best life.”—Marci Shimoff, #1 NewYorkTimes bestselling author of HappyForNoReason and ChickenSoupfortheWoman’sSoul Award-winning author, producer, and founder of Project Happiness, Randy Taran knows that every emotion, feeling, and mental state has the power to bring us back to our true essence, and that readers can use Emotional Advantage as a guide to get there. In recent years, there has been an overwhelming interest in the science of happiness and positive psychology, and many books on the subject. There is a good reason for this: it is a core, universal human drive. And while happiness has opened the door for many to move forward, there is a burgeoning curiosity about the full range of human emotions, all of which factor into the human experience. What do we do when life does not go as planned? Neuroscience reveals that to understand and utilize any emotion, we need to “name it to tame it.” It turns out that even negative emotions have something to offer, if we know how to learn from them. Have you ever woken up in a fog of feelings and felt directionless? Or maybe it was hard to pinpoint exactly what you were feeling, but it wasn’t where you wanted to be? What if we could actually use our feelings as a pathway to guide us back to our inner compass? What if, like alchemists, we had the tools to transform our emotions to take charge of creating our very best life? What if we could comprehend how even the most troublesome emotions are sending messages to alert, protect, and fuel us forward? Emotional Advantage is that guide. It will show us how a new perspective on fear can move us to courage, how guilt can clarify our values, and how anger can help us create healthy boundaries.

The study of emotional expressions has a long tradition in psychology. Although research in this domain has extensively studied the social context factors that influence the expresser's facial display, the perceiver was considered passive. This 2007 book focuses on more recent developments that show that the perceiver is also subject to the same social rules and norms that guide the expresser's behavior and that knowledge of relevant emotion norms can influence how emotional expressions shown by members of different groups are perceived and interpreted. Factors such as ethnic-group membership, gender and relative status all influence not only emotional expressions but also the interpretation of emotional expressions shown by members of different groups. Specifically, the research presented asks the question of whether and why the same expressions shown by men or women, members of different ethnic groups, or individuals high and low in status are interpreted differently.

One of the defining attributes of the human species is sophisticated communication, for which facial expressions are crucial. Traditional research has so far mainly investigated a minority of 6 basic emotional expressions displayed as pictures. Despite the important insights of this approach, its ecological validity is limited: facial movements express more than emotions, and facial expressions are more than just pictures. The objective of the present thesis is therefore to improve the understanding of facial expression recognition by investigating the internal representations of a large range of facial expressions, displayed both as static pictures and as dynamic videos. To this end, it was necessary to develop and validate a new facial expression database which includes 20.000 stimuli of 55 expressions (study 1). Perceptual representations of the six basic emotional expressions were found previously to rely on evaluation of valence and arousal; study 2 showed that this evaluation generalises to many more expressions, particularly when displayed as videos. While it is widely accepted that knowledge influences perception, how these are linked is largely unknown; study 3 investigated this question by asking how knowledge about facial expressions, instantiated as conceptual representations, relates to perceptual representations of these expressions. A strong link was found which changed with the kind of expressions and the type of display. In probably the most extensive behavioural studies (with regards to the number of facial expressions used) to date, this thesis suggests that there are commonalities but also differences in processing of emotional and of other types of facial expressions. Thus, to understand facial expression processing, one needs to consider more than the 6 basic emotional expressions. These findings outline first steps towards a new domain in facial expression research, which has implications for a number of research and application fields where facial expressions play a role, ranging from social, developmental, and clinical psychology to computer vision and affective computing research.

