How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

This kind of internal battle between emotion and reason is one of the great narratives of Western civilization. It helps define you as human. Without rationality, you are merely an emotional beast.

More significantly, the classical view of emotion is embedded in our social institutions. The American legal system assumes that emotions are part of an inherent animal nature and cause us to perform foolish and even violent acts unless we control them with our rational thoughts.

Even after a century of effort, scientific research has not revealed a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion. When scientists attach electrodes to a person’s face and measure how facial muscles actually move during the experience of an emotion, they find tremendous variety, not uniformity. They find the same variety—the same absence of fingerprints—when they study the body and the brain.

When scientists set aside the classical view and just look at the data, a radically different explanation for emotion comes to light. In short, we find that your emotions are not built-in but made from more basic parts. They are not universal but vary from culture to culture. They are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that environment.

I felt sadness in that moment because, having been raised in a certain culture, I learned long ago that “sadness” is something that may occur when certain bodily feelings coincide with terrible loss.

Scientific revolutions tend to emerge not from a sudden discovery but by asking better questions.

And a lot of social factors too

These new experiments revealed something that had never been documented before: everyone we tested used the same emotion words like “angry,” “sad,” and “afraid” to communicate their feelings but not necessarily to mean the same thing.

According to the classical view of emotion, our faces hold the key to assessing emotions objectively and accurately. A primary inspiration for this idea is Charles Darwin’s book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, where he claimed that emotions and their expressions were an ancient part of universal human nature. All people, everywhere in the world, are said to exhibit and recognize facial expressions of emotion without any training whatsoever.

Lol that 19th century anthropology

From this evidence, scientists concluded that emotion recognition is universal: no matter where you are born or grow up, you should be able to recognize American-style facial expressions like those in the photos. The only way expressions could be universally recognized, the reasoning went, is if they are universally produced: thus, facial expressions must be reliable, diagnostic fingerprints of emotion.

I'm curious about the study design and how it could possibly have had any merit, since the Fore people would be already familiar with the researchers' expressions and it's ostensibly a test of interpreting the expressions in the researchers' culture

As it turns out, facial EMG presents a serious challenge to the classical view of emotion. In study after study, the muscle movements do not reliably indicate when someone is angry, sad, or fearful; they don’t form predictable fingerprints for each emotion. At best, facial EMG reveals that these movements distinguish pleasant versus unpleasant feeling. Even more damning, the facial movements recorded in these studies do not reliably match the posed photos created for the basic emotion method.

However, those expressions can’t be consistently and specifically detected by objective measures of facial muscle movements when people are actually feeling emotion. We all move our facial muscles all the time, of course, and when we look at each other, we effortlessly see emotion in some of these movements.

I'm super curious about the implications for the Mind in the Eyes test's legitimacy here, and how neurotypicals suck at reading autistic facial expressions

Nevertheless, when adults watched these videos, they somehow identified the infants in the gorilla film as afraid and infants in the arm restraint film as angry, even when Camras and Oster blanked out the babies’ faces electronically! The adults were distinguishing fear from anger based on the context, without seeing facial movements at all.

Autistic people are taught to view facia expressions via neurotypical contexts

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.

If facial movements have so much variation within an emotion category like “Fear,” you might wonder why we find it so natural to believe that a wide-eyed face is the universal fear expression. The answer is that it’s a stereotype, a symbol that fits a well-known theme for “Fear” within our culture.

“Now, wait just a minute,” you might be thinking. “Is she saying that our culture has created these expressions, and we all have learned them?” Well . . . yes. And the classical view perpetuates these stereotypes as if they are authentic fingerprints of emotion.

The idea that a posed, so-called facial expression can trigger an emotional state is known as the facial feedback hypothesis. Allegedly, contorting your face into a particular configuration causes the specific physiological changes associated with that emotion in your body.

Western subjects could conceivably identify most of the target emotions from these instructions. This understanding can actually produce the heart rate and other physical changes Ekman and colleagues observed, a fact that was unknown when these studies were conducted.

