How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Through prediction, your brain constructs the world you experience. It combines bits and pieces of your past and estimates how likely each bit applies in your current situation.

This efficient, predictive process is your brain’s default way of navigating the world and making sense of it. It generates predictions to perceive and explain everything you see, hear, taste, smell, and touch.

Prediction errors aren’t problems. They’re a normal part of the operating instructions of your brain as it takes in sensory input. Without prediction error, life would be a yawning bore. Nothing would be surprising or novel, and therefore your brain would never learn anything new. Most of the time, at least when you are an adult, your predictions aren’t too far off-base. If they were, you would go through life feeling constantly startled, uncertain . . . or hallucinating.

If your brain is predicting well, then input from the world confirms your predictions. Usually, however, there is some prediction error, and your brain, like a scientist, has some options. It can be a responsible scientist and change its predictions to respond to the data. Your brain can also be a biased scientist and selectively choose data that fits the hypotheses, ignoring everything else. Your brain can also be an unscrupulous scientist and ignore the data altogether, maintaining that its predictions are reality. Or, in moments of learning or discovery, your brain can be a curious scientist and focus on input. And like the quintessential scientist, your brain can run armchair experiments to imagine the world: pure simulation without sensory input or prediction error.

Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence.

The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. The energized feeling of anticipating good news, the jittery feeling after drinking too much coffee, the fatigue after a long run, and the weariness from lack of sleep are examples of high and low arousal.

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.

The phrase “an unpleasant image” is really shorthand for “an image that impacts my body budget, producing sensations that I experience as unpleasant.” In these moments of affective realism, we experience affect as a property of an object or event in the outside world, rather than as our own experience. “I feel bad, therefore you must have done something bad. You are a bad person.”

what’s happening in your brain when you categorize? You are not finding similarities in the world but creating them. When your brain needs a concept, it constructs one on the fly, mixing and matching from a population of instances from your past experience, to best fit your goals in a particular situation.

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

In a situation where a person with a working conceptual system might experience anger, people with alexithymia are more likely to experience a stomachache. They complain of physical symptoms and report feelings of affect but fail to experience them as emotional.

Simply put: I did not see a snake and categorize it. I did not feel the urge to run and categorize it. I did not feel my heart pounding and categorize it. I categorized sensations in order to see the snake, to feel my heart pounding, and to run. I correctly predicted these sensations, and in doing so, explained them with an instance of the concept “Fear.” This is how emotions are made.

the German emotion word Backpfeifengesicht, meaning “a face in need of a fist.”

Your control network assists in efficiently constructing and selecting among the candidate instances so your brain can pick a winner. It helps neurons to participate in certain constructions rather than others, and keeps some concept instances alive while suppressing others. The result is akin to natural selection, in which the instances most suitable to the current environment survive to shape your perception and action.

Your control network helps select between emotion and non-emotion concepts (is this anxiety or indigestion?), between different emotion concepts (is this excitement or fear?), between different goals for an emotion concept (in fear, should I escape or attack?), and between different instances (when running to escape, should I scream or not?).

In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. I’ve been calling this process “categorization,” but it’s known by many other names in science. Experience. Perception. Conceptualization. Pattern completion. Perceptual inference. Memory. Simulation. Attention. Morality. Mental Inference.

Emotions are meaning. They explain your interoceptive changes and corresponding affective feelings, in relation to the situation. They are a prescription for action.

Social reality is therefore one conduit for transmitting behaviors, preferences, and meanings from ancestors to descendants via natural selection. Concepts are not merely a social veneer on top of biology. They are a biological reality that is wired into your brain by culture.

Emotion concepts are also cultural tools. They come with a rich set of rules, all in the service of regulating your body budget or influencing someone else’s. These rules can be specific to a culture, stipulating when it’s acceptable to construct a given emotion in a given situation.

You can’t predict efficiently when you don’t know the local concepts. You must get by with conceptual combination, which can be effortful and yields only an approximate meaning. Or you will be awash in prediction error much of the time. The process of acculturation therefore taxes your body budget. In fact, people who are less emotionally acculturated report more physical illness.

Most of us think of the outside world as physically separate from ourselves. Events happen “out there” in the world, and you react to them “in here” in your brain. In the theory of constructed emotion, however, the dividing line between brain and world is permeable, perhaps nonexistent.

Emotional intelligence is better characterized in terms of concepts. Suppose you knew only two emotion concepts, “Feeling Awesome” and “Feeling Crappy.” Whenever you experienced emotion or perceived someone else as emotional, you could categorize only with this broad brush. Such a person cannot be very emotionally intelligent. In contrast, if you could distinguish finer meanings within “Awesome” (happy, content, thrilled, relaxed, joyful, hopeful, inspired, prideful, adoring, grateful, blissful . . .), and fifty shades of “Crappy” (angry, aggravated, alarmed, spiteful, grumpy, remorseful, gloomy, mortified, uneasy, dread-ridden, resentful, afraid, envious, woeful, melancholy . . .), your brain would have many more options for predicting, categorizing, and perceiving emotion, providing you with the tools for more flexible and functional responses.

