Kenneth L. Davis

The main ideas of this book were first formulated by Jaak Panksepp, the psychobiologist and neuroscientist who became a wee bit famous outside the field for his research about laughter in non-human animals, especially laughing rats. He died before it was finished, and this volume could be considered his crowning achievement. The Emotional Foundations of Personality: A Neurobiological and Evolutionary Approach is hard to review, as I’m not really the target audience.

The book is definitely not without merit, but for the general reader there are some problems. For starters, let me try to break those down.

Afterwards I’ll highlight what this reader found to be the interesting take-aways. That list should be of interest to those readers of this blog who don’t care for criticism of this book, but do care about their emotions and their brain.

1) I was generally underwhelmed. “Is this it?” seems to be an adequate summary of my basic reaction. This stems from the fact that the basic premise of this book seems so obvious. Of course our emotions are rooted in biology. Of course we share our basic emotions with other mammals. Of course these things evolved. But apparently these things aren’t considered as basic facts among a lot of psychological & personality scientists – that fact was new for me, and maybe one of the most interesting things I’ll take away from reading this. As this is first and foremost a book written for that academic community, it makes that for me a big part of the book read as a defense of the obvious. Then again, common sense is not science, and what this book does extremely well is make these insights irrefutable, drawing on lots of research papers and actual experiments.

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Read the full review on Weighing A Pig

(4 stars for the science, 2 stars for the reading experience)… (more)