 Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has a fascinating book, How Emotions Are Made, The Secret Life of the Brain. This book turns what you might know about how the brain works on its head, and there's been a few mind-blowing and jaw-dropping realizations of how your brain works and how it helps make us who we are, our human nature. In this video, we'll be discussing something that Dr. Barrett calls effective realism. What is effective realism? Effective realism is basically how what we feel on the inside affects what or how we perceive our reality. It literally influences and changes what we think we see. And it also has an effect, not affect, on our decision-making, which can impact our own lives and those of others, which is kind of scary when you think about it. In her book, one of the examples she talks about was judges in Israel making decisions in court before lunch when they're hungry. Their internal feeling of being hungry actually affected their sentencing of defendants and not in a positive way. But after they'd had their lunch, then they were back to pardoning people as frequently as before. In a definition from Wikipedia, affect in psychology refers to the underlying experience of feeling, emotion, or mood. You may have heard people who are emotionless, like say for example some serial killers who have no emotional reaction to what they've done as having a flat effect. Effective realism affects how we see the world. According to an article by Anthony Cosner about how Barrett talks about effective realism, he writes that our feelings cause us to view the world in a certain way, whether that is objective reality or not. He quotes Barrett who says, essentially how we feel about the world creates our thoughts about things. For example, she says, I feel negative, so something bad must be happening. It's kind of the reverse of what we think happens when we experience reality. We think something bad is happening, so that's why we feel bad. Effective realism affects how we act. On a website for Barrett's book, HowemotionsAreMade.com, she says that marketing depends on the effects of things like effective realism. Apparently, people drink more and are willing to pay more for a beverage if they see smiling faces, though aren't aware of seeing the faces, as in subliminal messaging techniques. Effective realism affects what we feel. According to an article by Barrett and colleagues, they write how people's emotions, moods, feelings, aka affect, are intertwined with how they experience the world and actually affect how people see things, such as a neutral face. If people are experiencing positivity, they're more likely to see a neutral face in a positive light. This study is discussed again in an article by PubMed. Barrett and colleagues ran tests where they showed smiling, angry, or neutral faces in a way that wasn't consciously aware of them, and when they were shown neutral faces at before, at the same time, and after. When people saw the neutral faces paired with the smiling faces they weren't aware of, or the scowling faces they also didn't know they were seeing, they'd read the neutral faces as more positive or trustworthy than the invisible angry faces. Effective realism affects what we think. In a fascinating New York Times article from 2015 called When a gun is not a gun, it talks about shootings by police officers in Philadelphia over an eight-year period, and how in 15% of the cases the victims were unarmed. And in half of those, the officer thought that a normal object like a cell phone or a specific movement, like putting their hand in their pocket for example, was misidentified as a threat, as being a gun, or weapon, and then shot the person. Though there are many reasons for shootings, one of them may be effective realism, which is where your feelings or emotions have an impact on what you see and perceive is going on in your environment or experience. Your brain reacts to how your body is feeling. According to the world as we feel it blog, it mentions that our feelings and therefore how we respond and react, i.e. socialization theories, are influenced by our past experiences. So police officers past experiences could be seeing people with weapons, and the brain is a predictive organ, so they predict they see guns where there aren't any, because that's what they're used to experiencing. Dangerous. Effective realism impacts how we act, feel, and think. Adam Schneider, a writer for sure people, explains that how we feel can have an impact on how we act and think. This reminds me of acceptance and commitment therapy. How we think, feel, and behave are all interlinked. He says that according to Lisa Feldman Barrett's TED talk, cultivating wisdom, the power of mood, that your brain is naturally wired to adjust its perspective based on your mood. In turn, you come to believe what you feel, and that is what effective realism is all about. How we think and how we feel is sometimes indistinguishable, it seems. It's like the chicken and the egg. What comes first? Ash Schneider mentions, sometimes our emotions, feelings, mood, influence, or cause our thoughts. Other times it's the opposite, and what we think influences how we feel about something. That's why positive psychology, which looks at things through a positive lens, can help us to become more resilient. When we look at things positively and combine that with positive emotions, it can make you feel like you can accomplish anything. Whereas, when the opposite occurs, you're thinking negatively, as well as feeling negative, or in a negative mood. This can be detrimental to your overall well-being.