When I address audiences at conferences and present these meta-analyses, some people become incredulous: “Are you saying that in a frustrating, humiliating situation, not everyone will get angry so that their blood boils and their palms sweat and their cheeks flush?” And my answer is yes, that is exactly what I am saying.

My favorite example involved a much more senior colleague, built like a linebacker and towering a foot above me, who cocked his fist and offered to punch me in the face to demonstrate what real anger looks like. (I smiled and thanked him for the thoughtful offer.) In these examples, my colleagues demonstrated the variability of anger far more handily than my presentation did.

That is absolutely terrifying

They even found a way to make SM feel terror, by asking her to breathe air that was loaded with extra carbon dioxide. Lacking the normal degree of oxygen, SM panicked. (Don’t worry, she was not in danger.) So SM could clearly feel and perceive fear under some circumstances, even without her amygdalae.

Scientists have studied other emotion categories in lesion patients besides fear, and the results have been similarly variable. Brain regions like the amygdala are routinely important to emotion, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient for emotion.

Instead, combinations of different neurons can create instances of fear. Neuroscientists call this principle degeneracy. Degeneracy means “many to one”: many combinations of neurons can produce the same outcome.

This is really unfortunate terminology lmao

Some of these scientists claim that the statistical summaries depict neural fingerprints for anger and fear. But that’s a gigantic logical error. The statistical pattern for fear is not an actual brain state, just an abstract summary of many instances of fear. These scientists are mistaking a mathematical average for the norm.

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. The discovery of simulation in the late 1990s ushered in a new era in psychology and neuroscience. Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it.

All people of Western culture with normal hearing have a concept for this ubiquitous scale, even if they can’t explicitly describe it. Not all music uses this scale, however. When Westerners hear Indonesian gamelan music for the first time, which is based on seven pitches per octave with varied tunings, it’s more likely to sound like noise. A brain that’s been wired by listening to twelve-tone scales doesn’t have a concept for that music.

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.

Kantian as heck

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.

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.

Your familiar emotion concepts are built-in only because you grew up in a particular social context where those emotion concepts are meaningful and useful, and your brain applies them outside your awareness to construct your experiences. Heart rate changes are inevitable; their emotional meaning is not.

Spherical rocks in space are objectively real and come in various sizes, but the idea of a “Planet,” representing a particular combination of features of interest, is made up by people.

an instance of fear cannot be reduced to mere ingredients. Fear is not a bodily pattern—just as bread is not flour—but emerges from the interactions of core systems. 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.

Epiphenomenalism

The muffin-cupcake distinction is social reality: when objects in the physical world, like baked goods, take on additional functions by social agreement. Likewise, emotions are social reality. A physical event like a change in heart rate, blood pressure, or respiration becomes an emotional experience only when we, with emotion concepts that we have learned from our culture, imbue the sensations with additional functions by social agreement.

Likewise, we do not “recognize” or “detect” emotions in others. These terms imply that an emotion category has a fingerprint that exists in nature, independent of any perceiver, waiting to be found. Any scientific question about “detecting” emotion automatically presumes a certain kind of answer. In the construction mindset, I speak of perceiving an instance of emotion. Perception is a complex mental process that does not imply a neural fingerprint behind the emotion, merely that an instance of emotion occurred somehow. I also avoid verbs like “triggering” emotion, and phrases like “emotional reaction” and emotions “happening to you.” Such wording implies that emotions are objective entities. Even when you feel no sense of agency when experiencing emotion, which is most of the time, you are an active participant in that experience.

We don’t recognize emotions or identify emotions: we construct our own emotional experiences, and our perceptions of others’ emotions, on the spot, as needed, through a complex interplay of systems. 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.

We had them repeat an emotion word like “anger” over and over. Eventually, the word becomes just a sound to the subject (“ang-gurr”) that’s mentally disconnected from its meaning. This technique has the same effect as creating a temporary brain lesion, but it’s completely safe and lasts less than one second.

As emotion concepts become more remote, people do worse and worse at recognizing the emotions that the posed stereotypes are supposedly displaying. This progression is strong evidence that people see an emotion in a face only if they possess the corresponding emotion concept, because they require that knowledge to construct perceptions in the moment.

