Passion and Ease
To understand what matters to us and what does not, we need to understand some pretty basic things about our emotional life. Most of our...
Disembodied Communication
We live in a social world in which we are mimetically engulfed, constantly sharing and imitating the behavior and facial expressions of...
Sophomoric Emotion
I have long found it odd that most college curricula in psychology do not include a course on emotion, as the research on emotion has...
Supernatural Bones
Glendower: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” Hotspur: “Why, so can I, or so can anyone; But will they come when you do call...
You're Breaking Up
We use the phrase “you’re breaking up” too often these days to simply mean (or occasionally just pretend) that an electronic signal...
Shame On You
Shame and pride are second order emotions. They are really emotions that are about other emotions. Shame is an inborn script that...
History of Love II: Religion and Eros
"Love cannot be disembodied even in its most sanctified forms, nor is it without sanctity even in its most fleshly." Thomas Mann, The...
History of Love I: Myths of Love
One of my favorite Greek myths is that of Eros and Psyche. Eros was a god, the son of Aphrodite. He is a handsome young man, not the...
Full Frontal
I recently went dancing with my wife at an upstairs ballroom, and was pleased to discover that “club music,” what I once called...
Engage Brain
We do need to talk some more about the prefrontal cortex, and the neuropsychology of Plato’s charioteer, who must hold the reins and...