How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

When scientists set aside the classical view and just look at the data, a radically different explanation for emotion comes to light. In short, we find that your emotions are not built-in but made from more basic parts. They are not universal but vary from culture to culture. They are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that environment. Emotions are real, but not in the objective sense that molecules or neurons are real. They are real in the same sense that money is real — that is, hardly an illusion, but a product of human agreement.5

An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world.

Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action.

When you experience affect without knowing the cause, you are more likely to treat affect as information about the world, rather than your experience of the world.

In short, you feel what your brain believes. Affect primarily comes from prediction.

You cannot overcome emotion through rational thinking, because the state of your body budget is the basis for every thought and perception you have, so interoception and affect are built into every moment. Even when you experience yourself as rational, your body budget and its links to affect are there, lurking beneath the surface.60

Emotions are meaning. They explain your interoceptive changes and corresponding affective feelings, in relation to the situation. They are a prescription for action. The brain systems that implement concepts, such as the interoceptive network and the control network, are the biology of meaning-making.

People with a classical view mindset think about emotional intelligence as “detecting” other people’s emotions “accurately,” or experiencing happiness and avoiding sadness “at the right time.” With our new understanding of emotions, however, we can think about emotional intelligence in a new way. “Happiness” and “Sadness” are each populations of diverse instances. Therefore, emotional intelligence (EI) is about getting your brain to construct the most useful instance of the most useful emotion concept in a given situation. (And also when not to construct emotions but instances of some other concept.)

The head of my daughter’s karate school, Grandmaster Joe Esposito, advises his nervous students before their black belt test: “Make your butterflies fly in formation.” He is saying yes, you feel worked up right now, but don’t perceive it as nervousness: construct an instance of “Determination.”

Overall, the body sensations that are categorized as pain, stress, and emotions are fundamentally the same, even at the level of neurons in the brain and spinal cord.* Distinguishing between pain, stress, and emotion is a form of emotional granularity.19

The traditional view of depression is that negative thoughts cause negative feelings. I’m suggesting it’s the other way around. Your feelings right now drive your next thought, as well as your perceptions, as predictions. So a depressed brain relentlessly keeps making withdrawals from the budget, basing its predictions on similar withdrawals from the past. This means constantly reliving difficult, unpleasant events. You wind up in a cycle of budgeting imbalances, unbroken by prediction error because it is ignored, gets tuned down, or doesn’t make it to the brain. In effect, you’re locked into a cycle of uncorrected predictions, trapped in an adverse past when your metabolic needs were high. A depressed brain is effectively locked into misery. It’s like a brain in chronic pain, ignoring prediction error, but on a much larger scale that shuts you down. It puts your budget chronically in debt, so your brain tries to cut spending. What’s the most efficient way to do that? Stop moving and don’t pay attention to the world (prediction error). That is the unrelenting fatigue of depression.32 If depression is a disorder caused by chronic misbudgeting, then it’s not, strictly speaking, exclusively a psychiatric disease. It’s also a neurological, metabolic, and immunologic disease. Depression is an imbalance of many entwined parts of the nervous system that we can understand only by treating the whole person, not by treating one system in isolation like the parts of a machine.

Traditional research on anxiety disorders is founded on the old “triune brain” model, that cognition controls emotion. Your allegedly emotional amygdala is overactive, they say, and your so-called rational prefrontal cortex is failing to regulate it. This approach is still influential, even though the amygdala is not the home of any emotion, the prefrontal cortex does not house cognition, and emotion and cognition are whole-brain constructions that cannot regulate each other. So, how is anxiety made? We don’t know all the details yet, but we have some tantalizing clues.36 I speculate that an anxious brain, in a sense, is the opposite of a depressed brain. In depression, prediction is dialed way up and prediction error way down, so you’re locked into the past. In anxiety, the metaphorical dial is stuck on allowing too much prediction error from the world, and too many predictions are unsuccessful. With insufficient prediction, you don’t know what’s coming around the next corner, and life contains a lot of corners. That’s classic anxiety.37

Emotions are not temporary deviations from rationality. They are not alien forces that invade you without your consent. They are not tsunamis that leave destruction in their wake. They are not even your reactions to the world. They are your constructions of the world. Instances of emotion are no more out of control than thoughts or perceptions or beliefs or memories. The fact is, you construct many perceptions and experiences and you perform many actions, some that you control a lot and some that you don’t.

what it means to control your behavior and therefore be responsible for your actions. The law (like much of psychology) usually considers responsibility in two parts: actions caused by you, where you have more responsibility, and actions caused by the situation, where you have less. This simple dichotomy of internal versus external does not mesh with the reality of the predictive brain. In a construction view of human nature, every human action involves three types of responsibility, not two. The first is traditional: your behavior in the moment. You pull the trigger. You grab the money and run. (The legal system names this behavior actus reus, the harmful action.) The second type of responsibility involves your specific predictions (chapter 4) that brought about the unlawful act (known as mens rea, the guilty mind). Your behavior is not caused in a single moment; it is always driven by prediction. When you steal money from an open cash register, you are an agent in the moment, but the ultimate cause of your behavior also includes concepts like “Cash Register,” “Money,” “Ownership,” and “Stealing.” Each of these concepts is associated with a large and diverse population of instances in your brain, and based on them, you issued predictions that led to your action. Now, if other people with similar concepts in the same situation (i.e., the reasonable person) would also steal the cash, well, you might be less culpable for your actions. However, they may well have left the cas...

Our challenge is to understand animal minds for their own sake, not as inferior human minds. The latter idea comes from the classical view of human nature, which implies that chimps and other primates are less evolved, diminished versions of ourselves. They’re not. They’re adapted to the ecological niche that they live in. Chimps have to forage for food and modern humans largely do not, so a chimp brain is wired to identify and remember details, not to build mental similarities.53

Animals are emotional creatures, at least as far as human perceivers are concerned. This is part of the social reality that we create. We grant emotions to our cars, our houseplants, and even little circles and triangles in a movie. We also grant emotions to animals. However, this does not mean that animals experience emotion. Animals with a small affective niche cannot form emotion concepts. A lion cannot hate a zebra when she hunts and kills it as prey. That is why we don’t find the lion’s actions immoral. Anytime you read a book or news story about animals experiencing human emotions (“News Flash: Cats Feel Schadenfreude toward Mice”), keep this mindset and you’ll quickly see the mental inference fallacy materialize before your eyes.

In these pages, you’ve learned that emotions are part of the biological makeup of the human brain and body, but not because you have dedicated circuits for each one. Emotions are a result of evolution, but not as essences passed down from ancestral animals. You experience emotions without conscious effort, but that does not mean you’re a passive recipient of these experiences. You perceive emotions without formal instruction, but that does not mean that emotions are innate or independent of learning. What’s innate is that humans use concepts to build social reality, and social reality, in turn, wires the brain. Emotions are very real creations of social reality, made possible by human brains in concert with other human brains.

Affective realism is an inevitability, and yet you are not helpless against it. The best defense against affective realism is curiosity. I tell my students to be particularly mindful when you love or hate something you read. These feelings probably mean that the ideas you’ve read are firmly in your affective niche, so keep an open mind about them.

Your experiences are not a window into reality. Rather, your brain is wired to model your world, driven by what is relevant for your body budget, and then you experience that model as reality. Your moment-to-moment experience may feel like one discrete mental state followed by another, like beads on a string, but as you have learned in this book, your brain activity is continuous throughout intrinsic, core networks. Your experiences might seem to be triggered by the world outside the skull, but they’re formed in a storm of prediction and correction. Ironically, each of us has a brain that creates a mind that misunderstands itself.