Emotional Intelligence. It’s everywhere. They won’t shut up about it. And yet nobody seems to be able to explain what it really means or how you develop it.

Face it: you don’t even know what an emotion is. Most people would say an emotion is a feeling. And what’s a feeling? Umm… an emotion? Yeah, nice work there, Captain Circular.

And it turns out the latest research shows that the little we know about emotions is actually all wrong. And I mean really wrong.

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, with appointments at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Her new book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain turns everything you know about the feels upside down.

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