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What it argues
Richard Davidson spent decades in a field where discussing emotions in relation to brain science was considered soft and suspect. His early mentor told him directly that studying emotion would derail his career. Davidson persisted anyway, and the research program he built at the University of Wisconsin became one of the most productive in the history of affective neuroscience. This book, written with science journalist Sharon Begley, is his account of what he found and what it means for how people understand and can change their own emotional lives.
The central concept is emotional style: not the transient moods we experience but the stable, characteristic patterns by which individuals respond to emotional experience. Davidson identifies six dimensions — Resilience (how quickly you recover from adversity), Outlook (how long positive emotion persists), Social Intuition (how well you read social cues), Self-Awareness (how accurately you perceive your own emotional states), Sensitivity to Context (how well you modulate emotion to fit the situation), and Attention (how focused or scattered your attention is under normal conditions). Each dimension has a measurable neural signature, and each person has a characteristic position on each dimension — a profile that constitutes their emotional style.
What it gets right
- 1.
Emotional style — your stable, characteristic patterns of emotional response — has measurable neural signatures in specific brain circuits rather than being a purely psychological abstraction.
- 2.
Davidson identifies six dimensions of emotional style: Resilience, Outlook, Social Intuition, Self-Awareness, Sensitivity to Context, and Attention. Each has its own neurobiological substrate.
- 3.
Emotional style is distinct from personality, mood, and emotional disorder. It is the foundation from which moods and disorders arise, shaped by both genetics and experience.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Richard J. Davidson is the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds. He has been studying the neural basis of emotion and emotional style for four decades and has collaborated extensively with the Dalai Lama on the neuroscience of meditation. Sharon Begley was a science journalist at Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal and the author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. She and Davidson co-authored this book from Davidson's research.
