Sensing that there is more: Barbara Fredrickson was the first to note this bias in the science of emotion, its focus on fight-or-flight states like anger, disgust, or fear, to the neglect of the positive emotions. Fredrickson, Barbara L. “The Value of Positive Emotions.”
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“the emotional brain”: LeDoux, Joseph E.
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the secrets of love: Gottman, John M.
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moral issues of our times: Haidt, Jonathan.
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cultivating our “emotional intelligence”: Mayer, John D., and Peter Salovey. “The Intelligence of Emotional Intelligence.”
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“an age of emotion”: Dukes, Daniel, et al. “The Rise of Affectivism.”
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survival-of-the-selfish-genes view: In the late twentieth century, evolutionary thinking and the science of emotion were shaped by Richard Dawkins’s selfish gene hypothesis, and its privileging of the gene as the unit of analysis and assumptions that humans have evolved competitive, self-serving traits that led to the reproduction of those selfish genes. This thinking produced a self-preservation bias in my field: emotions are about individual survival. In the twenty-first century, evolutionary thought shifted to the group and culture as the units of analysis. Discoveries of the cooperative tendencies of young children; our universal inclination to share; our instinct to attach, belong, and be tribal; and the neurophysiology of empathy, contagion, mirroring, connection, compassion, and exploration were revealing a new lens upon human nature: we are a hypersocial species who accomplished almost all survival-related tasks, from the raising of vulnerable offspring to the provision of food, in collaborative, often altruistic groups. Groups that collaborate well and build a sense of shared identity, this reasoning would advance, are more likely to prevail and survive. And culture—the system of beliefs and practices that unite individuals into community—is an ever-evolving repository of shared knowledge and experience, a collective mind that enables us to adapt together to the challenges and opportunities in our natural and social environments.
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articulate a definition of awe: Keltner, Dacher, and Jonathan Haidt. “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Aesthetic, and Spiritual Emotion.”
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We read treatments: Kaufman, Scott B.
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mobs whipped up by demagogues: Weber, Max.
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