Words seed your concepts, concepts drive your predictions, predictions regulate your body budget, and your body budget determines how you feel. Therefore, the more finely grained your vocabulary, the more precisely your predicting brain can calibrate your budget to your body’s needs.

With practice, you can learn to deconstruct an affective feeling into its mere physical sensations, rather than letting those sensations be a filter through which you view the world. You can dissolve anxiety into a fast-beating heart. Once you can deconstruct into physical sensations, then you can recategorize them in some other way, using your rich set of concepts. Perhaps that pounding in your chest is not anxiety but anticipation, or even excitement.

We all walk a tightrope between the world and the mind, and between the natural and the social. Many phenomena that were once considered purely mental—depression, anxiety, stress, and chronic pain—can, in fact, be explained in biological terms. Other phenomena that were believed to be purely physical, like pain, are also mental concepts. 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.

That is, 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.

When a woman has been raped, for instance, judges (and juries and the police) expect to see her express grief on the witness stand, which tends to bring the rapist a heavier sentence. When a female victim expresses anger, judges evaluate her negatively.

If you negligently or intentionally break my arm, you owe me. But if you negligently or intentionally break my heart, you don’t, even if we were close for a long time, regulating each other’s body budgets, and the breakup will put me through a physical process that can be as excruciating as withdrawal from an addictive drug.

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.

You know full well that some of your concepts, such as racial stereotypes, can lead you into trouble. If your brain predicts that an African American youth in front of you is holding a weapon, and you perceive a gun where none is present, you have some degree of culpability even in the face of affective realism, because it is your responsibility to change your concepts.

You might not think of smell as conceptual knowledge, but each time you smell the same aroma, such as popcorn in a movie theater, you’re categorizing. The mix of chemicals in the air differs each time, and yet you perceive buttered popcorn.

You do have survival circuits for behaviors like the famous “four F’s” (fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating); they’re controlled by body-budgeting regions in your interoceptive network, and they cause bodily changes that you experience as affect, but they are not dedicated to emotion. For emotion, you also need emotion concepts for categorization.

We all like things that support our beliefs, and usually dislike things that violate those beliefs.

Affective realism keeps you believing something even when the evidence puts it highly in doubt.

Your brain’s concepts are a model of the world that keeps you alive, serves to meet your body’s energy needs, and ultimately determines how well you propagate your genes.

Concepts are not just “in your head.” Suppose you and I are chatting over coffee, and when I make some witty remark, you smile and nod. If my brain predicted your smile and your nod, and the visual input to my brain confirms these movements, then my own prediction—say, to nod back at you—becomes my behavior.

In other words, your neurons influence one another not only through direct connections but indirectly through the outside environment, in an interaction with me. We are performing a synchronized dance of prediction and action, regulating each other’s body budgets.

Your personal experience, therefore, is actively constructed by your actions. You tweak the world, and the world tweaks you back. You are, in a very real sense, an architect of your environment as well as your experience. Your movements, and other people’s movements in turn, influence your own incoming sensory input. These incoming sensations, like any experience, can rewire your brain. So you’re not only an architect of your experience, you’re also an electrician.

We constantly mistake perceiver-dependent concepts—flowers, weeds, colors, money, race, facial expressions, and so on—for perceiver-independent reality.

We separate “emotion,” “emotion regulation,” “self-regulation,” “memory,” “imagination,” “perception,” and scores of other mental categories, all of which can be explained as emerging from interoception and sensory input from the world, made meaningful by categorization, with assistance from the control network.

Ironically, each of us has a brain that creates a mind that misunderstands itself.

There is a kind of freedom in realizing that we categorize to create meaning, and therefore it is possible to change meaning by recategorizing.

When I write “you have a concept for awe,” this translates as “you have many instances that you have categorized, or that have been categorized for you, as awe, and each can be reconstituted as a pattern in your brain.” The “concept” refers to all the knowledge you construct about awe in your conceptual system in a given moment. Your brain is not a vessel that “contains” concepts. It enacts them as a computational moment over some period of time. When you “use a concept,” you are really constructing an instance of that concept on the spot. You don’t have little packets of knowledge called “concepts” stored in your brain, any more than you have little packets called “memories” stored in your brain. Concepts have no existence separate from the process that creates them.

This book has extended endnotes on the web at how-emotions-are-made.com

Affective realism is a common but powerful form of naive realism, the belief that one’s senses provide an accurate and objective representation of the world.