How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

on different occasions, in different contexts, in different studies, within the same individual and across different individuals, the same emotion category involves different bodily responses.

Despite tremendous time and investment, research has not revealed a consistent bodily fingerprint for even a single emotion.

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.

Your range of angers is not necessarily the same as mine, although if we were raised in similar circumstances, we will likely have some overlap.

The theory of constructed emotion incorporates elements of all three flavors of construction. From social construction, it acknowledges the importance of culture and concepts. From psychological construction, it considers emotions to be constructed by core systems in the brain and body. And from neuroconstruction, it adopts the idea that experience wires the brain.

the words and concepts of your culture help to shape your brain wiring and your physical changes during emotion.

our emotions aren’t built-in, waiting to be revealed. They are made. By us. We don’t recognize emotions or identify emotions: we construct our own emotional experiences, and our perceptions of others’ emotions,

Human beings are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits buried deep within animalistic parts of our highly evolved brain: we are architects of our own experience.

If humans actually had an inborn ability to recognize emotional expressions, then removing the emotion words from the method should not matter . . . but it did, every single time.

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 might believe that you are a rational creature, weighing the pros and cons before deciding how to act, but the structure of your cortex makes this an implausible fiction.

Mathematical models indicate that under certain conditions, unregulated free-market economies do work well. But one of those “certain conditions” is that people are rational decision makers.

Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world.

Your genes gave you a brain that can wire itself to its physical and social environment. The people around you, in your culture, maintain that environment with their concepts and help you live in that environment by transmitting those concepts from their brains to yours.

A sound, therefore, is not an event that is detected in the world. It is an experience constructed when the world interacts with a body that detects changes in air pressure, and a brain that can make those changes meaningful.

in the absence of a brain, there is no experience of color at all, only reflected light in the world.

Your muscle movements and bodily changes become functional as instances of emotion only when you categorize them that way, giving them new functions as experiences and perceptions.

Emotions are social reality. We construct instances of emotion in exactly the same manner as colors, falling trees, and money: using a conceptual system that is realized within the brain’s wiring.

Suppose you find yourself breathing rapidly and sweating. Are you excited? Afraid? Physically exhausted? Different categorizations represent different meanings: that is, different likely explanations for your physical state in this situation, based on your past experience.

Money, reputation, laws, government, friendship, and all of our most fervent beliefs are also “just” in human minds, but people live and die for them. They are real because people agree that they’re real. But they, and emotions, exist only in the presence of human perceivers.

emotions are constructed by prediction, and you can predict only with the concepts you possess,

If you grow up in a society full of anger or hate, you can’t be blamed for having the associated concepts, but as an adult, you can choose to educate yourself and learn additional concepts.

You are indeed partly responsible for your actions, even so-called emotional reactions that you experience as out of your control. It is your responsibility to learn concepts that, through prediction, steer you away from harmful actions.

It would be highly inefficient for all of humanity to have one inherited set of mental modules, given that we live in such diverse geographic and social environments around the world. The human brain evolved to create different kinds of human minds, adapted to different environments.

You are born with some brain wiring as determined by your genes, but the environment can turn some genes on and off, allowing your brain to wire itself to your experiences. Your brain is shaped by the realities of the world that you find yourself in, including the social world made by agreement among people.

Population thinking is based on variation, whereas essentialism is based on sameness. The two ideas are fundamentally incompatible. Origin is therefore a profoundly anti-essentialist book. So it is baffling that where emotion is concerned, Darwin reversed his greatest achievement by writing Expression.

Darwin’s name is invoked to lend authority to essentialist scientific views, when his greatest scientific achievement was to vanquish essentialism in biology.

Essentialism promises simple, single-cause explanations that reflect common sense, when in fact we live in a complex world. Essentialism is also remarkably difficult to disprove.

If scientists believe in a world of essences that are waiting to be discovered, then they devote themselves to finding those essences, a potentially endless quest.

words invite you to believe in an essence, and that process is conceivably the psychological origin of essentialism.

induction, is an extremely efficient way for the brain to extend concepts by ignoring variation. However, induction also encourages essentialism.

The human brain is itself a cultural artifact because it is wired by experience. We have genes that are turned on and off by the environment, and other genes that regulate how sensitive to the environment we are.

Some of the most pressing questions about emotion remain unanswered, and important questions remain obscured, because many businesses and scientists continue practicing essentialism while the rest of us are figuring out how emotions are made.

It’s hard to give up the classical view when it represents deeply held beliefs about what it means to be human. Nevertheless, the facts remain that no one has found even a single reliable, broadly replicable, objectively measurable essence of emotion.

emotional intelligence (EI) is about getting your brain to construct the most useful instance of the most useful emotion concept in a given situation.

Be a collector of experiences. Try on new perspectives the way you try on new clothing. These kinds of activities will provoke your brain to combine concepts to form new ones, changing your conceptual system proactively so you’ll predict and behave differently later.

Help them understand the variety of the real world, that a smile may mean happiness, embarrassment, anger, or even sadness depending on context. Try also to admit when you aren’t sure how you feel, when you’re guessing how someone else feels, or when you guess badly.

Sometimes deconstructing the self is too challenging. You can achieve some of the same benefits more simply by cultivating and experiencing awe, the feeling of being in the presence of something vastly greater than yourself. It helps you get some distance from your self.

I can notice a tiny weed forcing its way through a crack in the sidewalk, proving yet again that nature cannot be tamed by civilization, and employ the same concept to take comfort in my insignificance.

Whether you cultivate awe, meditate, or find other ways to deconstruct your experience into physical sensations, recategorization is a critical tool for mastering your emotions in the moment.

Perceptions of emotion are guesses, and they’re “correct” only when they match the other person’s experience; that is, both people agree on which concept to apply. Anytime you think you know how someone else feels, your confidence has nothing to do with actual knowledge.

If you feel unpleasant in the moment, then deconstruct or recategorize your experiences. And realize that your perceptions of others are just guesses and not facts.

You construct instances of “Stress” via the same brain mechanisms that construct emotion. In each case, your brain issues predictions about your body budget in relation to the outside world and makes meaning.

Chronic stress is dangerous to your physical health. It literally eats away at your interoceptive and control networks, causing them to atrophy, as your chronically imbalanced body budget remodels the very brain circuitry that regulates the budget.

When you are expecting pain, like the moment just before an injection, your brain regions that process nociception change their activity. That is, you simulate pain and therefore feel it. This phenomenon is called the nocebo effect.

If I scan your brain while you’re having a toothache and when you’re angry, the scans will look somewhat different. But then, if I scan your brain during different instances of anger, they look somewhat different too. Different instances of dental pain likely vary as well. This is degeneracy; variation is the norm.

We know that your brain continually predicts your body’s energy needs based on past experience. Under normal circumstances, your brain also corrects its predictions based on actual sensory information from your body. But what if this correction wasn’t working properly? Your momentary experience would be constructed from the past but not corrected by the present. In general terms, that’s what I think is happening in depression.

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.

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.