Valuable read, if not a bit long winded in places. I appreciated the expansion on the emotional styles that make us unique and how the brain processes and interprets emotion. Much of the text is dedicated to the research and history of studying emotion and the brain, and also expounding upon the authors' experiences in researching this multidimensional topic. But I'll admit there were times the narrative lost my attention because it was so bogged down in the actual portrayal of these experiences...

This is not "light" reading, but still truly fascinating. If you don't mind reading about the clinical and scientific aspects of how the brain functions and why we do what we do, this is a worthwhile read.Davidson has narrowed down peoples' emotional styles to 6 dimensions:-Resilience (how slowly or quickly you recover from adversity)-Outlook (how long you're able to sustain positive emotion)-Social Intuition (how adept you are at picking up social signals from people around you)-Self-Awareness

You can't go wrong with neuroscience, especially since you've been practicing it for many, many years. This book is both a friendly reminder about how patterns can shape behaviors (good and bad) and how we digest emotions to improve our lives. "I would go so far as to assert that of all the forms of human behavior and psychological states, the most powerful influence on our physical health is our emotional life."Without learning the language of emotions and expressing it, we live empty lives, my...

I first heard of Dr. Richard Davidson’s work in the field of neuroscience a couple of months ago in an unlikely setting: the annual conference of the National Art Education Association in New York. Regular readers might remember my mention of the Compassion Project in Appleton, Wisconsin, which challenged teachers and students at all levels to give some thought to the nature of compassion, to some discussion, and then to join in a collaborative art project. The results, an amazing 10,000 tiny pa...

I will say from the outset that this book was better than I thought it was going to be. That said, I didn’t have very high hopes to start. OK, that’s a bit unfair. "The Emotional Life of Your Brain" (TELoYB) is a decent read and does introduce some useful ideas I had not heard before. But, at the end of the day I didn’t feel all that smarter for reading it. TELoYB is one part professional autobiography, two parts popular psychology and one part self-help.The professional autobiography parts foll...

This book could be retitled: “MY CAREER AS A GREAT PSYCHOLOGIST.” The book gets a lot of rave reviews, so I was expecting a lot. But it didn’t really deliver. It is less about a new unifying psychological concept (as the author would have us believe), and more of a self-congratulatory review of his career. But there was a sprinkling of worthwhile material. I was intrigued by Cognitive Behavior Therapy: regarding depressive thoughts as simple electrical events in the brain. But this kind of open

If you've never read anything about the study of emotions/personality I am sure this books is a revelation. However, as someone who has read quite a bit about emotions, this book is just yet another author/researcher trotting out his "new" theory that looks pretty much like all the rest. Nothing new here. Another case of the emperor having no clothes.

Despite the author ranking himself as an 8/10 in both "Self-Awareness" and "Sensitivity to Context", this book comprises little more than absurdly exaggerated statements about the hurdles the author faced and his own contributions to the field. To hear him describe it, before he bravely came along and set them straight, all psychologists thought the brain was just a pile of mushy uselessness hanging out in the skull, and anyone who studied the brain literally did not believe in emotion. Anyone w...

I bought this book because I find anything about neuroscience pretty interesting, and the emotional aspect doesn't seem to have been investigated in any rigorous way until recently. This book promises to satisfy that, and, to a large extent, I think it does.I found myself constantly struggling with a sort of duality in this book. At some points I found the observations to be extremely obvious, such as the idea that our emotional styles aren't simply genetic, but a product of our environment and

If you're looking for...- a long-winded autobiography, written by a smug and slightly bitter hipster-neuroscientist- a scale to gauge your 'emotional style', invented by said hipster-neuroscientist, that seems real simplistic- excessively generalized concepts and definitions of emotion- a lack of nuance when discussing how a person's global psychology creates an individual mind- unnecessary rambling about going to meet the Dalai Lama- vague descriptions of brain areas activated when aspects of y...

I'm not much for self help mind over matter books, but this one seems to have a lot of research to back up what it says. I am bothered by the author's self congratulatory style.

This book is a snoooozefest. Unfortunately I had to read it for school, and thank god it’s over.

For someone who proclaims himself to be a longtime friend of the Dalai Lama, you'd think Davidson might have more modesty. But ultimately, his huge ego destroys this book, partly because he insists on giving us his own detailed personal story (which is not all that interesting), but even more so because the more substantive part of this book (recent neuroscience about the brain and its role in emotions) is seriously skewed to Davidson's own research while ignoring the work of other scientists wh...

The Emotional Brain: Character, Personality, and TemperamentThose of us committed to personal growth will find much that is rewarding in The Emotional Life of Your Brain. Davidson draws on an array of scientific experiments and studies to develop a set of ideas that can add to our understanding of how the “emotional brain” works, how its unique patterns affect the way we think, feel, and live, and how we can change them. Three of these ideas are worth highlighting here. The first is that contrar...

I have learned a lot about the brain, especially the impact of emotions on the brain. It's interesting to know the scientific analysis of meditation and its effect on the brain. The six emotional styles are helpful to know my usual emotional response to the good and the bad.

This book is absolutely fascinating. Author Davidson is the founder of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at UW-Madison. He's gotten a lot of attention with his work doing brain scans on Tibetan monks while they meditate. This book is an introduction to the work he's been doing. He has come up with six different categorizations of types of mental/emotional styles that operate something like the Myers-Briggs type indicator. Each category places you on a spectrum between two extremes, whic...

A unique look at the brain through the work of neuro-psycholgical researcher Richard Davidson, linking our emotions to significant circuits and activities in our brain. For those interested in the intricacies of the brain chemistry and circuitry this is the book for you. Davidson is a very good writer and explains complex scientific phenomena in laypersons' terms. Sometimes the detail has gotten a bit overwhelming to me and I skipped over that to the "so what does this mean" section. It has been...

We are so fortunate to have Richard Davidson here at the University of Wisconsin, so those of us that know him can testify that his findings that regular meditation can change your brain patterns and make you calm and cheerful despite a busy life hold particularly true in his example. The other benefits of mindfulness training, as well as other approaches to altering our brain's responses to stimulus, are fascinating -- and are clearly described in this book, which also describes recent discover...

This took me so long to read (considering it was only 252 pages) that it affected my opinion of the book as a whole. Though the subject was genuinely interesting, by the time I got to page 200, I wanted to be done with it so much that I started skimming. I was a psychology major, so I really enjoyed reading about Dr. Davidson's various research studies, as well as his amazing and illustrious career. For people who aren't very interested in psychology, though? I would think they'd have a difficul...

MY God this book was so amazingly interesting! It provided such insight into the way the mind works and how the patterns in our brain help shape us into the people we are. This took me quite a while to read because it is a heavy book; it requires a lot of focus (at least for me it did) and I found I had to really sit and think about what I was reading. It was like a step down from reading a textbook. There were plenty of facts and spatterings of humour. It was good for me to read as I am studyin...