Summary: I have been learning about various aspects of emotional life proactively for more than a year now, and I point you to a couple of great resources that I found helpful throughout that time. Jump to the end of the post for the links.
I have been studying some aspects of the science of emotions for over a year now, though in a rather unstructured fashion. It all started a few years back when I first realized that the greatest challenges I am facing in my life are part of my emotional life. I began to understand that if I want to be a happy, self-reliant and valuable individual, I simply have to learn how to regulate and use my own emotions, and how to deal with the emotions of other people. For the most part of my life I was oblivious to my own emotions: I was not aware of how I felt, why I felt that way, and how it affected my behavior. Moreover, I had no clue what other people felt, or what it meant, except for more obvious, extreme emotions like someone shouting at me. As you can imagine, being emotionally blind did not make me the happiest guy around.
At some point I decided I needed assistance in solving my day to day struggle. I reached out to a psychologist, and was lucky enough to meet a very good one. I slowly became aware of my emotions. I began to see how circumstances affect me, and how my own behavior affects others. It was a true revelation. I consider the successful completion of this learning process the most important event in my adult life. It has given me the freedom and the tool to actually start changing my life for the better.
Soon after my curiosity kicked in, and I began to read a lot on the topic. Based on written word and reflection on daily interactions with a few good friends, I started building skills and understanding that would help me control and use y emotions in the best possible way. I explored the topic of emotion from a variety of perspectives, mostly through popular science books, Internet websites and my own "practice" (talking to people, using a diary to have trusted experiential reports, therapy).
Here are some of the best learning sources on emotion that I found so far which I can heartily recommend if you find yourself a victim of your own emotions a bit too often:
- Daniel Goleman's books "Emotional Intelligence" and "Social Intelligence", are a great overview of the many aspects of emotional life (both within a person and between people), importance of emotion regulation, and description of physiological mechanisms that underlie emotion - along with pointers to research papers on pretty much every topic a dilettante might want to explore further
- "Drive" by Daniel Pink and "Nudge" by Richard Thaler deal with the science of motivation and decision making in certain important scenarios; I don't like the style of the books, but results and concepts they cover have consequences for many areas of our daily life
- "Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert is a wonderful story on how and why we are unable to predict what will make us happy and even misremember our emotional past
- mindfulness and meditation is an interesting area that has shown promise in training our emotional muscles; one good starting resource are recordings of Google talks, including a talk by Philippe Goldin titled "Cognitive Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation", and two talks by Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn" and "Mindfulness Stress Reduction and Healing"
- "Predictably Irrational" and "Upside of Irrationality" by Dan Ariely are stories of research showing that humans are not rational animals; heuristics and cognitive biases are closely related to behavioral economics research which is central topic of these books
- Paul Ekman's research into facial expressions and body language, with simple (but introductory) online training in recognizing emotions from brief facial expressions, and books describing these topics in detail: "Unmasking the Face", "Emotions Revealed" and "Telling Lies" (I only read the first one so far; it's tedious to read but thorough)
- in general, fields (or buzzwords :) that are of particular interest of mine now are: cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics and whatever else can be helpful in making better decisions, improving my communication, emotion regulation and other interpersonal skills
- support and feedback from close friends, family and some of my colleagues were, not surprisingly, very important; this was the playground, and the mirror
- interaction with a psychotherapist was definitely the most intense and transformative experience I have had so far; it involved a lot of effort on my own part, and spanned a long, tumultuous period of my personal and professional life, which invoked all kinds of emotions; this depends a lot on the therapist and personal preference - I was lucky to find someone whose style matched mine very well
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