How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

The neuroanatomist Franz Joseph Gall in the nineteenth century founded phrenology, perhaps the ultimate essentialist view of the brain, to detect and measure mental essences as bumps on the skull (!!).

Plato’s essences of the mind are still around today, though their names have changed (and we’ve dispensed with the horses). Nowadays we call them perception, emotion, and cognition. Freud called them the id, the ego, and the superego. The psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman metaphorically calls them System 1 and System 2. (Kahneman is very careful to say it’s a metaphor, but many people seem to be ignoring him and essentializing Systems 1 and 2 as blobs in the brain.)

The battles today are all the more intense because it’s easy for each side to view the other in caricature. 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.

We are not blank slates, and our children are not “Silly Putty” to be shaped this way and that, but neither is biology destiny.

When we peer into the workings of a functioning brain, we don’t see mental modules. We see core systems that interact continuously in complex ways to produce...

The human brain is itself a cultural artifact because it is w...

Ironically, the millennia-long war over human nature has itself been tainted by essentialism. Both sides have assumed that a single, superior force must be shaping the brain and designing the mind. In the classical view, this force has been nature, God, and then evolution. In construction, it has been the environment and then culture. But neither biology nor culture is responsible alone.

As Steven Pinker so nicely writes, “It is now simply misguided to ask whether humans are flexible or programmed, whether behavior is universal or varies across cultures, whether acts are learned or innate.”

in the early twentieth century, when scientists inspired by Darwin and the mutant James-Lange theory were searching in vain for the essences of anger, sadness, fear, and so on. Their repeated failures eventually led them to a creative solution. If we cannot measure emotions in the body and brain, they said, we’ll measure only what happens before and after: the events that bring on an emotion and the physical reactions that result. Never mind what’s happening inside that skull thing in the middle. 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.”

Psychology emerged from the darkness in the 1960s, according to the official history, as a cognitive revolution reinstated the mind as a topic of scientific inquiry, likening emotion essences to modules or organs in a mind that was thought to function like a computer. With this transformation, the final pieces of the modern classical view fell into place, and the two main flavors of the classical view—basic emotion theory and classical appraisal theories—were officially anointed.

They presented solid counterevidence to be sure, but criticism alone was not enough to remain relevant. As philosopher Thomas Kuhn wrote about the structure of scientific revolutions: “To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.”

Microsoft is analyzing facial photographs in an attempt to recognize emotion. Apple has recently purchased Emotient, a startup company using artificial intelligence techniques in an effort to detect emotion in facial expressions. Companies are programming Google Glass ostensibly to detect emotion in facial expressions in an effort to help autistic children. Politicians in Spain and Mexico are engaging in so-called neuropolitics to discern voter preferences from their facial expressions.

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.

Each time you perform a physical act for your body budget, you’re also doing something mental with concepts. Every mental activity has a physical effect as well. You can put this connection to work for you, to master your emotions, enhance your resilience, become a better friend or parent or lover, and even change your conception of who you are.

People who practice yoga long-term are able to calm down more quickly and effectively, probably due to some combination of physical activity and the slow-paced breathing. Yoga also reduces levels of certain proteins, called proinflammatory cytokines, that over the long term promote harmful inflammation in your body.

Regular exercise also increases the levels of other proteins, called anti-inflammatory cytokines, that reduce your chances of developing heart disease, depression, and other illnesses.

Research shows that giving and gratitude have mutual benefits for the body budgets involved,

There are many ways to gain new concepts: taking trips (even just a walk in the woods), reading books, watching movies, trying unfamiliar foods. Be a collector of experiences. Try on new perspectives the way you try on new clothing. These kinds of activities will provoke your brain to combine concepts to form new ones, changing your conceptual system proactively so you’ll predict and behave differently later.

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.

And don’t limit yourself to words in your native language. Pick another language and seek out its concepts for which your language has no words, like the Dutch emotion of togetherness, gezellig, and the Greek feeling of major guilt, enohi. Each word is another invitation to construct your experiences in new ways.

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.

Fine-grained categorizations have been shown to beat two other popular approaches for “regulating” emotions, in a study about fear of spiders. The first approach, called cognitive reappraisal, taught subjects to describe the spider in a nonthreatening way: “Sitting in front of me is a little spider, and it’s safe.” The second approach was distraction, having the subjects pay attention to something unrelated instead of the spider. The third was to categorize sensations with greater granularity, such as: “In front of me is an ugly spider and it is disgusting, nerve-wracking, and yet, intriguing.” The third approach was the most effective in helping people with arachnophobia to be less anxious when observing a spider and to actually approach spiders.

