How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Traditional research on anxiety disorders is founded on the old “triune brain” model, that cognition controls emotion. Your allegedly emotional amygdala is overactive, they say, and your so-called rational prefrontal cortex is failing to regulate it. This approach is still influential, even though the amygdala is not the home of any emotion, the prefrontal cortex does not house cognition, and emotion and cognition are whole-brain constructions that cannot regulate each other.

In depression, prediction is dialed way up and prediction error way down, so you’re locked into the past. In anxiety, the metaphorical dial is stuck on allowing too much prediction error from the world, and too many predictions are unsuccessful. With insufficient prediction, you don’t know what’s coming around the next corner, and life contains a lot of corners.

your interoceptive inputs become even more noisy than usual when your body budget has been in the red for a while; as a consequence, your brain ignores them. These situations leave you open to a lot of uncertainty and a lot of prediction error that you can’t resolve. And uncertainty is more unpleasant and arousing than assured harm, because if the future is a mystery, you can’t prepare for it.

In general, moderately severe depression and anxiety can have overlapping symptom profiles with one another, and with chronic stress and chronic pain, and also with chronic fatigue syndrome.

But here’s the thing: If he had simply diagnosed me with depression, he could have actually cultivated a feeling of depression in me in that instant. Sure, I was fatigued, and I probably had some inflammation going on due to a bit of chronic stress. If I hadn’t resisted, I could have come away with a prescription for antidepressants and a belief that something was seriously wrong with my life or myself for being unable to cope. This belief might have worsened my miscalibrated body budget, if I started to search for problems in my life . . . and you can always find something if you look.

Without a fully loaded predictive brain, you’d be at the mercy of your environment. You’d have a brain driven by stimulus and response, when the nervous system is optimized for a more metabolically efficient brain organization. That might explain the experiences of people with autism.

When you have too much prediction and not enough correction, you feel bad, and the flavor of badness depends on the concepts you use. In small amounts, you might feel angry or shameful. In extreme amounts, you get chronic pain or depression. In contrast, too much sensory input and ineffective prediction yields anxiety, and in extreme amounts, you might develop an anxiety disorder. With no prediction at all, you’d have a condition comparable to autism.

To be an effective architect of your experience, you need to distinguish physical reality from social reality, and never mistake one for the other, while still understanding that the two are irrevocably entwined.

In the United States, if your accountant steals your life savings, or a banker sells you a bad mortgage, it’s considered unacceptable to kill them; but if you murder your spouse in a fit of rage for cheating on you with a secret lover, the law might cut you some slack, especially if you’re a man. It’s unacceptable to make your neighbor feel fear that you will harm him bodily—that is considered a form of assault—but in some states it’s okay for you to “stand your ground” and harm someone first, even if you kill the person. It’s acceptable for you to profess romantic love, but not (at various times in U.S. history) toward people whose sex is the same as yours or whose skin color isn’t. Violate these norms, and you might lose your money, your freedom, or your life. For centuries, laws in the United States have been shaped by the classical view of emotion, steeped in the essentialist view of human nature.

The U.S. legal system assumes that emotions are part of our supposed animal nature and cause us to perform foolish and even violent acts, unless we control them with our rational thoughts.

Anger is a population of diverse instances, not a single automatic reaction in the true sense of the phrase. The same holds for every other category of emotion, cognition, perception, and other type of mental event. It might seem like your brain has a quick, intuitive process and a slower, deliberative one, and that the former is more emotional and the latter more rational, but this idea is not defensible on neuroscience or behavioral grounds.

Scientists are still trying to figure out how the brain creates the experience of having control. But one thing is certain: there is no scientific justification for labeling a “moment without awareness of control” as emotion.

Emotions are not temporary deviations from rationality. They are not alien forces that invade you without your consent. They are not tsunamis that leave destruction in their wake. They are not even your reactions to the world. They are your constructions of the world. Instances of emotion are no more out of control than thoughts or perceptions or beliefs or memories.

the women believe they are more emotional than men, and the men agree. The one exception is anger, as subjects believe that men are angrier. However, when the same people record their emotional experiences as they occur in everyday life, there are no sex differences.

Sometimes a biological problem can interfere with your brain’s ability to choose your actions with intent. Maybe you grow a brain tumor, or some neurons begin to die in just the wrong places. But mere variability in the brain—in its structure, function, chemistry, or genetics—is not an extenuating circumstance for a crime. Variation is the norm.

Emotions, however, have no consistent fingerprints in facial movements, body posture and gestures, or voice. Jurors and other perceivers make educated guesses about what those movements and sounds mean in emotional terms, but there is no objective accuracy.

If stand your ground doesn’t scare the crap out of you, think about the impact of affective realism on people who legally carry concealed weapons. Affective realism indisputably influences people’s perceptions of threat; therefore it virtually assures that innocent people will be shot by accident.

