Briefly Noted

How Emotions Are Made, by Lisa Feldman Barrett (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Drawing on neuroscience and experimental psychology to overturn the assumption that emotions are innate and universal, this book describes them as “goal-based concepts” designed to help us categorize experience. Emotions, Barrett writes, are learned and shaped by culture, so “variation is the norm”: “Russian has two distinct concepts for what Americans call ‘Anger.’ German has three distinct ‘Angers’ and Mandarin has five.” Upbringing has the biggest influence, but we can all reshape our mental makeup and learn new concepts. The latter part of the book considers how doing so can affect our health, the law, and our relationship to the natural world. As Barrett frequently repeats, “You are an architect of your experience.”