How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Norwegians have a concept for an intense joy of falling in love, calling it “Forelsket.

Danes have the concept “Hygge” for a certain feeling of close friendship.

The Russian “Tocka” is a spirit...

Portuguese “Saudade” is a strong, spir...

“Pena Ajena.” Carmen described it to me as “sadness over another person’s loss,” but I’ve also seen it characterized as discomfort or embarrassment on someone else’s behalf.

Gigil (Filipino): The urge to hug or squeeze something that is unbearably adorable.

Voorpret (Dutch): Pleasure felt about an event before the event takes place.

Age-otori (Japanese): The feeling of looking worse after a haircut.

The concept of “Fago” in Ifaluk (Micronesian) culture can mean love, empathy, pity, sadness, or compassion, depending on context.

Czech culture, the concept of “Litost” is said to be untranslatable but roughly “torment over one’s own misery combined with the desire for revenge.”

Japanese emotion concept “Arigata-meiwaku” is felt when someone has done you a favor that you didn’t want from them, and which may have caused difficulty for you,...

Utka Eskimos have no concept of “Anger.” The Tahitians have no concept of “Sadness.”

they feel ill, troubled, fatigued, or unenthusiastic, all of which are covered by their broader term pe’ape’a.

For example, if you already have cancer, inflammation makes tumors grow faster. The

People who are diagnosed with the same-named disorder may have greatly diverse symptoms—variation is the norm.

They instead focus on a set of common ingredients that leave people vulnerable to these various disorders, such as genetic factors, insomnia, and damage to the interoceptive network or key hubs in the brain (chapter 6).

But stress doesn’t come from the outside world. You construct it.

stress is a population of diverse instances.

(Emotion and stress researchers rarely recognize these similarities, and tend to ask how stress influences emotion and vice versa, as if stress and emotion are independent.)

(Chronic misbudgeting is often diagnosed as stress, which is why people think stress causes illness.)

Growing up in a family that is harsh or chaotic, with a lot of conflict or verbal criticism, increases inflammation in adolescent girls and places kids on a trajectory toward chronic disease; it’s almost as bad for the development of these networks as childhood abuse or neglect. Ditto for suffering as the target of a bully. Kids who were bullied as children show low-grade inflammation that persists into adulthood, which predisposes them to a host of psychiatric and physical diseases.

the highest levels of circulating cytokines were found in men who expressed a lot of affect that they didn’t label.

people who effectively categorize their interoceptive sensations as emotion might be better protected against chronic inflammatory processes that lead to poor health.15

Pain is an experience that occurs not only from physical damage but also when your brain predicts damage is imminent. If nociception works by prediction, as does every other sensory system in the brain, then you construct instances of pain out of more basic parts using your concept of “Pain.”

you simulate pain and therefore feel it. This phenomenon is called the nocebo effect.

Opioids increase during placebo and turn down nociception, and likewise decrease during nocebo effects, earning them the moniker of “your internal medicine cabinet.”

Distinguishing between pain, stress, and emotion is a form of emotional granularity.19

(Incredibly, infants prior to the 1980s were routinely not anesthetized during major surgery, on the belief that they couldn’t feel pain!)

You could characterize pain and stress as emotions, or even emotion and stress as types of pain.

To many scientists and physicians, depression remains a disease of the mind. It’s classified as a disorder of affect and often blamed on negative thinking:

and too unresponsive to positive ones. All of these explanations assume that thinking controls feeling—the old “triune brain” idea.

likely, depression is not just one thing. Depression is—you guessed it—a concept. It is a population of diverse instances, so there are many degenerate paths to depression, many of which begin with an imbalanced body budget.

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.

Your feelings right now drive your next thought, as well as your perceptions, as predictions. So a depressed brain relentlessly keeps making withdrawals from the budget, basing its predictions on similar withdrawals from the past. This means constantly reliving difficult, unpleasant events. You wind up in a cycle of budgeting imbalances, unbroken by prediction error because it is ignored, gets tuned down, or doesn’t make it to the brain. In effect, you’re locked into a cycle of uncorrected predictions, trapped in an adverse past when your metabolic needs were high.

You could have physical conditions like chronic heart disease or insomnia that lead to bad interoceptive predictions.

When you’re anxious, you feel worried or worked up, like you don’t know what to do with yourself, and generally miserable. This is a stark contrast with depression, in which you feel sluggish, like you can’t go on with life, and also generally miserable, and with chronic pain, which is, well, painful.

And uncertainty is more unpleasant and arousing than assured harm, because if the future is a mystery, you can’t prepare for it.

that “Anxiety” and “Depression” are concepts for categorizing similar sensations.

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.

the possibility is intriguing that autism is a disorder of prediction.42

lacking a properly functioning conceptual system, Higashida has to work hard to do what other brains do automatically.

autism is a failure of prediction.

The rise of bullying as a form of joking because on television, people say horrible things to each other to the sound of a laugh track. Add

Your brain’s natural opioids reduce pain because they regulate affect (not nociception), and opiate drugs mimic these effects—which might explain their widespread abuse. From

Violate these norms, and you might lose your money, your freedom, or your life.

Simply put, some people are punished undeservedly, and others escape punishment, based on an outdated theory of the mind that is rooted in belief rather than science.

The heat-of-passion defense depends on some familiar assumptions from the classical view of emotion. The first assumption is that there is one universal type of anger, with a specific fingerprint, that justifies such a defense to a charge of murder.

The legal system’s second assumption behind the heat-of-passion defense is that “cognitive control” in the brain is synonymous with rational thought, deliberate actions, and free will. For

A human brain’s sensory and motor neurons, however, communicate through intermediaries, called association neurons, and they endow your nervous system with a remarkable ability: decision-making.

Therefore, the same sensory input can yield different outcomes on different occasions. This