How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Parents who ask a child, “Are you upset?” instead of the more general question, “How are you feeling?” are influencing the answer, co-constructing emotion and honing the child’s concepts toward being upset. Doctors who ask a patient, “Are you feeling depressed?” likewise make a positive response more likely than if they’d said, “Tell me how you’ve been.” These are leading questions, the same sort that attorneys utilize (and object to) with witnesses on the stand. In everyday life, as in the courtroom, you need to be mindful of influencing people’s predictions by your words.

A construction approach to understanding illness can answer some perplexing questions that have never been resolved. Why do so many disorders share the same symptoms? Why are so many people both anxious and depressed? Is chronic fatigue syndrome a distinct illness, or merely depression in disguise? Are people who suffer from chronic pain with no identifiable tissue damage mentally ill? And why do so many people with heart disease develop depression? If differently named illnesses are related to the same set of core causes, muddying the dividing lines between those illnesses, then such questions cease to be mysteries.

This paragraph started great but ended disappointingly from a disability justice standpoint

As per normal, your brain predicts you need fuel that your body doesn’t require, temporarily impacting your budget. But what if the social situation doesn’t resolve quickly? What if this social rejection is your life every day? Your body stays on alert, flush with cortisol and cytokines. Now your brain starts treating your body as if it were sick or damaged, and chronic inflammation sets in.

minority stress

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

Depends on the cancer

More emotionally intelligent people with cancer, for example, appear to have lower levels of proinflammatory cytokines. In studies, when patients said that they frequently categorize, label, and understand their emotions, they were less likely to have increased cytokines during recovery from prostate cancer, or after a stressful event, and the highest levels of circulating cytokines were found in men who expressed a lot of affect that they didn’t label. Female breast cancer survivors who explicitly label and understand their emotions also have better health and fewer medical visits for cancer-related symptoms. This means that over time, people who effectively categorize their interoceptive sensations as emotion might be better protected against chronic inflammatory processes that lead to poor health.

Did the cancer study control for fast-developing versus slow-developing cancers? Because having a fast-growing cancer is going to mean more doctor visits regardless of any emotion granularity.

When people experience ongoing pain without any damage to their body tissue, it’s called chronic pain.

Hypermobility arthralgia is chronic pain and indeed involves tissue damage

Human infants who have surgery are more likely to have heightened pain in later childhood. (Incredibly, infants prior to the 1980s were routinely not anesthetized during major surgery, on the belief that they couldn’t feel pain!) There’s also a medical condition called complex regional pain syndrome, in which pain from an injury spreads inexplicably to other areas of the body, which appears to be linked to bad nociceptive predictions.

The traditional view of depression is that negative thoughts cause negative feelings. I’m suggesting it’s the other way around. 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.

I’d been feeling fatigued for some time and had gained some weight, and the doctor asked, “Are you depressed?” I responded, “Well, I don’t have sad feelings, but I do feel dead tired much of the time.” He countered with, “Maybe you’re depressed and you don’t know it.”

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.

In the end, you’d exist in a constant stream of ambiguous sensory input with few concepts to help you make sense of it. You’d be anxious all the time because sensations are unpredictable. In effect, you’d have a total breakdown of interoception, concepts, and social reality. In order to learn at all, you’d need your sensory input to be very consistent, even stereotyped, with as little variation as possible. I don’t know about you, but to me, this collection of symptoms sounds just like autism.

Other researchers too are now speculating that autism is a failure of prediction. Some believe that autism is primarily caused by a dysfunction of the control network, producing a model of the world that is too specific to each situation. Others see the problem as a deficit in the neurochemical called oxytocin, leading to problems in the interoceptive network.

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.

The wretchedness of chronic misbudgeting can also be temporarily reduced with food, which stimulates some of the same brain receptors that respond to opiate drugs. In experiments on rats, this stimulation leads the rats to binge on high-carbohydrate foods, even when they are not hungry. In people, eating sugar triggers the brain’s opioids to increase production. So eating junk food or white bread actually feels good.

The receptors in question are involved with *pleasure* and get stimulated by completely innocuous things as well. Let people eat food they like, istg. Food is supposed to be pleasant

I wouldn’t be surprised if people are employing high-carbohydrate food as a drug to manage their affect and feel better. Hello, obesity epidemic.

