Jenna Goudreau, Forbes Staff I write about business and women's
leadership. Ever wondered why some people are constantly cheery
and others shadowed by gloom? Why some have trouble focusing,
are good with people or have strong emotional reactions to
seemingly minor occurrences? Pioneering neuroscientist and
psychology professor Richard Davidson, Ph.D., says there’s a
reason we are who we are. Our emotions and thoughts do not
happen to us, he argues. Rather, they are routine, predictable
and rooted in the structure of our brains. “Other schemes of
personality were invented without any knowledge of the brain,”
says Davidson, who compiled his 30 years of research findings
into new book The Emotional Life of Your Brain. “This is the
first neuroscientific conception of the emotional and social
variations among people, based on a modern diagnosis of the
brain.” Decades of lab work resulted in a hybrid discipline
called “affective neuroscience,” or the study of brain
mechanisms that underpin our emotions. Davidson sa