Affective Realism: How Your Body Feels Affects Your Decisions And Actions
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I’m currently reading a fascinating book by psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. As a big fan of psychology and neuroscience, I’ve taken quite a few classes and courses in those subjects, and this book has turned what I know about how the brain works on its head! There’s been a few mind blowing and jaw-dropping realizations in Dr. Barrett’s book. If you’re interested in the subject of how the brain works and how it helps make us who we are — our human nature — I highly recommend this book!
According to a definition from Wikipedia, affect (in psychology that is) refers to “the underlying experience of feeling, emotion or mood”. You may have heard people who are emotionless — like say, for example, serial killers who have no emotional reaction to what they’ve done — as having a ‘flat affect’.
And according to Dr Barrett, there’s something called Affective Realism — where basically how we feel on the inside affects what (or how) we perceive our reality. Put more simply, our emotions affect our reality. It literally influences and changes what we…