FUCK OFF

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.

Juries look for remorse in a defendant, as if remorse had a single, detectable expression in the face and body.

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. Centuries ago, legal minds decided that people, when provoked, sometimes kill because they haven’t “cooled off” yet, and anger erupts unbidden.

What’s more, most instances of anger do not lead to killing. I can state quite definitively that in twenty years of creating anger in my lab, we’ve never seen a test subject kill anybody. We see a far greater repertoire of action: swearing, threatening, pounding the table, leaving the room, crying, trying to resolve whatever conflict they’re having, or even smiling while wishing ill upon their oppressor. So the idea of anger as a trigger for uncontrolled murder is at best questionable.

Here’s where the law is out of sync with science, thanks to the classical view of human nature. The law defines deliberate choice—free will—as whether you feel in control of your thoughts and actions. It fails to distinguish between your ability to choose—the workings of your control network—and your subjective experience of choice. The two are not the same in the brain.

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.

The standard of the reasonable person, and the social norms behind it, is not merely reflected in the law—it is created by the law. It is a way of saying, “Here is what we expect a human person to act like, and we will punish you if you don’t conform.”

The prevailing belief in many cultures is that women are more emotional and empathic, whereas men are more stoic and analytical. Shelves full of popular books portray this stereotype as fact: The Female Brain; The Male Brain; His Brain, Her Brain; The Essential Difference; Brain Sex; Unleash the Power of the Female Brain; and on and on.

In courtrooms, angry women like Ms. Norman lose their liberty. In fact, in domestic violence cases, men who kill get shorter and lighter sentences, and are charged with less serious crimes, than are women who kill their intimate partners. A murderous husband is just acting like a stereotypical husband, but wives who kill are not acting like typical wives, and therefore they are rarely exonerated.

When people perceive emotion in a man, they usually attribute it to his situation, but when they perceive emotion in a woman, they connect it to her personality. She’s a bitch, but he’s just having a bad day.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Albertani’s case is that the expert witnesses and the judge thought that the brain was an “extenuating explanation” for Albertani’s murderous behavior. All behavior stems from the brain. No human actions, thoughts, or feelings exist apart from firing neurons. The wrong way to use neuroscience in court is to argue that a biological explanation automatically releases someone from responsibility. You are your brain.

Jurors formed these opinions of Tsarnaev’s remorse by observing him closely during the trial, where he reportedly sat “stone-faced” throughout most of the proceedings.

People from the Caucasus have different cultural expectations for what emotions look like, and different standards for appropriate expressivity in men.

For that juror’s perceptions to be “accurate,” she and the defendant must categorize with similar concepts. This kind of synchrony, with one person feeling remorse and the other perceiving it, even without words ever being spoken, is more likely to occur when two people have similar backgrounds, age, sex, or ethnicity.

Chechen culture expects men to be stoic in the face of adversity. If they lose a battle, they should bravely accept defeat, a mindset known as the “Chechen wolf.” So if Tsarnaev felt remorse, he might well have remained stony-faced.

Jurors and other perceivers make educated guesses about what those movements and sounds mean in emotional terms, but there is no objective accuracy. At best, we can measure whether jurors agree with one another in the emotions they perceive, but when the defendant and the jurors have different backgrounds, beliefs, or expectations, agreement is a poor substitute for accuracy. If a defendant’s demeanor cannot reveal emotion, then the legal system is left to grapple with a difficult question: under what circumstances can a trial be completely fair?

According to the legal system, intent is a fact that is as plain as the nose on a defendant’s face. But in a predicting brain, a judgment about someone else’s intent is always a guess you construct based on the defendant’s actions, not a fact you detect; and just as with emotions, there is no objective, perceiver-independent criterion of intent.

Affective realism decimates the ideal of the impartial juror. Want to increase the likelihood of a conviction in a murder trial? Show the jury some gruesome photographic evidence. Tip their body budgets out of balance and chances are they’ll attribute their unpleasant affect to the defendant: “I feel bad, therefore you must have done something bad. You are a bad person.”

