How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

One flavor, called social construction, studies the role of social values and interests in determining how we perceive and act in the world.

I was wondering how long we were going to take to get to the social construction of reality (Berger & Luckmann)

macro structure of your brain is largely predetermined, but the microwiring is not.

You are genetically predisposed to language but not English. Same idea

“Cookie”

I didn’t think I’d be thinking so much about Plato vs Aristotle in this book

Their major distinguishing feature is the time of day at which they are eaten.

This is why muffins make me angry

low emotional granularity.

I like this term. It accurately describes people who have confused me with their descriptions of their internal states

Maria was “already married to another man with a very big gun.”

I have this problem a lot

Whenever Himba participants described something other than the English emotion concept, they received negative feedback and were told to try again.

Of course 🤦🏻

Conversely, other gestures, which would mean little to us, were much more heavily freighted with significance.

Like the horned hand!!! 🤟🏻

find walnuts delicious whereas my husband calls them an offense against nature—but

This seems like me versus everyone else on the subject of pickles

Ok so this is suuuuper interesting

To simplify our discussion drastically,

Booooooooooo

sociologists, economists,

Don’t lump us together! Economists suck! Bah!

You don’t even have to open your eyes to have an affective adventure. When you daydream and have a large change in interoception, your brain will swirl with affect.42 Affect

You can induce the same thing with music

when you experience yourself as rational, your body budget and its links to affect are there, lurking beneath the surface.60

This is super interesting because I’ve thought for a long time now that there is no such thing as disinterested rationality

antiquity

As usual, I smell Plato lurking in the background with his pure Ideas

This category is clearly and entirely a construction of the human mind.

Ok sure but what about when and how categories necessarily overlap and interpenetrate?

Your concept of “Happiness” in the moment is centered on such a goal, binding together the diverse instances from your past.

This seems a little fuzzy. I wouldn’t call all of those things happiness. It also calls to mind a Hegelian interpretation of emotion wherein every emotion is an event, a historical fact, rather than a purely empirical one.

It becomes an invitation for the infant to create similarities among diverse instances.

Sounds like the beginning of constructing categories using discrete concepts

The infant creates a new piece of reality, a thing called a “wug” with the goal “to make a ringing noise.”

I’m really confused as to why we’re calling this a goal rather than a property. It seems weird

Children must be gaining emotion concepts in some other way.

The idea of fluency comes to mind. Do we become fluent in emotions?? Is cross cultural knowledge not a simple matter of linguistic fluency but also emotional fluency? Do some people seem more emotionally intelligent because they’re simply more fluent?

(For the record, she’s not much for experiencing scorn or vengeance on a regular basis, but the concepts come in handy with other adolescents.)

Lol but how about frustration and dissatisfaction and contempt?

This means that an instance of an emotion concept helps to make sense of longer continuous streams of sensory input, dividing them into distinct events.40

Hegel is at it again!

For example, schadenfreude, a German emotion word meaning “pleasure from someone else’s misfortune,” has now been incorporated into English.

But my favorite is still Weltschmerz!

Personally, I’d like to add the Greek word stenahoria to English, which refers to a feeling of doom, hopelessness, suffocation, and constriction. I can think of a few romantic relationships where this emotion concept would have come in handy.41

Ohh sounds juicy

If you asked me what I had for dinner this evening, I could say “baked dough with tomato sauce and cheese,” but this is much less efficient than saying “pizza.”

It’s funny when people get this wrong. It’s why Spock and Data make us laugh. They’re like perpetual children with excellent vocabularies that never take offense

(My husband jokes that before we met, he knew only three emotions: happy, sad, and hungry.)

Oooooh gender differences? Are we actually neurologically impoverishing men by reducing their available affective concepts and therefore their emotional granularity?

Your conceptual system samples instances of embarrassed nakedness from your past, which is more taxing on your body budget than the refreshed nakedness after stepping out of a sauna, or the comfortable nakedness after a passionate afternoon with your lover.

😱

when I thought I felt attraction but in fact I had the flu, is another example of categorization.

Reminds me of our conversation about attraction. Using different concepts/categories to denote attraction. I definitely have a narrow band of interoception I label as attraction Also reminds me of the misattribution of arousal

Backpfeifengesicht,

Literally “slapping face”

help her distinguish statistically between naptime and bedtime, so she would sleep for shorter or longer stretches.

Sleep routines for the win

The brain represents this information as patterns of firing neurons, and it’s advantageous (and efficient) to represent it with as few neurons as possible.

Makes me wonder about the development of written language. How does a culture decide on signs for speech and how many? How to combine them? Does the efficiency change over time?

Together, these concepts are part of the concept “Face,” whose instances are yet more efficient summaries of the sensory regularities in facial features.

Sounds like we’re moving towards a network theory of concepts

On the other hand, if you were constructing with the very broad concept “Pleasant Feeling” rather than “Happiness,” your brain’s job would be harder. Preciseness leads to efficiency; this is a biological payoff of higher emotional granularity.11

Broader emotional concepts feel like work because they literally are more work

If you talk to a chemist, “real” is a molecule, an atom, a proton. To a physicist, “real” is a quark, a Higgs boson, or maybe a collection of little strings vibrating in eleven dimensions. They are supposed to exist in the natural world whether or not humans are present—that is, they are thought to be perceiver-independent categories. If all human life left this planet tomorrow, subatomic particles would still be here.4

This is exactly how I explained social construction to my students

bootstrap

She loves using this word

Words give us our own special form of telepathy.

Yessss. I’ve always felt like texting was a kind of telepathy