The Emotional Life of Your Brain: The Essence of Emotions and Ways to Manage Them in Order to Improve Your Happiness

You’ve probably experienced flight delays. If you paid attention to the passengers around you, you would see that they’d react differently to flight delays. Some would be listening to music with headphones on, completely ignoring the situation around them. Some would be grumbling, walking into the departure lounge in a huff after hearing the news of delay. Some would calmly but firmly demand to be rerouted immediately. And some would angrily and loudly question the staff.

The differences in how people react to a flight delay have much to do with their Emotional Style. Richard J. Davidson, a psychologist and neuroscientist, proposed Emotional Style model in this book, the first theory of human emotions based on modern neuroscience. Through rigorous experiments and data analysis, Davidson puts forward that Emotional Style comprises six dimensions, and each of them is the result of a particular pattern of brain activity. The six dimensions introduced in the book give us a clear picture of our Emotional Style, which plays a major role in every aspect of our lives, including our physical health. The good news is, Emotional Style is malleable, which means that we can shape it to work to our advantage.