《The Emotional Life of Your Brain》

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People is characterized by Emotional style, which is a consistent way of responding to the experience of our lives. Emotional style comprises six dimensions.

• Resilience: how slowly or quickly you recover from adversity.
• Outlook: how long you are able to sustain positive emotion.
• Social Intuition: how adept you are at picking up social signals from the people around you.
• Self-Awareness: how well you perceive bodily feelings that reflect emotions.
• Sensitivity to Context: how good you are at regulating your emotional responses to take into account the context you find yourself in.
• Attention: how sharp and clear your focus is.

The emotional style is the result of brain circuity that is laid down by genes and our experience. It can also be altered by serendipitous experience as well as by conscious, intentional mental training.

Although our temperament and emotional style come from genetic inheritance and environment nurturance, the actual gene can be turned on or off depending on the experience we have. In another word, genes load the gun, but only environment can put the trigger.

Emotional style influences health. Communication between the mind and body is bidirectional. Altering the emotional style can be beneficial to physiological system and thus overall health. Changes in the patterns of movements can affect how our mind possesses emotional information, e.g. keeping smiling can inhibit negative emotions.

The brain is plastic. It can change as a result of two distinct input: the experiences we have in the world and purely mental activity, ranging from meditation to cognitive-behavior therapy, with the result that activity in specific circuits can increase or decrease.