Where Do Emotions Come From?
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“We don’t actually detect things in the world,” says neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Barrett. “We infer what we expect to see.” Barrett is the author of How Emotions are Made, a book that overturns a lot of what we thought we knew about the mind and brain. For one, we aren’t as good at reading other people as we think, says Barrett. Emotions don’t live in distinct parts of the brain. They aren’t universally expressed. When it comes to expressing emotion, Barrett says, variability is the norm. She shows us how we construct emotion in the moment and how we make sense of our body’s sensations. And: She teaches us how to master a significant system of regulation that she calls “the body budget.”
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