Higher emotional granularity has other benefits for a satisfying life. In a collection of scientific studies, people who could distinguish finely among their unpleasant feelings—those “fifty shades of feeling crappy”—were 30 percent more flexible when regulating their emotions, less likely to drink excessively when stressed, and less likely to retaliate aggressively against someone who has hurt them.

Every experience you construct is an investment, so invest wisely. Cultivate the experiences you want to construct again in the future.

Sometimes it’s helpful to construct instances of unpleasant emotion on purpose. Think about football players who cultivate anger before a big game. They shout and jump and pump their fists in the air to get themselves in the right frame of mind for crushing the competition. By elevating their heart rates, breathing more deeply, and generally influencing their body budgets, they create a familiar physical state and categorize it in the context of the sports stadium, based on their knowledge of past situations where a particular emotion helped with performance. Their aggression also strengthens bonds with their teammates and tells their opponents to beware. This is EI at work in a somewhat unlikely place.

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.

Studies show that children in low-income homes hear 125,000 more words of discouragement than praise, while their higher-income counterparts hear 560,000 more words of praise than discouragement, all by age four.

All animals use motion to regulate their body budgets; if their brain serves up more glucose than their body needs, a quick scamper up a tree will bring their energy level back into balance. Humans are unique in that we can regulate the budget without moving, using purely mental concepts. But when this skill fails you, remember that you too are an animal.

Anytime you feel miserable, it’s because you are experiencing unpleasant affect due to interoceptive sensations. Your brain will dutifully predict causes for those sensations. Perhaps they are a message from your body, like “I have a stomachache.” Or perhaps they’re saying, “Something is seriously wrong with my life.” This is the distinction between discomfort and suffering. Discomfort is purely physical. Suffering is personal.

The head of my daughter’s karate school, Grandmaster Joe Esposito, advises his nervous students before their black belt test: “Make your butterflies fly in formation.” He is saying yes, you feel worked up right now, but don’t perceive it as nervousness: construct an instance of “Determination.”

The notion of recategorizing suffering as discomfort, or deconstructing the mental into the physical, has ancient origins. In Buddhism, some forms of meditation help to recategorize sensations as physical symptoms to reduce suffering, a practice Buddhists call deconstructing the self. Your “self” is your identity—a collection of characteristics that somehow define you, like your assorted memories, beliefs, likes, dislikes, hopes, life choices, morals, and values.

Buddhism considers the self to be a fiction and the primary cause of human suffering. Whenever you crave material things like expensive cars and clothes, or desire compliments to enhance your reputation, or seek positions of status and power to benefit your life, Buddhism says you are treating your fictional self as real (reifying the self).

the self is a plain, ordinary concept just like “Tree,” “Things That Protect You from Stinging Insects,” and “Fear.” I am quite sure you don’t go around thinking of yourself as a concept, but just go with me for a bit on this.35 If the self is a concept, then you construct instances of your self by simulation. Each instance fits your goals in the moment. Sometimes you categorize yourself by your career. Sometimes you’re a parent, or a child, or a lover. Sometimes you’re just a body.

How does your brain keep track of all the varied instances of your “Self” as an infant, a young child, an adolescent, a middle-aged adult, and an older adult? Because one part of you has remained constant: you’ve always had a body. Every concept you have ever learned includes the state of your body (as interoceptive predictions) at the time of learning. Some concepts involve a lot of interoception, such as “Sadness,” and others have less, such as “Plastic Wrap,” but they’re always in relation to the same body. So every categorization you construct—about objects in the world, other people, purely mental concepts like “Justice,” and so on—contains a little bit of you. This is the rudimentary mental basis of your sense of self.

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. As a matter of fact, a portion of the interoceptive network, called the default mode network, has been called the “self system.” It consistently increases in activity during self-reflection. If you have atrophy in your default mode network, as happens in Alzheimer’s disease, you eventually lose your sense of self.

Meditation has a potent effect on brain structure and function, though scientists have not sorted out the exact details yet. Key regions in the interoceptive and control networks are larger for meditators, and connections between these regions are stronger.

Whether you cultivate awe, meditate, or find other ways to deconstruct your experience into physical sensations, recategorization is a critical tool for mastering your emotions in the moment. When you feel bad, treat yourself like you have a virus, rather than assuming that your unpleasant feelings mean something personal.

