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July 2 - July 10, 2023
And consider this: what is the difference between two hundred one-dollar bills and a silk-screened painting of two hundred one-dollar bills? The answer is, “about $43.8 million.” That’s the price paid in 2013 for Andy Warhol’s painting “200 One Dollar Bills.” The painting is exactly what its title sounds like, scarcely different from the currency it depicts. The colossal difference in value is entirely social reality.
Make something up, give it a name, and you’ve created a concept. Teach your concept to others, and as long as they agree, you’ve created something real. How do we work this magic of creation? We categorize. We take things that exist in nature and impose new functions on them that go beyond their physical properties.
Certain great apes appear to use sign language in a limited way, on the order of a two-year-old human, usually linked in some way to securing a reward.
No they do not. They use signs, but not grammar and therefore not language. My 2 year old has more language skill than an ape
When my daughter was a preschooler, I only had to widen my eyes to warn her away from mischief. No words were required. Nevertheless, you need a word to teach a concept efficiently.
I don't know if this is intentionally audist
So we, as a culture, introduce mental similarity using words. From childhood we hear people say “fear” and “surprise” in particular contexts. The sound of each word (or, later in life, the written form of each word) creates enough statistical regularity within each category, and statistical differences between them, to get us started. The words quickly prompt us to infer the goals to anchor each concept. Without the words “fear” and “surprise,” these two concepts would likely not spread from person to person.
I am sighing at the audism here. Signs are words. Emotion signs are words with high iconicity
When you can’t find an objective criterion to compute accuracy and are left with consensus, this is a clue that you are dealing with social, not physical, reality.
I am also not saying that emotions are “just in your head.” That phrase trivializes the power of social reality. 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.
Just because fear appears generation after generation in your culture does not prove that fear is coded into the human genome, nor that it was sculpted by natural selection in our hominin ancestors millions of years ago on the African savanna. These single-cause explanations discount the enormous power of collective intentionality (not to mention copious evidence from modern neuroscience).
Gender is like this too
As far as I know, no emotion concept is universal, but even if one were, universality itself does not automatically imply a perceiver-independent reality.
Concepts are not merely a social veneer on top of biology. They are a biological reality that is wired into your brain by culture. People who live in cultures with certain concepts, or more diverse concepts, may be more fit to reproduce.
The scientist who discovered emotion acculturation is, in fact, Batja herself. She found that people’s emotion concepts not only vary from culture to culture but also transform. For example, situations that bring about anger in Belgium, like having your goals blocked by a coworker, in Turkey will also include feelings of (what Americans experience as) guilt, shame, and respect. But for Turkish immigrants in Belgium, their emotional experiences come to look more “Belgian” the longer they live there.
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. Your brain’s core systems combine in various ways to construct your perceptions, memories, thoughts, feelings, and other mental states.
Kant
Your control network, you may recall, constantly shapes the course of your predictions and prediction error to help select among multiple actions, whether you experience yourself as in control or not. This network can only work with the concepts that you’ve got. So the question of responsibility becomes, Are you responsible for your concepts? Not all of them, certainly. When you’re a baby, you can’t choose the concepts that other people put into your head. But as an adult, you absolutely do have choices about what you expose yourself to and therefore what you learn, which creates the concepts
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It is your responsibility to learn concepts that, through prediction, steer you away from harmful actions. You also bear some responsibility for others, because your actions shape other people’s concepts and behaviors, creating the environment that turns genes on and off to wire their brains, including the brains of the next generation. Social reality implies that we are all partly responsible for one another’s behavior, not in a fluffy, let’s-all-blame-society sort of way, but a very real brain-wiring way.
Your brain is shaped by the realities of the world that you find yourself in, including the social world made by agreement among people. Your mind is a grand collaboration that you have no awareness of. Through construction, you perceive the world not in any objectively accurate sense but through the lens of your own needs, goals, and prior experience (as you did with the blobby bee). And you are not the pinnacle of evolution, just a very interesting sort of animal with some unique abilities.
People are almost always unaware that they essentialize; they fail to see their own hands in motion as they carve dividing lines in the natural world.
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.
Any essentialist view that wraps itself in the cloak of Darwin is demonstrating a profound misunderstanding of Darwin’s central ideas about evolution.
It is ironic, not to mention absurdly tragic, when Darwin’s name is invoked to lend authority to essentialist scientific views, when his greatest scientific achievement was to vanquish essentialism in biology.
Essentialism inoculates itself against counterevidence. It also changes the way science is practiced. 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.
William James made a similar observation over a century ago when he wrote, “Whenever we have made a word . . . to denote a certain group of phenomena, we are prone to suppose a substantive entity existing beyond the phenomena, of which the word shall be the name.” The very words that help us to learn concepts can also trick us into believing that their categories reflect firm boundaries in nature.