Memories are not like a photograph—they are simulations, created by the same core networks that construct experiences and perceptions of emotion. A memory is represented in your brain in bits and pieces as patterns of firing neurons, and “recall” is a cascade of predictions that reconstruct the event.

The judge’s life is one of intense and continual emotional labor under the fiction of equanimity.

Emotions are not expressed, displayed, or otherwise revealed in the face, body, and voice in any objective way, and anyone who determines innocence, guilt, or punishment needs to know this. You cannot recognize or detect anger, sadness, remorse, or any other emotion in another person—you can only guess, and some guesses are more informed than others.

Your sight, hearing, and other senses are always colored by your feelings. Even the most objective-sounding evidence is colored by affective realism.

Events that feel automatic are not necessarily completely outside your control and are not necessarily emotional. Your predicting brain provides the same range of control when you construct an emotion as when you construct a thought or a memory.

Every brain is unique; variation is normal (think degeneracy) and not necessarily meaningful. Unlawful behavior has never been definitively localized to any brain region.

Women should not be punished for feeling anger rather than fear toward their aggressors, and men should not be punished for feeling helpless and vulnerable rather than brave and aggressive. The law’s reasonable person standard is a fiction based on stereotypes, and it is inconsistently applied.

every day in America, thousands of people appear before a jury of their peers and hope they will be judged fairly, when in reality they are judged by human brains that always perceive the world from a self-interested point of view.

Eventually, the legal system must come to grips with the tremendous influence of culture on people’s concepts and predictions, which determine their experiences and actions. After all, the brain wires itself to the social reality it finds itself in.

The First Amendment was founded on the notion that free speech produces a war of ideas, allowing truth to prevail. However, its authors did not know that culture wires the brain. Ideas get under your skin, simply by sticking around for long enough. Once an idea is hardwired, you might not be in a position to easily reject it.

People don’t have a rational side and an emotional side, with the former regulating the latter. Judges can’t set aside affect to issue rulings by pure reason. Jurors can’t detect emotion in defendants. The most objective-looking evidence is tainted by affective realism. Criminal behavior can’t be isolated to a blob in the brain. Emotional harm is not mere discomfort but can shorten a life. In short, every perception and experience within the courtroom—or anywhere else—is a culturally infused, highly personalized belief, corrected by sensory inputs from the world, rather than the result of an unbiased process.

The human capacity for social reality appears unique in the animal kingdom. Only we can create and share purely mental concepts using words. Only we can use these concepts to more effectively regulate our own body budgets and each other’s, while we cooperate and compete with one another. Only we have concepts for mental states, such as emotion concepts, for predicting and making sense of sensations. Social reality is a human superpower.

Dogs do perceive distress and pleasure and a handful of other states, a feat that requires only affect.

a number of scientists now suspect that very social animals, such as dogs and elephants, have some concept of death and can experience some kind of grief. This grief need not have exactly the same features as human grief, but both could be rooted in something similar: the neurochemical basis of attachment, body budgeting, and affect.

emotions are perceptions, and every perception requires a perceiver. And therefore every question about an instance of emotion must be asked from a particular point of view.

It’s one thing to observe that a rodent’s anterior cingulate cortex increases its activity when a neighbor is in pain. It’s quite another to say the rodent is feeling empathy. A simpler explanation is that the two animals are just influencing each other’s body budgets, as so many creatures do.

Animals are emotional creatures, at least as far as human perceivers are concerned. This is part of the social reality that we create.

However, this does not mean that animals experience emotion. Animals with a small affective niche cannot form emotion concepts.

Natural selection favors a complex brain. Complexity, not rationality, makes it possible for you to be an architect of your experience. Your genes allow you, and others, to remodel your brain and therefore your mind.

Affective realism, the phenomenon that you experience what you believe, is inevitable because of your wiring.

Affective realism, when left unchecked, leads people to be dead certain and inflexible.

The best defense against affective realism is curiosity.

Try to become comfortable with uncertainty, he suggests, finding pleasure in mystery, and being mindful enough to cultivate doubt. These practices will help you take a calm look at evidence that violates your own deeply held beliefs and experience the pleasure of the hunt for knowledge.

We are performing a synchronized dance of prediction and action, regulating each other’s body budgets. This same synchrony is the basis of social connection and empathy; it makes people trust and like each other, and it’s crucial for parent-infant bonding.

Your experiences are not a window into reality. Rather, your brain is wired to model your world, driven by what is relevant for your body budget, and then you experience that model as reality.

the official welfare statistics are true because we, as a society, made them so.

By virtue of our values and practices, we restrict options and narrow possibilities for some people while widening them for others, and then we say that stereotypes are accurate. They are accurate only in relation to a shared social reality that our collective concepts created in the first place.