If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- Have you ever wondered why we think emotions are reactions to the world, when they are actually predictions your brain makes based on your past?
- What if you could gain more control over your feelings by uncovering the secret way your brain constructs emotions like stress, fear, and joy?
- Did you know that your culture and the language you speak might be the real reason you feel certain emotions while people in other parts of the world don't?
Listen to How Emotions Are Made — Free Audiobook
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Key Takeaways from How Emotions Are Made
- Discover why the classical view of hardwired emotions is flawed, and learn how your brain actually constructs feelings based on bodily sensations and your present environment.
- Understand how your brain simulates emotional responses by instantly recalling past sensory memories and experiences to give meaning to your current situation.
- Learn why facial expressions are not universally reliable indicators of feelings, and discover why context and full body language are essential to truly understand an emotion.
- Find out how your brain uses distinct concepts and categories to process new situations, revealing exactly why different people react to the same emotions in vastly varying ways.
- Realize how deeply social realities and shared cultural rules shape your emotional creations, even influencing physical functions like how your body metabolizes food.
Learning Tools
Reinforce what you learned from How Emotions Are Made
Mind Map
How Emotions Are Made
The Classical View (False Paradigm)
Hardwired Reflexes
Essentialism
Biological Fingerprints
Scientific Reality
No Universal Expressions
No Dedicated Brain Regions
Flawed Technology
Theory of Constructed Emotion
Spontaneous Creation
Predictive Processing
Darwinian Variation
Interoception & Affects
Interoception
Affects
Raw Data
The Body Budget
Resource Regulation
Feedback Loop
Explaining Imbalance
Cultural Construction
Social Reality
Language Dependency
Historical Context
Learning & Regulating
Taught from Birth
Emotional Granularity
Physical Rebalancing
Quiz — Test Your Understanding
Question 1 of 8
According to the 'classical view' of emotions, how are emotions primarily understood?
How Emotions Are Made — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: The classical view of emotions sees them as hardwired into our brains.
Chapter 3: Scientific evidence does not support the classical view of emotion and money is wasted researching it.
Chapter 4: Emotions are generated spontaneously and simultaneously, grounded in our individual experiences.
Chapter 5: A predictive system governs the body’s internal state, including how we experience emotions.
Chapter 6: Our interoception system manages a body budget that allocates our physical resources.
Chapter 7: Emotion concepts are culturally shaped beliefs about what feelings mean.
Chapter 8: From birth we absorb cultural emotion concepts, and we can always learn more.
How Emotions Are Made Summary & Overview
How Emotions Are Made (2017) challenges everything you think you know about emotions. From learning how our brain registers anger, fear and joy to how we think about these emotions culturally, you’ll come away with a new understanding of the ways in which emotions are created and how their scope is determined by society at large.
Who Should Listen to How Emotions Are Made?
- People interested in psychology and neuroscience
- Those who want to better understand and control their emotions
- Students of cultural studies and languages
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