IN MY FEELINGS

A lucid, basic introduction to key emotions, their positive and negative effects, and their management.

This brief book’s goal is to enable teens to know their feelings so that they can make informed decisions about their actions; it balances information with some practical strategies. After three introductory chapters addressing the book’s relevance to teens, defining emotions, and explaining how emotional intelligence functions, chapters separately consider love, anger, sadness, anxiety, jealousy and envy, guilt and shame, joy, and well-being. Each emotion is described and analyzed as an experience (broken down into physical, mental, and behavioral components), followed by a section on myths and truths about it, suggestions for living with the emotion, and one mini-exercise to develop emotional awareness. The author, a clinical psychologist, addresses teen readers in a serious, sympathetic, professional tone leavened by short anecdotes, like the case of a boy who was comfortable with strangers but paralyzed around his friends: He hadn’t understood that his behavior stemmed from anxiety. The book’s goal is to provide readers with the words and concepts to identify and understand their emotions. The information is valuable, reassuring, and sometimes thought-provoking, but the layout and design make it harder to absorb: Although there is some variation in font and text size and color, there is just one graphic and few bullet-pointed lists to break up the paragraphs; illustrations might also have added to the book’s appeal.

A clear and helpful overview.