So, essentialism is intuitive, logically impossible to disprove, part of our psychological and neural makeup, and a self-perpetuating scourge in science. It is also the basis for the classical view’s most fundamental idea, that emotions have universal fingerprints. No wonder the classical view has such stamina—it’s powered by a virtually unkillable belief.
Either way, if you’re at the mercy of strong emotions that can hijack you, the argument goes, then you might be less culpable for your actions. This assumption now sits at the foundation of Western legal systems, where so-called crimes of passion are given special treatment. Additionally, if you are completely devoid of emotion, then you are seen as more capable of inhuman acts. A serial killer who feels no remorse, some believe, is somehow less human than a murderer who deeply regrets his actions. If this is the case, then morality would be rooted in your ability to feel certain emotions.
Today’s textbooks in psychology and neurology still hold up Broca’s area as the clearest example of localized brain function, even as neuroscience has shown that the region is neither necessary nor sufficient for language.* Broca’s area is actually a failure to localize a psychological function to a brain blob. Nevertheless, history was rewritten in Broca’s favor, lending strength to essentialist views of the mind.
Modern neuroscience, however, has shown that the so-called limbic system is a fiction, and experts in brain evolution no longer take it seriously, let alone consider it a system.
Philosophers in the seventeenth century, such as René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, believed in emotion essences and catalogued them, while eighteenth-century philosophers like David Hume and Immanuel Kant argued more for construction and perception-based explanations for human experience.
This is an incorrect interpretation of Kant that presents him as an empiricist
The classical view often dismisses construction as saying everything is relative, as if the mind were merely a blank slate and biology can be disregarded. Construction blasts the classical view for ignoring the powerful effects of culture and justifying the status quo. In caricature, the classical view says “nature” and construction says “nurture,” and the result has been a wrestling match between straw men.
I would like to believe that this time, we’ll actually push aside essentialism and begin to understand the mind and brain without ideology.
Thus began the most notorious historical period in psychology, called behaviorism. Emotions were redefined as mere behaviors for survival: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating, collectively known as the “four F’s.” To a behaviorist, “happiness” equaled smiling, “sadness” was crying, and “fear” was the act of freezing in place. And so, the nagging problem of finding the fingerprints of emotional feelings was, with the flick of a pen, defined out of existence.
As philosopher Thomas Kuhn wrote about the structure of scientific revolutions: “To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.” So when the classical view reasserted itself in the 1960s, half a century of anti-essentialist research was swept into history’s dustbin.
Companies are programming Google Glass ostensibly to detect emotion in facial expressions in an effort to help autistic children.
When mountains of contrary data don’t force people to give up their ideas, then they are no longer following the scientific method. They are following an ideology.
The good news is that we’re in a golden age of mind and brain research. Many scientists are now on a path forged by the data, rather than ideology, to understand emotion and ourselves. This new, data-driven understanding leads to innovative ideas about how to live a fulfilling and healthful life.
The idea that science can be completely free of ideology is scientism. I get what you're trying to say about past research being based on unfalsifiable assumptions, but science is not immune to reliance on unfalsifiable assumptions. Science *requires* some unfalsifiable assumptions (like causality) in order to be done at all.
Many of the products sold in supermarkets and chain restaurants are pseudo-food loaded with budget-warping refined sugar and bad fats.
Lmao pseudo-food
Diving into a compelling novel is also healthful for your body budget. This is more than mere escapism; when you get involved in someone else’s story, you aren’t as involved in your own. Such mental excursions engage part of your interoceptive network, known as the default mode network, and keep you from ruminating (which would be bad for the budget).
Yes this!
Perhaps the easiest way to gain concepts is to learn new words. You’ve probably never thought about learning words as a path to greater emotional health, but it follows directly from the neuroscience of construction. 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.
*laughs in alexithymia and High Superior Range vocabulary*
Try also to invent your own emotion concepts, using your powers of social reality and conceptual combination. The author Jeffrey Eugenides presents a collection of amusing ones in his novel Middlesex, including “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age,” “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy,” and “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar,” though he does not assign them words.
I don't want to read Middlesex but those are some moods
In contrast, lower emotional granularity is associated with all sorts of afflictions. People who have major depressive disorder, social anxiety disorder, eating disorders, autism spectrum disorders, borderline personality disorder, or who just experience more anxiety and depressed feelings all tend to exhibit lower granularity for negative emotion. People who are diagnosed with schizophrenia exhibit low granularity for distinguishing positive from negative emotions. To be clear, nobody is claiming that low granularity causes these disorders, but it conceivably plays some role.
