How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

Lisa Feldman Barrett | Mariner Books | 2017

Barrett overturns the widely held belief that emotions are housed in different brain regions and are universally expressed and recognized. Her core finding, that emotions aren’t hardwired or universally felt, but are constructed by the brain based on personal history and context, has direct implications for how talent leaders should think about personality and behavioral data. If emotional and behavioral responses are more individualized and contextualized than we’ve assumed, then tools that sort people into fixed categories are capturing even less than we thought. Barrett’s work reinforces the case for continuous, trait-based data over the false precision of typologies.

Rigorous, accessible, and paradigm-shifting. This is the kind of science that belongs in every talent leader’s reading rotation.