Richard J. Davidson – författare

For anyone who is overwhelmed, stressed, or lonely in today’s world, or who simply senses they have an untapped potential to lead a more fulfilling life, here are ways to flourish.The human species is experiencing a massive mental health crisis. Depression is now the leading cause of morbidity globally. Loneliness is more dangerous to our health than smoking 15 cigarettes per day. Suicide rates in different groups in some parts of the world are skyrocketing and cut across social class and income. Distractibility and impairments of concentration are at an all-time high, and teens are spending more time on social media than they do sleeping.Now, based on decades of neuroscientific research, Dr Richard J. Davidson, a pioneering neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author, and Dr Cortland Dahl, one of the world’s foremost experts on the science and practice of meditation, share their groundbreaking scientific model — the Healthy Minds Framework — that highlights the four core skills of human flourishing to counteract such problems.Each skill — awareness, insight, connection, and purpose — translates into practices that all of us can do in simple ways, every day, with enormous positive results. When we cultivate these skills, we can navigate life’s ups and downs with far more resilience and calmness, on a path to a life that feels balanced, rich, and rewarding.

Building on the legacy of the groundbreaking first edition, the Editors of this unique volume have selected more than 100 leading emotion researchers from around the world and asked them to address 14 fundamental questions about the nature and origins of emotion.For example: What is an emotion? How are emotions organized in the brain? How do emotion and cognition interact? How are emotions embodied in the social world? How and why are emotions communicated? How are emotions physically embodied? What develops in emotional development?Each chapter addresses one of these questions, with often divergent answers from the experts represented here: Adam Anderson, Lauren Atlas, Yair Bar-Haim, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Kent Berridge, Jennifer Urbano Blackford, Caroline Blanchard, Margaret Bradley, Ralph Adolphs, Joshua Carlson, Laura Carstensen, Luke Chang, Joan Chiao, Gerald Clore, Roshan Cools, Eveline Crone, Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio, Richard Davidson, Mauricio Delgado, Nazanin Derakshan, Nancy Eisenberg, Naomi Eisenberger, Paul Ekman, Phoebe Ellsworth, Andrew Fox, Nathan Fox, Barbara Fredrickson, Jonathan Freeman, Karl Friston, Matthias Gamer, Beatrice de Gelder, Paul Glimcher, Hill Goldsmith, Todd Hare, Lasana Harris, Catherine Hartley, Aaron Heller, Ursula Hess, Quentin Huys, Tom Johnstone, Jerome Kagan, Dacher Keltner, Brian Knutson, Peter Lang, Regina Lapate, Edward Lemay, Robert Levenson, Wen Li, Matthew Lieberman, Bruce McEwen, Katie McLaughlin, Andrew Meltzoff, Mohammed Milad, Elisabeth Murray, Kristin Naragon-Gainey, Charles Nelson, Paula Niedenthal, Hadas Okon-Singer, Jaak Panksepp, Carolyn Parkinson, Luiz Pessoa, Rosalind Picard, Carien van Reekum, Edmund Rolls, Melissa Rosenkranz, Carol Ryff, Tim Salomons, Anil Seth, Alexander Shackman, Rebecca Shiner, Tania Singer, Peter Sokol-Hessner, Leah Somerville, Daniel Tranel, Kay Tye, Tor Wager, Leanne Williams, Rachel Yehuda, and David Zald.At the end of each chapter, the Editors--Andrew Fox, Regina Lapate, Alexander Shackman, and Richard Davidson--highlight key areas of agreement and disagreement.In the final chapter--The Nature of Emotion: A Research Agenda for the 21st Century--the Editors outline their own perspective on the most important challenges facing the field today and the most fruitful avenues for future research.Not a textbook offering a single viewpoint, The Nature of Emotion reveals the central issues in emotion research and theory in the words of many of the leading scientists working in the field today, from senior researchers to rising stars, providing a unique and highly accessible guide for students, researchers, and clinicians.

This book examines how Western behavioral science--which has generally focused on negative aspects of human nature--holds up to cross-cultural scrutiny, in particular the Tibetan Buddhist celebration of the human potential for altruism, empathy, and compassion. Resulting from a meeting between the Dalai Lama, leading Western scholars, and a group of Tibetan monks, this volume includes excerpts from these extraordinary dialogues as well as engaging essays exploring points of difference and overlap between the two perspectives.

This unique volume focuses on the relationship between basic research in emotion and emotional dysfunction in depression and anxiety. Each chapter is authored by a highly regarded scientist who looks at both psychological and biological implications of research relevant to psychiatrists and psychologists. And following each chapter is engaging commentary that raises questions, illuminates connections with other bodies of work, and provides points of integration across different research traditions. Topics range from stress, cognitive functioning, and personality to affective style and behavioral inhibition, and the book as a whole has significant implications for understanding and treating anxiety disorders.

The Handbook of Affective Sciences is a comprehensive road map to the burgeoning area of affective sciences, which now spans several disciplines. Helping to delineate this emerging field, this volume brings together, for the first time, the various strands of inquiry and latest research in the scientific study of emotion and related affective phenomena. In recent years, scientists have made considerable advances in understanding how brain processes shape emotions and are changed by human emotion. There have also been major methodological advances in objectively measuring different parameters of emotion, ranging from expressive behavior to physiology to subjective experience using experience sampling. Drawing on a wide range of research and methods of inquiry-neuroimaging techniques, neuropsychological assessment, clinical research, and laboratory paradigms designed to assess the cognitive and social constituents of emotion-scientists are beginning to understand the many factors that shape emotion and the vast range of functions that are affected by emotion. As a result, researchers are gaining insight into such compelling questions as how people experience life emotionally, why people respond so differently to the same experiences, what the face can tell us about internal states, how emotion in significant social relationships influence health, and whether there are basic emotions common to all humans. This handbook brings together the most eminent scholars in the area of affective science, who lay out, in fifty-nine original chapters, the latest research and theorise in the field. The book is divided into ten sections: Neuroscience; Autonomic Psychophysiology; Genetics and Development; Expression of Emotion; Cognitive Components of Emotion; Personality; Emotion and Social Processes; Evolutionary and Cultural Perspective on Affect; Emotion and Psychopathology; and Emotion and Health. This major new volume will be an invaluable resource for researchers that will define affective sciences for the next decade.

In the Preface to the third volume, we described the evolution of this Series and the changes that have taken place in the field since the first volume appeared. The contents of the current volume continue the com­ mitment to a broadly based perspective on research related to con­ sciousness and self-regulation which was embodied in the previous three volumes. Chapters are included which consider the role of con­ sciousness in cognitive theory and clinical phenomena. Several of the contributions to this volume are concerned with the nature of self-reg­ ulation and the role of conscious processing in the mediation of self­ regulated behavior. Most of the authors adopt a psychobiological ap­ proach to their subject matter. Our selection of contributors with a bias toward this approach reflects our own views that the psychobiological approach is a very fruitful one and that the "architecture" of the nervous system places important constraints on the types of theories that are possible in this emerging area. While the subject matter of the chapters in this volume is quite diverse, the contributions are united by their emphasis on the impor­ tance of consciousness and/or self-regulation in the understanding of behavior and experience. We have selected what we believe is repre­ sentative of the best theory and research in the diverse areas which bear on the theme of this series, maintaining a balance between basic and clinical research.