It’s impossible to determine reasonable fear for one’s life in a society where racist stereotypes abound and affective realism literally transforms how people see each other. The whole line of reasoning for stand your ground is gutted by affective realism.

The victim told police that she’d seen her attacker’s face clearly, identifying him as Donald Thomson, a scientist. Police picked up Thomson the next day based on this eyewitness evidence, but Thomson had an iron-clad alibi: he was being interviewed on television at the time of the rape. It turned out that the victim’s TV was on when the intruder broke into her house, and it was tuned to Thomson’s interview, which ironically was about Thomson’s research on memory distortion. The poor woman had somehow, in her trauma, fused Thomson’s face and identity onto her attacker.

Neuroscience and the legal system are seriously out of sync on fundamental issues of human nature. These discrepancies must be addressed if the legal system is to remain one of our most impressive achievements of social reality and continue protecting people’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Most instances of anger, no matter how automatic they feel, don’t lead to murder. Anger can also unfold very deliberately over a long time, so there is nothing inherently automatic about it.

Often, judges and attorneys weed out jurors by asking them direct, transparent questions such as “Can you be objective, fair, and impartial in this case?” or “Do you know the defendant?”

Before DNA evidence, the law could not say whether a judgment of guilt was true or false.

Today’s legal system works only if we assume that consistency produces a just outcome. DNA testing is changing all that. It’s not perfect, but it’s immeasurably more objective than the affect-laden perceptions of human jurors.

A panel of skilled judges who are trained to be self-aware and emotionally granular might avoid affective realism more effectively than a jury would. It’s not a perfect solution by any means: in the United States at least, judges tend to be on the older side, predominantly European American, and may overrepresent a particular set of beliefs while maintaining the illusion that they are free of them.

While it’s exciting to escape into a world of urban crime in a movie, or to retreat from the stress of the day by watching an hour or two of a police drama on TV, routine depictions of police conflicts have a cost. They fine-tune our predictions about the danger posed by people of certain ethnicities or socioeconomic status. Your mind is not only a function of your brain but also of the other brains in your culture.

Dylann Roof, the man who shot African American members of a Bible study group, chose to surround himself with symbols of white supremacy. Sure, he grew up in a society struggling with racism, but so did most adults in the United States, and most of us don’t go around shooting people. So at the level of neurons, you and your society jointly cause certain predictions to become more likely in your brain. However, you still bear responsibility to overcome harmful ideology. The difficult truth is that each of us, ultimately, is responsible for our own predictions.

The eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham thought that an animal belongs in the human moral circle only if we can prove the animal can feel pleasure or pain. I disagree. An animal is worthy of inclusion in our moral circle if there is any possibility at all that it can feel pain. Does that keep me from killing a fly? No, but I’ll make it quick.

And some bonobos appear able to complete tasks without external rewards, whereas chimps seem to require them.

In humans, the loss of a parent, lover, or close friend can wreak havoc with your budget and cause much distress that operates similarly to drug withdrawal. When one creature loses another who helped to keep its body budget on track, the first creature will feel miserable from the budget imbalance.

Now comes the subtle mistake I alluded to. Freezing is a behavior, whereas fear is a much more complex mental state. The scientists who believe they study fear learning are categorizing a freezing behavior as “Fear” and the underlying circuit for freezing as a fear circuit.

The fear learning phenomenon is the most dramatic example of the mental inference fallacy in the science of emotion.* Its practitioners blur the important distinction among movement, behavior, and experience. Contracting a muscle is a movement. Freezing is a behavior because it involves multiple, coordinated muscle movements. The feeling of fear is an experience that may or may not occur together with behaviors like freezing.

In a nutshell, you can’t study fear by shocking rats unless at the outset you have defined “fear” circularly as “the freezing response of a shocked rat.”

the famous “four F’s” (fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating);

The human brain evolved, in the context of human cultures, to create more than one kind of mind. People in Western cultures, for example, experience thoughts and emotions as fundamentally different and sometimes in conflict. At the same time, Balinese and Ilongot cultures, and to a certain extent cultures guided by Buddhist philosophy, do not make hard distinctions between thinking and feeling.