The co-construction of experience also allows us to regulate each other’s body budgets; this is one of the great benefits that we get from living in groups. All members of a social species regulate each other’s body budgets—even bees, ants, and cockroaches. But we are the only species who can do so by teaching each other purely mental concepts, and then using them in synchrony.

You are a remarkable animal who can create purely mental concepts that influence the state of your body.

Usually, your immune system is one of the good guys in your body, since it protects you from invaders and injury. It helps you by causing inflammation, like the swelling you get from banging your finger by accident with a hammer, or from a bee sting or an infection. The inflammation comes from little proteins called proinflammatory cytokines,

When you are expecting pain, like the moment just before an injection, your brain regions that process nociception change their activity. That is, you simulate pain and therefore feel it. This phenomenon is called the nocebo effect. You’re probably more familiar with its counterpart, the placebo effect, which relieves pain using a medically ineffective treatment like a sugar pill. If you believe you’ll feel less pain, your beliefs influence your predictions and tune down your nociceptive input so you do feel less pain. Both placebos and nocebos involve chemical changes in the brain regions that process nociception. These chemicals include opioids that relieve pain and work similarly to morphine, codeine, heroin, and other opiate drugs. Opioids increase during placebo and turn down nociception, and likewise decrease during nocebo effects, earning them the moniker of “your internal medicine cabinet.”

Emotion, acute pain, chronic pain, and stress are constructed in the same networks, the same neural pathways to and from the body, and most likely the same primary sensory region of cortex, so it is completely plausible that we distinguish emotion and pain by concept—that is, via the concepts the brain applies to make sense of bodily sensations.

Anxiety sufferers, for whatever reason, have weakened connections between several key hubs in the interoceptive network, including the amygdala. Some of these hubs also happen to sit in the control network. These weakened connections likely translate into an anxious brain that is clumsy at crafting predictions to match the immediate circumstances, and that fails to learn effectively from experience.

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

The legal system has a standard called the reasonable person who represents the norms of society, that is, the social reality within your culture.

Trial by jury is considered the gold standard for fairness in a criminal case. Jurors are instructed to make decisions based only on the evidence presented. In a predicting brain, however, this is an impossible task. The jurors perceive every defendant, plaintiff, witness, judge, attorney, courtroom, and iota of evidence through the lens of their own conceptual system, which makes the idea of the impartial juror an implausible fiction. In effect, a jury is a dozen subjective perceptions that are supposed to yield one fair and objective truth.

Why is it that you can sue someone for breaking your leg but not for breaking your heart? The law considers emotional damage to be less serious than physical damage and less deserving of punishment. Think about how ironic this is. The law protects the integrity of your anatomical body but not the integrity of your mind, even though your body is just a container for the organ that makes you who you are—your brain.

The science of emotion is a convenient flashlight for illuminating some of the law’s long-held assumptions about human nature—assumptions that we now know are not respected by the architecture of the human brain. People don’t have a rational side and an emotional side, with the former regulating the latter. Judges can’t set aside affect to issue rulings by pure reason. Jurors can’t detect emotion in defendants. The most objective-looking evidence is tainted by affective realism. Criminal behavior can’t be isolated to a blob in the brain. Emotional harm is not mere discomfort but can shorten a life. In short, every perception and experience within the courtroom—or anywhere else—is a culturally infused, highly personalized belief, corrected by sensory inputs from the world, rather than the result of an unbiased process.

The theory of constructed emotion prompts us to ask whether animals have three necessary ingredients for making emotion. The first ingredient is interoception: do animals have the neural equipment to create interoceptive sensations and experience them as affect? The second is emotion concepts: can animals learn purely mental concepts like “Fear” and “Happiness,” and if so, can they predict with these concepts to categorize their sensations and make emotions like ours? Finally, there’s social reality: can animals share emotion concepts with each other so they are passed down to the next generation?

I think it’s best to assume all animals can experience affect. I realize this discussion has the potential to transport us from the land of science to the land of ethics, coming perilously close to moral issues such as pain and suffering in laboratory animals, creatures who are factory-farmed for food, and whether fish feel pain when a hook enters their mouth. The natural chemicals that relieve suffering within our own nervous systems, opioids, are found in fish, nematodes, snails, shrimps, crabs, and some insects. Even tiny flies might feel pain; we know that they can learn to avoid odors that are paired with electric shock.