num_pages: 256
description: An ambitious blueprint for the fulfilled lifeIn this fascinating book, pediatrician and neuropsychiatric researcher Ronald Dahl examines the biological and psychological origins of high-intensity positive feelings, and their influences on the development of powerful emotional and motivational tendencies. He sets forth the groundbreaking idea that passionate motivation, inspired goals, and intensely joyful experiences have shared roots in a particular learning process. Drawing upon Dahl's own clinical work and research, as well as that of others, "Emotional Learning explains how certain emotional tendencies are something that can be learned, much as one learns to ride a bicycle.Adolescence, with its unique interface between a changing biology and new depths of emotional experience, represents a critical period for this type of emotional learning.While many kinds of emotional learning occur during infancy and childhood, puberty represents a natural time for igniting passions, establishing goals, and acquiring new skills in navigating intense feelings. This creates opportunities as well as vulnerabilities in the lives of adolescents. Also explored are the deep emotional influences arising from feelings of larger purpose. Such feelings, which include spiritual longing and the desire for connection, may represent a neural architecture that facilitates a particular kind of emotional learning, which ultimately endows us with the capacity for passionate motivations that can last a lifetime.Ronald Dahl, M.D., is a Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He has served as a core-scientific member of The MacArthur Foundation ResearchNetwork on Development of Psychopathology, and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Research Network on the Etiology of Nicotine Dependence, and currently directs a program of research funded by the National Institute of Mental Health on emotion regulation and adolescent brain development.
language: English
title: Emotional Learning : The Crucial Role of the Adolescent Brain in Developing Lifelong Motivation, Passion, and Drive
titlecomplete: Emotional Learning : The Crucial Role of the Adolescent Brain in Developing Lifelong Motivation, Passion, and Drive
ratings_count: 7
publisher: McGraw-Hill