I. When I started this blog, I said I wanted to begin with a focus on personality disorders and emotions. I have somewhat made good on the first promise, but not the second. In this post, I want to begin to explore some of my own perplexities about emotions. I am going to start with Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017). Barrett is a psychologist and neuroscientist whose work I first encountered through mental health Twitter, back when academic Twitter was still a thing. She is very good at popularizing her views, and I should note right away that she is very clear, if you watch her videos or listen to her podcasts, that How Emotions Are Made is a popularization—and thus at times a drastic simplification—of the views that she and her lab have worked out in hundreds of academic papers. My impression of Barrett is that she revels in being a bit of a bête noire, that she likes to play the role of depriving us of t...