The Emotional Life of Your Brain

Now, in one of the most anticipated brain books in decades, Davidson along with Sharon Begley are introducing a new model of our emotions-their origins, their power, and their malleability in The Emotional Life of Your Brain [ Hudson Street Press; March 2012; ISBN: 978-1-59463-089-7]. He has discovered that personality is composed of six basic emotional affects or styles - our emotional fingerprint results from where on the continuum of each style we fall. Even more interesting, he's discovered the brain chemistry that underlies each style, one that will even go so far as to affect the way we treat conditions like autism and depression.

The icing on the cake is that he provides strategies we can use to change our own brains and our own emotional styles to help with a wide range of problems from having a negative outlook to being terminally scatterbrained.

Emotional Style is compromised of six dimensions. Neither conventional aspects of personality nor simple emotional traits or moods, these six dimensions reflect the discoveries of modern neuroscientific research:

They are:

▪Resilience: how slowly or quickly you recover from adversity

▪Outlook: how long you are able to sustain positive emotion.

▪Social Intuition: how adept you are at picking up social signals from the people around you.

▪Self Awareness: How well you perceive bodily feelings that reflect emotions.

▪Sensitivity to Context: how good are you at regulation your emotional responses to take into account the social context you find yourself in.

▪Attention: how sharp and clear your focus is.

The information in this book works through the mind to change the brain. It has the power to help you be the person you want to be and live the life you aspire to.