The Neuroscience of Emotion: A New Synthesis

This is an excellent summary and guidebook. It is written largely for professional research psychologists, and is concerned largely with questions, definitions, and methods of research. Nonspecialist readers might have to search, but if they do they will find a great deal of excellent, up-to-date, judicious commentary on the biology and neuropsychology of fear and other emotions widespread in the animal world. The authors take an evolutionary perspective: fear and at least some other emotions (aggression/anger, enjoyment...) are very widespread among animals, have evolved, work via evolved mechanisms and systems in the brain, and can be studied in animals by a combination of watching them and very sophisticated tracking of brain responses (down to individual neurons). The authors are cautious, asking constantly how much is shared by humans and animals. Are there human emotions? Shame, embarrassment, and awe might be (p. 290), or might not. Animals can't talk, so we are not sure. This point leads to one limit of the book: the authors are not animal behavior experts, so they don't know as much as some about how to read animal communication. Nonhumans don't have language, but the "higher" ones do have highly specialized, refined communication systems that humans can often read. I am thus aware that dogs certainly have fear and rage, certainly have affection and something like human love but much simpler, and may have something like guilt--however much some of them may cheat on their conscience when not being observed. But awe? I have no idea. It would seem that things like sheer panic are universal among animals with brains--all have to be able to escape. Love and anger involve more nuancing, and are more different among different species. Guilt and awe require a lot of nuancing. Embarrassment may be a purely learned human thing. As the authors say, only more research will tell. It certainly will involve admitting that animals have emotional responses, and the higher ones are conscious of them, in the sense of being thoroughly aware of what they are feeling and how to communicate it and what to communicate about it. (Watch any group of dogs or monkeys or other smartl animals deciding whether to play, fight, run, or forage.) One question for the authors: what do emotions in dreams have to tell us? At night I am routinely terrified, or in love, or joyous, or disturbed, or anxious, all without showing the world any trace of brain activity at all except for telltale eyelid flickering.

This books systematically lays out the state of the art in its field, with care and clarity. Very useful in that regard--if not entirely exciting. The prose is workmanly but not graceful or engaging. You'll need to be motivated by the subject to stay with it.The Kindle edition is awful--more like a PDF than an ebook. You cannot change the font size, which means that in a 10-inch Kindle in horizontal position you basically read the equivalent of a large-print book. Since the font is large, you can't get a full page on the screen, so you have to scroll down to finish the page before swiping to the next page. You can get the whole page in vertical position, but I never read that way. On the phone app, the book is illegible. When you highlight a passage, you cannot share it to email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I really wish I had not bought the Kindle version.

This book is well-written and covers very interesting ground. It does not present a linear “story” from beginning to end, but that is understandable because the authors wish to cover a very broad array of issues and studies that fall within the study of emotion, including but not limited to the neuroscience of emotion. For me, the primary strength of this book is that it tries to provide conceptual and philosophical context for the neuroscientific study of emotions.But there are several important weaknesses. Although the authors declare from the beginning that it is important to separate out objective “emotion states” from subjective experience such as the conscious experience of emotion, they fail to do so. Further, although they insist in the beginning of the book that they will focus only on the former, the specter of subjective experience continues to rear it’s head throughout the book. In my view, including subjective experience in the study of emotion, even a neuroscientific study, is understandable, perhaps necessary. What I am criticizing is the authors’ insistence that we should not, and that they do not, despite the fact that they do repeatedly throughout the book.But there is an even more serious self-contradiction to this book. The authors argue throughout, based both on scientific evidence as well as their own intuitions, that non-human animals not only have emotion states, but that they also have subjective feelings. This is not the contradiction. The contradiction is that, despite making this claim, the authors continue to draw an “ethical” line between human and non-human animals in order to justify why scientists conduct invasive research on the latter but not the former. In the same book that they present compelling evidence that animals feel and have the capacity to suffer, just as humans do, they argue for the use of invasive research methods that damage animals’ bodies and nervous systems, and the use of experimental paradigms that invoke intense emotional states of panic and terror in these individuals. They apparently wish to keep their career (as scientists) and their ethics separate.The final self-contradiction I want to describe is less serious, but indicative of the important flaws in this book. Within the same chapter, the authors state “Emotions are fundamentally biological phenomena,” and then go on to argue that it will be possible to create robots with emotions. Do they really not see this and the other self-contradictions throughout this book?

In the last twenty years great strides have been made in the biological, psychological and neurological understanding of the brain and emotions, but these insights only move us away from a philosophical explanation to an awareness of the profound complexity of the source of emotions. This books provides a survey of the state of biology, psychology and neurology and suggest approach that will help to unite approaches in these three distinctly different fields. There is a need for better definitions as well as an appreciation of very diverse theory. A New Synthesis is about finding a common path for future enquirer.

Honest about the weaknesses as well as strenths of biological reductionism in study of emotion

This is a complex topic and Georgy Buszaki attempts, successfully for this reviewer, to reverse the Outside-In explanations of Neuroscience, to the Inside-Outside view of how the brain works. There is complex writing, but if you stay with it, without skipping a page or a diagram, you’ll be well-rewarded...the author turns to these themes again and again in subsequent chapters.I like the author’s sincerity, his authenticity, the decades of research he and colleagues have put in. As a layman, I read through each word, sometimes twice. The two books in the image are ones that I have recently read. Buszaki is on the right.

Adolphs und Anderson versuchen sowohl aktuelle Erkenntnisse zusammenzufügen als auch Perspektiven aufzuzeigen oder dies nicht zu tun, wenn es zu spekulativ ist. Wer sich aus Sicht der Neurowissenschaft mit Emotionen befasst und nicht direkt vom Fach ist, erhält mit dem Buch einen interessanten Überblick.

Synthèse de deux neuro scientifiques sur les émotions. Plebiscite pour une approche purement scientifique. Passionnant