More reason the Mind in the Eyes Test is bullshit

In effect, Himba participants were not permitted to listen to any sounds, let alone pick the ones that matched the story, until they had learned the corresponding English emotion concepts. When we attempted to replicate Sauter and colleagues’ experiment, we used only the methods in their published paper, without the extra, unreported step, so our Himba test subjects did not have the opportunity to learn English emotion concepts before listening to the vocalizations.

consider this fun fact: the historical record implies that ancient Romans did not smile spontaneously when they were happy. The word “smile” doesn’t even exist in Latin. Smiling was an invention of the Middle Ages, and broad, toothy-mouthed smiles (with crinkling at the eyes, named the Duchenne smile by Ekman) became popular only in the eighteenth century as dentistry became more accessible and affordable.

In the long run, scientists who still subscribe to the basic emotion method are very likely helping to create the universality that they believe they are discovering.

Psychologists assess and treat emotion deficits in people suffering from mental illness using similar methods. The growing economy of emotion-reading gadgets and apps also assumes universality, as if emotions can be read in the face or in patterns of bodily changes in the absence of context, as easily as reading words on a page. The sheer amount of time, effort, and money going into these efforts is mind-boggling. But what if the fact of universal emotions isn’t a fact at all?

The brain’s second alternative is to be stubborn and stick with the original prediction. It filters the sensory input so it’s consistent with the prediction. In this situation, I could be standing in a baseball field but daydreaming (predicting and simulating) as the ball sails toward me. Even though the ball is fully within my visual field, I don’t notice it until it thumps at my feet.

Of course, there are times when you directly feel a headache, a full stomach, or your heart pounding in your chest. But your nervous system isn’t built for you to experience these sensations with precision, which is fortunate, because otherwise they’d overwhelm your attention.

Autistic interoception is often atypical and we either inadvertently walk on broken legs or we are constantly overwhelmed by our body sensations

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.

If you grow up in poverty, a situation that leads to chronic body-budget imbalance and an overactive immune system, these body-budgeting problems are reduced if you have a supportive person in your life. In contrast, when you lose a close, loving relationship and feel physically ill about it, part of the reason is that your loved one is no longer helping to regulate your budget. You feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself because, in a sense, you have.

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 pleasantness of the sun on your skin, the deliciousness of your favorite food, and the discomfort of a stomachache or a pinch are all examples of affective valence. The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal.

Intuitively, your affective niche includes everything that has any relevance to your body budget in the present moment. Right now, this book is within your affective niche, as are the letters of the alphabet, the ideas you’re reading about, any memories that my words bring to mind, the air temperature around you, and any objects, people, and events from your past that impacted your body budget in a similar situation. Anything outside your affective niche is just noise: your brain issues no predictions about it, and you do not notice it. The feel of your clothing against your skin is usually not in your affective niche (though it is now, since I just mentioned it), unless it happens to be relevant, say, to your physical comfort.

Autistic people's affective niches are atypical

Younger American adults tend to prefer the upper right quadrant: pleasant, high arousal. Middle-aged and older Americans tend to prefer the lower right quadrant (pleasant, low arousal), as do people from Eastern cultures like China and Japan.

80% of college aged American men admit to regularly getting stoked

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.

Sometimes it's the opposite problem

People employ affect as information, creating affective realism, throughout daily life. Food is “delicious” or “bland.” Paintings are “beautiful” or “ugly.” People are “nice” or “mean.” Women in certain cultures must wear scarves and wigs so as not to “tempt men” by showing a bit of hair.

Please don't talk about hijabis without distinguishing between laws and culture. Choosing to cover hair and skin is very often an assertion of bodily autonomy: I choose who gets to see this part of me. Hijab requirements are shitty but hijab bans are also a means of controlling women.

Many factors may contribute to these tragedies, ranging from carelessness to racial bias, but it is also possible that some of the shooters actually perceive a weapon when none is present due to affective realism in a high-pressure and dangerous context.

Implicit bias makes the misattribution more likely by giving negative valence to Black people. You could have phrased it like that