Emotion Understand how emotions are generated and learn to control your emotions.

The author of Emotion is Lisa Federman Barrett, a world-famous neurologist and psychologist. She devoted herself to the open research in the field of emotion and emotion all the year round, and creatively put forward the theory of constructing emotion, which is different from the traditional emotion theory.

This book is the representative work of Professor Barrett's emotional theory. She verifies the process of our emotions through meticulous experimental science, not only telling readers what emotions are and how they are generated, but also spying on the secrets of brain operation through the medium of emotions, thus helping us to control emotions better.

Next, I will take you to know "emotions" from a brand-new perspective from two aspects: how emotions are generated and how we control them.

About emotions, we generally have three kinds of cognition:

But in Professor Barrett's view, the above three understandings are incorrect.

First, when we judge a person's mood, we will make a comprehensive judgment not only according to facial expressions or body movements, but also according to the other person's environment.

This conclusion comes from an experiment. In the experiment, the researchers combined a frowning and angry facial expression with a photo of a corpse wearing dirty diapers through technical means. Almost all the experimenters who saw this photo subconsciously combined the information provided by the whole photo, such as dirty diapers, and made a comprehensive judgment that this frowning expression was disgust rather than anger.

Second, the human brain will construct an emotional experience in many ways, instead of controlling a certain emotion in a specific area.

This conclusion comes from the researcher's in-depth study of a woman named "SM". SM suffers from a genetic disease, which caused her amygdala to disappear completely during adolescence. Experiments show that she can't experience and recognize the emotions of fear. It is concluded that the amygdala is the center of fear in the brain.

However, in later experiments, the researchers found that SM can recognize fear from other people's body posture, and can also hear fear from her voice. Even when she is facing suffocation, she will feel fear.

This also proves that there is a clear and concrete connection between amygdala and fear, but fear is not necessarily fixed in a certain area of the brain, but is created by the brain in many ways.

Third, physiological changes and emotions are not one-to-one correspondence. Whether the heart beats faster or the palms sweat, there is no emotional meaning. Connecting them is our brain, which interprets the changes in the body as various emotions.

If the traditional emotion cognition is wrong, how does emotion come into being?

Professor Barrett put forward his own core viewpoint-"Emotion Construction Theory", that is, emotions are not stimulated by external stimuli, but are constructed by ourselves.

In her view, the human brain is not only a machine that responds mechanically to external stimuli, but also has the ability to predict. This prediction is also the core ability of the human brain, which means that our brain is evaluating and predicting what we are doing all the time, processing the emotional elements input by the senses and matching them with our previous experiences, which means that when the input sensory information is consistent with the brain's prediction, it will output corresponding emotional responses.

If you drive to the wild alone on a weekend afternoon, but unfortunately you meet a poisonous rattlesnake. Past experience tells you that if you are bitten by it, you may not live for half an hour, so your brain will give you an instruction to run. And this "running" signal, the brain will spread to all areas of the body in an instant, so your heart will speed up the flow of blood by dilating blood vessels, thus delivering more glucose to muscles, and even changing your blood pressure and making your heart rate faster, which is to produce "inner feelings".

And this series of feelings will naturally match the concepts in your mind. According to past experience, the emotion of "fear" refers to the feeling of rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, extreme mental tension and special discomfort. The feeling at this time completely corresponds to the concept of "fear" in your mind, so the mood of fear was born.

Therefore, the theory of emotional construction holds that emotions come from three key elements-the predictive ability of the brain, the feelings we experience and the concepts of different emotions in the brain. We will predict what is happening, adjust our own system, and produce feelings about this matter. When this prediction and feeling match the existing emotional concept in our minds, we will construct specific emotions.

Knowing how emotions are generated, let's take a look at how to use these emotions to build a theory to control our emotions.

Professor Barrett made two suggestions.

First, give our feelings a more positive meaning.

Our body is moving all the time, such as the heart is beating constantly, and the feeling produced by this inner movement is called inner feeling. For example, before giving a speech on stage, our hearts will beat faster and our palms will sweat. This is how we feel inside. If we give meaning to this inner feeling, it will become an emotion.

For example, you are about to face an important interview. Before you start, your heart is beating violently, your whole body is unconsciously nervous, and your palms are sweating. If you give this series of feelings such meanings as "fear" and "nervousness", then your whole interview will be very bad.

How should it be improved?

In fact, you can tell yourself that this series of feelings is because you are excited about the upcoming interview, because you have been waiting for this opportunity for a long time, or tell yourself that this series of feelings is because you didn't have a good rest last night, not because you are afraid of this interview. So you won't be influenced by emotions.

Second, we should learn to increase emotional granularity and master more detailed emotional experience ability.

Among them, emotional granularity refers to the meticulous degree of our division of certain emotions. For example, some people divide emotions into happiness, sadness and anger. While others divide happiness into happiness, satisfaction, excitement and relaxation. So we can say that the latter has more granularity than the former.

The richness of emotional granularity can effectively help us control our emotions. For example, if a thing makes everyone who meets it feel angry, people with large emotional granularity are easily controlled by angry emotions and do radical things, while people with small emotional granularity and richer emotions can effectively identify whether this anger is unbearable or just anger caused by disappointment.

This is also the reason why children's emotions are more easily excited. Because in the concept of children, the granularity of emotions is very large, so once something happens, it will naturally match more extreme emotions-happiness, anger and so on. , and respond accordingly.

At this time, if parents can effectively help their children describe their emotions and increase the granularity of emotions, for example, tell their children that besides being angry, there is also the concept of "a little angry", so that children will distinguish their emotions at this time next time, whether they are angry or a little angry, as long as the person who makes them angry can apologize, he will not be angry again.

For adults, the best way to better control emotions is to learn more new words related to emotions and use existing words accurately, so that the brain can adjust the body's coping state more accurately when establishing emotions after prediction. And when encountering something, establish a more positive emotional concept, instead of constantly matching feelings with negative emotional concepts in the brain.

Well, after reading this, we know the content of this book. Let me summarize it for you.