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For the last three decades, Richard Davidson, a pioneer in affective neuroscience, has been a major force in academic psychology. The Emotional Life of Your Brain, coauthored with Sharon Begley, describes his professional journey in an informal way, and is not a scholarly overview of his body of work. In fact, it is not directed to clinicians or neuroscientists, but rather to an educated lay audience as a self-help book. This leads to the question, “Why is a pop science book being reviewed in a publication of the American Psychological Association's Division of Psychoanalysis?” I address that question, as well as discuss the essential hypothetical tenet that lies at the core of his theory—the valence model of brain laterality. Indeed, the valence hypothesis is the organizing principle and the red thread that runs throughout his research on emotion, as well as the driving principle that directs the application of his work to clinical problems that are familiar to psychoanalysts.
The theme of brain laterality (dominance, or hemispheric asymmetry), first described in the latter quarter of the 19th century, is now experiencing a resurgence in the broader field of neuroscience. It continues to be an area of controversy, especially in terms of the unique functional and structural differences between the right and left cerebral hemispheres. For some time, there has been agreement that verbal, conscious, rational, and serial processing of cognitive information takes place in the left hemisphere, whereas nonverbal, unconscious, holistic, processing takes place in the right. That said, for several decades, two predominant theories have been offered to explain the unique contributions of the two cortical hemispheres to emotional processing: (a) the right-hemisphere hypothesis assumes that the right hemisphere is dominant for all emotions and (b) the valence hypothesis, which suggests that the left hemisphere is specialized for processing positive emotions and approach behaviors