How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

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

Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious.

“Is she saying that our culture has created these expressions, and we all have learned them?” Well . . . yes. And the classical view perpetuates these stereotypes as if they are authentic fingerprints of emotion.

What we have been calling a fingerprint might just be a stereotype.29 Once I adopted a mindset of population thinking, my whole landscape shifted, scientifically speaking. I began to see variation not as error but as normal and even desirable.