How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

This view, which I call the theory of constructed emotion, offers a very different interpretation of the events during Governor Malloy’s speech. When Malloy’s voice caught in his throat, it did not trigger a brain circuit for sadness inside me, causing a distinctive set of bodily changes. Rather, I felt sadness in that moment because, having been raised in a certain culture, I learned long ago that “sadness” is something that may occur when certain bodily feelings coincide with terrible loss. Using bits and pieces of past experience, such as my knowledge of shootings and my previous sadness about them, my brain rapidly predicted what my body should do to cope with such tragedy.

introduce the new science of emotion: how psychology, neuroscience, and related disciplines are moving away from the search for emotion fingerprints and instead asking how emotions are constructed.

A skilled interior designer can look at five shades of blue and distinguish azure, cobalt, ultramarine, royal blue, and cyan. My husband, on the other hand, would call them all blue. My students and I had discovered a similar phenomenon for emotions, which I described as emotional granularity.

As it turns out, facial EMG presents a serious challenge to the classical view of emotion. In study after study, the muscle movements do not reliably indicate when someone is angry, sad, or fearful; they don’t form predictable fingerprints for each emotion. At best, facial EMG reveals that these movements distinguish pleasant versus unpleasant feeling. Even more damning, the facial movements recorded in these studies do not reliably match the posed photos created for the basic emotion method.10

those expressions can’t be consistently and specifically detected by objective measures of facial muscle movements when people are actually feeling emotion.

Nevertheless, from a purely objective standpoint, when scientists measure just the muscle movements themselves, those movements do not conform to the photographs.

And yet when scientists observe infants in situations that should evoke emotion, the infants do not make the expected expressions.

Faces are constantly moving, and your brain relies on many different factors at once—body posture, voice, the overall situation, your lifetime of experience—to figure out which movements are meaningful and what they mean.14

Nearly three-quarters of our test subjects who saw her face alone rated it as sad, but when presented with the scenario, 70 percent of subjects rated her face as displaying fear.17

“Fear” takes no single physical form. Variation is the norm. Likewise, happiness, sadness, anger, and every other emotion you know is a diverse category, with widely varying facial movements.

If facial movements have so much variation within an emotion category like “Fear,” you might wonder why we find it so natural to believe that a wide-eyed face is the universal fear expression. The answer is that it’s a stereotype,

If we put all the scientific evidence together, we cannot claim, with any reasonable certainty, that each emotion has a diagnostic facial expression.

The idea that a posed, so-called facial expression can trigger an emotional state is known as the facial feedback hypothesis. Allegedly, contorting your face into a particular configuration causes the specific physiological changes associated with that emotion in your body.

when studies distinguished anger from sadness from fear, they did not always replicate one another, implying that the instances of anger, sadness, and fear cultivated in one study were different from those cultivated in another.

Where emotions and the autonomic nervous system are concerned, four significant meta-analyses have been conducted in the last two decades, the largest of which covered more than 220 physiology studies and nearly 22,000 test subjects. None of these four meta-analyses found consistent and specific emotion fingerprints in the body. Instead, the body’s orchestra of internal organs can play many different symphonies during happiness, fear, and the rest.

Variation, not uniformity, is the norm.

Overall, SM seemed fearless, and her damaged amygdalae seemed to be the reason. From this and other similar evidence, scientists concluded that a properly functioning amygdala was the brain center for fear. But then, a funny thing happened. Scientists found that SM could see fear in body postures and hear fear in voices. They even found a way to make SM feel terror, by asking her to breathe air that was loaded with extra carbon dioxide. Lacking the normal degree of oxygen, SM panicked.

As research continued, however, anomalies emerged. Yes, the amygdala was showing an increase in activity, but only in certain situations, like when the eyes of a face were staring directly at the viewer. If the eyes were gazing off to the side, the neurons in the amygdala barely changed their firing rates. Also, if test subjects viewed the same stereotyped fear pose over and over again, their amygdala activation rapidly tapered off. If the amygdala truly housed the circuit for fear, then this habituation should not occur—the