How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

My long search for fingerprints in the face, body, and brain brought me to a realization that I had not expected—that we need a new theory of what emotions are and where they come from. In the chapters that follow, I introduce you to this new theory, which accounts for all the findings of the classical view as well as all the inconsistencies you’ve just seen. By moving beyond fingerprints and following the evidence, we will seek a better and more scientifically justified understanding, not only of emotion but also of ourselves.

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.

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. Philosophers

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.

The theory of constructed emotion incorporates elements of all three flavors of construction. From social construction, it acknowledges the importance of culture and concepts. From psychological construction, it considers emotions to be constructed by core systems in the brain and body. And from neuroconstruction, it adopts the idea that experience wires the brain.

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.

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 a sense, your brain is wired for delusion: through continual prediction, you experience a world of your own creation that is held in check by the sensory world. Once your predictions are correct enough, they not only create your perception and action but also explain the meaning of your sensations. This is your brain’s default mode. And marvelously, your brain does not just predict the future: it can imagine the future at will. As far as we know, no other animal brain can do that.

People call cortisol a “stress hormone,” but this is a mistake. Cortisol is released whenever you need a surge of energy, which happens to include the times when you are stressed. Its main purpose is to flood the bloodstream with glucose to provide immediate energy to cells, allowing, for example, muscle cells to stretch and contract so you can run.

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.

Your bad feeling, which is unpleasant affect, seems like evidence that your judgment was correct. But could your affect have misled you? This exact situation was the subject of a 2011 study of judges. Scientists in Israel found that judges were significantly more likely to deny parole to a prisoner if the hearing was just before lunchtime. The judges experienced their interoceptive sensations not as hunger but as evidence for their parole decision. Immediately after lunch, the judges began granting paroles with their customary frequency.43

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.

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. Sometimes affective realism is helpful, but it also shapes some of humanity’s most troubling problems. Enemies are “evil.” Women who are raped are perceived as “asking for it.” Victims of domestic violence are said to “bring it on themselves.”

People like to say that seeing is believing, but affective realism demonstrates that believing is seeing. The world often takes a backseat to your predictions. (It’s still in the car, so to speak, but is mostly a passenger.) And as you’re about to learn right now, this arrangement is not limited to vision.

If you’ve ever heard the advice, “Wait 20 minutes before you take a second helping, to see if you’re really still hungry,” now you know why it works. Whenever you make a big deposit or withdrawal from your body budget—eating, exercising, injuring yourself—you might have to wait for your brain to catch up. Marathon runners learn this; they feel fatigue early in the race when their body budget is still solvent, so they keep running until the unpleasant feeling goes away. They ignore the affective realism that insists they’re out of energy.52 Take a moment and consider what this means for your day-to-day life. You’ve just learned that the sensations you feel from your body don’t always reflect the actual state of your body.

In short, you feel what your brain believes. Affect primarily comes from prediction.

Descartes’ Error,

Carl Sagan popularized it in The Dragons of Eden, his bestselling (some would say largely fictional) account of how human intelligence evolved. Daniel Goleman employed it in his bestseller Emotional Intelligence.

For example, schadenfreude, a German emotion word meaning “pleasure from someone else’s misfortune,” has now been incorporated into English. Personally, I’d like to add the Greek word stenahoria to English, which refers to a feeling of doom, hopelessness, suffocation, and constriction. I can think of a few romantic relationships where this emotion concept would have come in handy.41

Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world. …

My friend Batja Mesquita is a Dutch cultural psychologist, and the first time I traveled to visit her in Belgium, she told me that we were sharing the emotion gezellig. Curled up in her living room, sharing wine and chocolates, she explained that this emotion means the comfort, coziness, and togetherness of being at home, with friends and loved ones. Gezellig is not an internal feeling that one person has for another but a way of experiencing oneself in the world.

Have you ever wanted to punch your boss? I would never advocate workplace violence, of course, and many bosses are terrific work partners. But sometimes we are blessed with supervisors who personify the German emotion word Backpfeifengesicht, meaning “a face in need of a fist.”

Emotions are meaning. They explain your interoceptive changes and corresponding affective feelings, in relation to the situation. They are a prescription for action. The brain systems that implement concepts, such as the interoceptive network and the control network, are the biology of meaning-making.

Emotions are real, but real in the same manner of the sound of a tree falling, the experience of red, and the distinctions between flowers and weeds. They are all constructed in the brain of a perceiver.

The distinction between “real in nature” versus “illusory” is a false dichotomy. Fear and anger are real to a group of people who agree that certain changes in the body, on the face, and so on, are meaningful as emotions. In other words, emotion concepts have social reality.

When Benazir Bhutto, the late prime minister of Pakistan, said that “You can kill a man, but not an idea,” she was proclaiming the power of social reality to reshape the world.

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. Then we transmit these concepts to each other, wiring each other’s brains for the social world. This is the core of social reality.

Words also have power. They let us place ideas directly into another person’s head.

This point is easily and frequently misunderstood, so let me be clear. I am not saying emotions are illusions. They are real, but socially real in the manner of flowers and weeds. I’m not saying that everything is relative. If that were true, civilization would fall apart. 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.

As a real-world example, pick any extended conflict in the world: Israelis versus Palestinians, Hutus versus Tutsis, Bosnians versus Serbs, Sunni versus Shia. Climbing out on a limb here, I’d like to suggest that no living member of these groups is at fault for the anger that they feel toward each other, since the conflicts in question began many generations ago. But each individual today does bear some responsibility for continuing the conflict, because it’s possible for each person to change their concepts and therefore their behavior. No particular conflict is predetermined by evolution. Conflicts persist due to social circumstances that wire the brains of the individuals who participate. Someone must take responsibility to change these circumstances and concepts. Who’s going to do it, if not the people themselves?

As philosopher Thomas Kuhn wrote about the structure of scientific revolutions: “To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.”

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.

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.

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

The U.S. Marine Corps has a motto that embodies this principle: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.”

According to Deborah Barrett, author of Paintracking (and my sister-in-law), when you can categorize pain as physical, the pain need not be a personal catastrophe.31

Deconstructing the self for a moment allows you to reduce the size of your affective niche so concepts like “Reputation,” “Power,” and “Wealth” become unnecessary.39

Your choice of words has a huge impact on this process, as those words shape other people’s predictions.

My view is that some major illnesses considered distinct and “mental” are all rooted in a chronically unbalanced body budget and unbridled inflammation. We categorize and name them as different disorders, based on context, much like we categorize and name the same bodily changes as different emotions.

The World Health Organization projects that by 2030, depression will cause more premature deaths and years of disability than cancer, stroke, heart disease, war, or accidents. Those are pretty dreadful outcomes for a “mental” illness.29

At the very least, these results should help spread the word that depression is a brain disease and not just a shortage of happy thoughts.

Choice bestows responsibility.

The legal system, with its essentialized view of the mind and brain, mixes up volition—whether your brain actually played a role in controlling your behavior—and awareness of volition—whether you experience having a choice.

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.14

“Sensitivity to one’s intuitive and passionate responses, and awareness of the range of human experience, is therefore not only an inevitable but a desirable part of the judicial process, an aspect more to be nurtured than feared.”

Firestein opens Ignorance with an old proverb, “It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat.”