The Emotional Brain

What happens in our brains to make us feel fear, love, hate, anger, joy? Do we control our emotions, or do they control us? Do animals have emotions? How can traumatic experiences in early childhood influence adult behavior, even though we have no conscious memory of them? In The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux investigates the origins of human emotions and explains that many exist as part of complex neural systems that evolved to enable us to survive. One of the principal researchers profiled in Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, LeDoux is a leading authority in the field of neural science. In this provocative book, he explores the brain mechanisms underlying our emotions -- mechanisms that are only now being revealed.

This longawaited book by a pioneer in brain research offers a new model of our emotions- their origins, their power, and their malleability. For more than thirty years, Richard Davidson has been at the forefront of brain research. Now he gives us an entirely new model for understanding our emotions, as well as practical strategies we can use to change them. Davidson has discovered that personality is composed of six basic emotional "styles," including resilience, self-awareness, and attention. Our emotional fingerprint results from where on the continuum of each style we fall. He explains the brain chemistry that underlies each style in order to give us a new model of the emotional brain, one that will even go so far as to affect the way we treat conditions like autism and depression. And, finally, he provides strategies we can use to change our own brains and emotions-if that is what we want to do. Written with bestselling author Sharon Begley, this original and exciting book gives us a new and useful way to look at ourselves, develop a sense of well-being, and live more meaningful lives.

In Unlocking the Emotional Brain, authors Ecker, Ticic, and Hulley equip readers to carry out focused, empathic therapy using the potent process of memory reconsolidation, the recently discovered and only known process for actually unlocking emotional memory at the synaptic level. The Routledge classic edition includes a new preface from the authors describing the book’s widespread impact on psychotherapy since its initial publication. Emotional memory's tenacity is the familiar bane of therapists, and researchers had long believed that emotional memory forms indelible learning. Reconsolidation has overturned these views. It allows new learning to truly nullify, not just suppress, the deep, intensely problematic emotional learnings that form, outside of awareness, during childhood or in later tribulations and generate most of the symptoms that bring people to therapy. Readers will learn methods that precisely eliminate unwanted, ingrained emotional responses—whether moods, behaviors, or thought patterns—causing no loss of ordinary narrative memory, while restoring clients' well-being. Numerous case examples show the versatile use of this process in AEDP, coherence therapy, EFT, EMDR, and IPNB.

This book deals with the results of theoretical and ex perimental studies of the emotions which my colleagues and I carried out over the last two decades. An interest in the psychology of emotions prompted us to undertake an analysis of the creative legacy of K. S. Stanislavsky. A result of this analysis was the book, The Method of K. s. StanisZavsky and the PhysioZogy of Emotions, written in 1955-1956 and published by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1962. I am grateful to the first reader and critic of the manuscript, Leon Abgarovich Orbeli. In 1960, having transferred to the Institute of Higher Nervous Activ ity and Neurophysiology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, I had the opportunity to conduct experiments on prob lems that had interested me for a long time. In close scien tific association with Peter Mikhailovich Ershov, director and teacher of theater, I began a systematic study of the in voluntary and electrophysiological shifts in actors during voluntary production of various emotional states. Here comparatively quickly we became convinced that the fruitfulness of such studies rests on an absence of any kind of developed, systematic, and sound generaZ theory of the emotions of man and the higher mammals. We will illustrate our difficulties if only with one example. We had frequently read of the so-called "emotional memory.

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.

Originally published by Viking Penguin, 2014.

Preeminent psychologist Lisa Barrett lays out how the brain constructs emotions in a way that could revolutionize psychology, health care, the legal system, and our understanding of the human mind. “Fascinating . . . A thought-provoking journey into emotion science.”—The Wall Street Journal “A singular book, remarkable for the freshness of its ideas and the boldness and clarity with which they are presented.”—Scientific American “A brilliant and original book on the science of emotion, by the deepest thinker about this topic since Darwin.”—Daniel Gilbert, best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose research overturns the long-standing belief that emotions are automatic, universal, and hardwired in different brain regions. Instead, Barrett shows, we construct each instance of emotion through a unique interplay of brain, body, and culture. A lucid report from the cutting edge of emotion science, How Emotions Are Made reveals the profound real-world consequences of this breakthrough for everything from neuroscience and medicine to the legal system and even national security, laying bare the immense implications of our latest and most intimate scientific revolution.

This book seeks to reframe the normative narrative of the 'culpable person' in American criminal law through a more humanising lens. It embraces such a reframed narrative to revise the criteria of the current voluntarist architecture of culpability and to advance a paradigm of punishment that positions social rehabilitation as its core principle. The book constructs this narrative by considering behavioural and neuroscientific insights into the functions of emotions, and socio-environmental factors within moral behaviour in social settings. Hence, it suggests culpability notions that reflect a more contextualised view of human conduct, and argues that such revised notions are better suited to the principle of personal guilt. Furthermore, it suggests a model of 'punishment' that values the dynamic power of change of individuals, and acknowledges the importance of social relationships and positive environments to foster patterns of social (re)integration. Ultimately, this book argues that the potential adoption of the proposed models of culpability and punishment, which view people through a more comprehensive lens, may be a key factor for turning criminal justice into a less punitive, more inclusionary and non-stigmatising system.