Where does Emotion Come From?

One of my favorite things about travel is that I finally get the time to read.

Today, I finished "blink" by Malcolm Gladwell.
Quite an interesting book, about how the best decisions are sometimes the ones made instantly.
Like most books I enjoy, it veers into many unexpected directions.

My favorite quote regards the surprising discovery, by a team of German psychologists, that your facial expression can influence your emotion (vs. the opposite view)

"...we take it as a given that first we experience an emotion and then we may - or may not - express that emotion on our face. We think of the face as the residue of emotion. What this research showed, though, is that the process works in the opposite direction as well. Emotion can also start on the face.
The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process."

Which makes a pretty strong argument for the age-old warning "if you keep making that expression, your face will freeze"!

Tomorrow, I start on "The Wisdom of Crowds".