Why are some people so quick to recover from a setback while others wallow in despair? Why are some people so highly attuned to others that they seem psychic, while other people put both feet in it over and over again? Why are some people always up and others always down?

In this hotly anticipated book, award-winning, pioneering neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson answers these questions by offering an entirely new model of our emotions - their origins, their power, and their malleability.

Davidson has discovered that each of us is composed of six basic “Emotional Styles”: Resilience, Outlook, Social Intuition, Self-Awareness, Sensitivity to Context, and Attention. Our own personal emotional fingerprint results from where on the continuum of each style we fall. He explains the patterns of brain activity that underlie each style in order to give us a new model of the emotional brain, one that will even go so far as to affect the way we treat conditions like autism and depression.

And, finally, he provides strategies we can use to determine our own Emotional Style and to change our own brains and emotions - if that is what we want to do. Written with best-selling author Sharon Begley, this original and exciting book gives us a new and useful way to look at ourselves, develop a sense of well-being, and live more meaningful lives.