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 it comes to emotion, a face doesn’t speak for itself. In fact, the poses of the basic emotion method were not discovered by observing faces in the real world. Scientists stipulated those facial poses, inspired by Darwin’s book, and asked actors to portray them. And now these faces are simply assumed to be the universal expressions of emotion.15

But here’s the cool thing: just now, when you read the word “apple,” your brain responded to a certain extent as if an apple were actually present.

Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest.

Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it.

So, a concept like “Bee” is actually a collection of neural patterns in your brain, representing your past experiences. Your brain combines these patterns in different ways to perceive and flexibly guide your action in new situations.

Every moment that you are alive, your brain uses concepts to simulate the outside world. Without concepts, you are experientially blind, as you were with the blobby bee. With concepts, your brain simulates so invisibly and automatically that vision, hearing, and your other senses seem like reflexes rather than constructions.

In these cases of disgust, longing, and anxiety, the concept active in your brain is an emotion concept.

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.

every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion.

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. If you didn’t have concepts that represent your past experience, all your sensory inputs would just be noise. You wouldn’t know what the sensations are, what caused them, nor how to behave to deal with them. With concepts, your brain makes meaning of sensation, and sometimes that meaning is an emotion.

(This challenge is common in science; for example, in quantum mechanics, the distinction between a cause and an effect is not meaningful.)

It can help us figure out how instances of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and other emotion categories are constructed by the same brain mechanism that constructed the blobby bee, the juicy apple, and the smell of poo from mashed baby food, with no need for emotion circuits or other biological fingerprints. …

emotions are highly variable, without fingerprints; and emotions are not, in principle, distinct from cognitions and perceptions.

That’s because their interactions produce new properties that are not present in the parts alone.

An instance of fear has irreducible, emergent properties not found in the ingredients alone, such as unpleasantness (as your car skids out of control on a slippery highway) or pleasantness (on an undulating rollercoaster). You cannot reverse-engineer a recipe for an instance of fear from a feeling of fear.

If you perceive the same baked good as a decadent “cupcake” or a healthful “muffin,” research suggests that your body metabolizes it differently.

If I were very strict, I would banish the phrase “an emotion” from our vocabulary so we don’t imply its objective existence in nature, and always speak of instances and categories.

By applying the theory of constructed emotion, combined with a little reverse engineering, you’ll see that concepts are a key ingredient for perceiving emotions. We’ll

That will prepare you to understand the gist of interoception, which is the origin of feeling.

At the level of brain cells, prediction means that the neurons over here, in this part of your brain, tweak the neurons over there, in that part of your brain, without any need for a stimulus from the outside world. Intrinsic brain activity is millions and millions of nonstop predictions.

Prediction is such a fundamental activity of the human brain that some scientists consider it the brain’s primary mode of operation.

The idea of an emotional brain region is an illusion caused by the outdated belief in a reactive brain. Neuroscientists understand this today, but the message hasn’t trickled down to many psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, economists, and others who study emotion.

Scientists in Israel found that judges were significantly more likely to deny parole to a prisoner if the hearing was just before lunchtime.

So familiar! Also cited in The Extended Mind

People like to say that seeing is believing, but affective realism demonstrates that believing is seeing.

That’s because familiar sensations like your heart beating in your chest, your lungs filling with air, and, most of all, the general pleasant, unpleasant, aroused, and quiescent sensations of affect are not really coming from inside your body. They are driven by simulations in your interoceptive network.53 In short, you feel what your brain believes. Affect primarily comes from prediction.

Let me show you what this means. You might think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: that what you feel alters your sight and hearing. Interoception in the moment is more influential to perception, and how you act, than the outside world is.

An economic model at the foundation of the U.S. economy—some might say the global economy—is rooted in a neural fairy tale.59

If the idea of the rational human mind is so toxic to the economy, and it’s not backed up by neuroscience, why does it persist? Because we humans have long believed that rationality makes us special in the animal kingdom. This origin myth reflects one of the most cherished narratives in Western thought, that the human mind is a battlefield where cognition and emotion struggle for control of behavior.

Your perceptions are so vivid and immediate that they compel you to believe that you experience the world as it is, when you actually experience a world of your own construction.

My point is not to say, “You construct instances of emotion by categorization: isn’t that unique?” Rather, it’s to show that categorization constructs every perception, thought, memory, and other mental event that you experience, so of course you construct instances of emotion in the same manner.

From the ashes of classical concepts, a new view arose. It said that a concept is represented in the brain as the best example of its category, known as the prototype.

population thinking

This means a prototype need not be found in nature, yet the brain can construct one when needed. Emotion prototypes, if that’s what they indeed are, could be constructed in the same manner.

not prototypes of the most typical or frequent instances. Instead, your brain has many instances—of cars, of dot patterns, of sadness, or anything else—and it imposes similarities between them, in the moment, according to your goal in a given situation.

Concepts are not static but remarkably malleable and context-dependent, because your goals can change to fit the situation.

Yet your brain lumps all these instances into the same category because they can achieve the same goal, safety from stings. In fact, the goal is the only thing that holds together the category.

Emotion concepts are goal-based concepts.

Any summary of the population is a statistical fiction that applies to no individual.

In a similar manner, some instances of concepts are more effective in a particular context to achieve a particular goal. Their competition in your brain is like Darwin’s theory of natural selection but carried out in milliseconds; the most suitable instances outlive all rivals to fit your goal in the moment. That is categorization.18

Babies become wired for their native languages by statistical learning.

Humans are not the only animals that learn statistically: non-human primates, dogs, and rats can do it, among others. Even single-celled animals engage in statistical learning and then prediction: they not only respond to changes in their environment but anticipate them. Human infants, however, do more than statistically learn simple concepts. They also quickly learn that some of the information they need about the world resides in the minds of the people around them.24

When the children were asked to pick from that bowl, they gave the experimenter a cube! In other words, the children were able to learn a subjective preference of the experimenter that was different from their own. This realization, that an object has positive value for someone else, is an example of mental inference.25

Going beyond preferences, babies can even infer other people’s goals statistically. They can tell the difference when an experimenter chooses a pattern of colored balls randomly versus with intent.

To build a purely mental concept, you need another secret ingredient: words.

“Do you see all these objects that look different physically? They have an equivalence that is mental.” That equivalence is the basis for a goal-based concept.30

Words encourage infants to form goal-based concepts by inspiring them to represent things as equivalent. In fact, studies show that infants can more easily learn a goal-based concept, given a word, than a concept defined by physical similarity without a word.

But you can show human infants a bunch of objects that look different, sound different, and feel different, and merely add a word—a WORD—and these little babies form a concept that overcomes the physical differences.

The stumbling block for this whole idea, we have learned, is that consistent emotion fingerprints don’t exist in the face and body. Children must be gaining emotion concepts in some other way.

So where is the statistical regularity that holds together a concept like “Happiness” or “Anger”? In the words themselves. The most visible commonality that all instances of “Anger” share is that they’re all called “anger.”