Autistic people tend to have atypical interoception, so low emotional granularity isn't surprising. But there are autistic experiences that cannot be adequately conveyed to neurotypicals: the joy of stimming and sensory overload come to mind.
When you teach emotion concepts to children, you are doing more than communicating. You are creating reality for these kids—social reality. You’re handing them tools to regulate their body budget, to make meaning of their sensations and act on them, to communicate how they feel, and to influence others more effectively. They will use these skills their whole lives.
When my daughter, Sophia, was two and in her tantrum phase, telling her to calm down had no effect, of course. So we invented a concept called the “Cranky Fairy.” Whenever Sophia launched into a tantrum (or if we were lucky, slightly beforehand), we’d explain to her, “Oh no, the Cranky Fairy is visiting. She’s making you feel cranky. Let’s try to make the Cranky Fairy go away.” Then we directed her to a particular chair—a fuzzy red one with a picture of Elmo from Sesame Street—as her special place for calming down. (No, it didn’t have little fuzzy red manacles.) At first we carried her to the
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After four years of life, children in higher-income homes have seen or heard four million more words than their low-income counterparts, and they have better vocabulary and reading comprehension. Children with the fewest material advantages therefore lag in the social world. A simple intervention, like advising lower-income parents to communicate with their children more, improves the children’s school performance.
How big was this effect and how long did it last? I'm skeptical of individual solutions to systemic problems
Another approach to mastering your emotions in the moment is to change your location or situation, which in turn can change your predictions. During the Vietnam War, for example, 15 percent of U.S. soldiers were addicted to heroin. When they came home as veterans, 95 percent of them stayed off the drug in their first year back—an astounding figure compared to the general population, where only 10 percent of users avoid relapse. The shift in location changed their predictions, which lessened their craving for the drug.
Uhhhh. This seems a bit simplistic
I think drug addiction is often a misguided attempt to relieve the suffering from a body budget that’s chronically out of whack.
Everything seemed to be going wrong, plus I was about to leave for a two-week trip. Somehow I was holding myself together, extinguishing each fire as it ignited . . . and then my laptop died. I sank to the floor in the middle of my kitchen and started sobbing. At just that moment, my husband walked in, noticed my state, and asked innocently, “Are you premenstrual?” Oh. My. God. I lashed out at him, the goddamn sexist pig and how dare he be so smug when I’m barely holding my life together?? My fury shocked us both. And three days later, I discovered that he was right.
Uh, it's still not okay to suggest to someone they're overreacting, even if they seem to be. I hope you're not telling people this is okay. When people ask "are you PMSing" it is almost always to invalidate the other person's experiences.
Look around right now and find an object to focus on. Try recategorizing it not as a three-dimensional visual object but as the individual pieces of differently colored light that your perception is constructed from. Tough, isn’t it? Nevertheless, you can train yourself to do it. Pick the shiniest part of the object and try tracing its outlines with your eye. With a lot of practice, you can learn how to deconstruct objects like this.
Art
If you can categorize your discomfort as helpful, say, when you’re exercising hard, you can cultivate greater stamina. The U.S. Marine Corps has a motto that embodies this principle: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” Whenever you exercise just until you feel unpleasant and then stop, you’re categorizing your physical sensations as exhaustion. You’ll always exercise below your threshold, despite the health benefits of continuing. Through recategorization, however, you can continue exercising and feel even better later, as you reap the benefits of a stronger, healthier body.
I literally injure myself if I do this
Social psychologists say that we have multiple selves, but you can think of this repertoire as instances of a single, goal-based concept called “The Self” in which the goal shifts based on context.
My favorite thing is when autistic people are pathologized for having more consistent selves
The fiction of the self, paralleling the Buddhist idea, is that you have some enduring essence that makes you who you are. You do not. I speculate that your self is constructed anew in every moment by the same predictive, core systems that construct emotions, including our familiar pair of networks (interoceptive and control), among others, as they categorize the continuous stream of sensation from your body and the world.
Okay but time
When you are suffering from some ill or insult that has befallen you, ask yourself: Are you really in jeopardy here? Or is this so-called injury merely threatening the social reality of your self ? The answer will help you recategorize your pounding heartbeat, the knot in the pit of your stomach, and your sweaty brow as purely physical sensations, leaving your worry, anger, and dejection to dissolve like an antacid tablet in water.
This is a bad application when the experience involves oppression or abuse.
To improve at emotion perception, we must all give up the fiction that we know how other people feel. When you and a friend disagree about feelings, don’t assume that your friend is wrong like Dan’s ex-therapist did. Instead think, “We have a disagreement,” and engage your curiosity to learn your friend’s perspective. Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right.