Is establishing and enjoying loving relationships important to your life? It ought to be, as many of your most important needs in life are met only through relationships. The quality of those relationships will greatly depend on how well you and your partner can do two things: (1) properly manage your emotions during times of stress, deprivation, and trials, and (2) recognize and meet the emotional needs of your partner. These skills are not inborn, nor can they be casually acquired. But only those who possess them can expect to enjoy happy, loving, fulfilling relationships. In The Emotional Foundations of Loving Relationships, you will learn: The Ten Secrets of Emotionally Fulfilling Relationships The Five Great Destroyers of Relationships How to identify and meet your partner's top twenty emotional needs How your emotions can influence critical life decisions How to distinguish uplifting emotions from destructive emotions What it means to be emotionally responsible The consequences of emotional irresponsibility How to manage your emotions constructively Why there is opposition, stress, and trials in life Ten Potent Weapons for Battling the Forces of Emotional Darkness

Emotional Self-Management in Academia draws on new empirical research from academics' own personal accounts of emotional experiences from their everyday practice to illustrate how their emotional work is adapting in response to a constantly changing workplace.

In homes and school communities nationwide, there is re-energized interest in the values of community, compassion, and tolerance, and in finding our way to a kinder culture—a culture that starts with our families. Headlines speak of hate crimes, intolerance, and us-versus-them divisiveness. Recent political events have left many Americans yearning for unity, respect, and compassion in our national discourse. In our schools, bullying continues to be a pervasive problem, and in our homes, "screen-time" poses a constant threat to 'family time.' Research shows that connection and social engagement are key to successful, fulfilling lives, and yet we have never been less connected than we are now. Perhaps more than any other group, parents recognize the potential damage of this trend. Children who are raised in a culture where giving and compassion are valued become happier and more positively engaged with those around them. They are less likely to treat others disrespectfully. With increased concern about meanness and bullying, you may be among the many parents who see the need for more civil, respectful, and considerate behavior among our children. The Kindness Advantage is a practical and concrete guide for you to equip your child with the skills they need to have a positive influence on the world. We all benefit when children are raised with the understanding that they can have an impact by making conscious choices. It's never too early to start your child on a path of fulfillment through meaningful connection with others. Designed to be read with children as young as four, the book presents ten fundamental concepts to weave into your family's daily life. Using text, quotes, questions and real life stories, The Kindness Advantage is the first book parents need to think about and teach the necessary skills to be a kind, compassionate person. Each idea on its own is simple and unintimidating, yet together they form the powerful foundation parents need to go beyond teaching "please" and "thank-you" to form kindness habits that will last a lifetime. In a world where kindness is so greatly needed, The Kindness Advantage offers inspiration and activities to teach kids empathy, inspire a culture of compassion and connection, and empower children to make a difference in their community and the world.

Explores a range of disciplines, including, psychology, neuroscience, sociology, primatology, philosophy, history, cognitive science, computer science, and education.

A study that goes beyond the debate over functional specialization to describe the ways that emotion and cognition interact and are integrated in the brain. The idea that a specific brain circuit constitutes the emotional brain (and its corollary, that cognition resides elsewhere) shaped thinking about emotion and the brain for many years. Recent behavioral, neuropsychological, neuroanatomy, and neuroimaging research, however, suggests that emotion interacts with cognition in the brain. In this book, Luiz Pessoa moves beyond the debate over functional specialization, describing the many ways that emotion and cognition interact and are integrated in the brain. The amygdala is often viewed as the quintessential emotional region of the brain, but Pessoa reviews findings revealing that many of its functions contribute to attention and decision making, critical components of cognitive functions. He counters the idea of a subcortical pathway to the amygdala for affective visual stimuli with an alternate framework, the multiple waves model. Citing research on reward and motivation, Pessoa also proposes the dual competition model, which explains emotional and motivational processing in terms of their influence on competition processes at both perceptual and executive function levels. He considers the broader issue of structure-function mappings, and examines anatomical features of several regions often associated with emotional processing, highlighting their connectivity properties. As new theoretical frameworks of distributed processing evolve, Pessoa concludes, a truly dynamic network view of the brain will emerge, in which "emotion" and "cognition" may be used as labels in the context of certain behaviors, but will not map cleanly into compartmentalized pieces of the brain.