How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

The theory of constructed emotion might not fit the way you typically experience emotion and, in fact, may well violate your deepest beliefs about how the mind works, where humans come from, and why we act and feel as we do. But the theory consistently predicts and explains the scientific evidence on emotion, including plenty of evidence that the classical view struggles to make sense of.

Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious.

A skilled interior designer can look at five shades of blue and distinguish azure, cobalt, ultramarine, royal blue, and cyan. My husband, on the other hand, would call them all blue. My students and I had discovered a similar phenomenon for emotions, which I described as emotional granularity.

different behaviors have different patterns of heart rate, breathing, and so on to support their unique movements.28 Despite tremendous time and investment, research has not revealed a consistent bodily fingerprint for even a single emotion.

Yes, the amygdala was showing an increase in activity, but only in certain situations, like when the eyes of a face were staring directly at the viewer. If the eyes were gazing off to the side, the neurons in the amygdala barely changed their firing rates. Also, if test subjects viewed the same stereotyped fear pose over and over again, their amygdala activation rapidly tapered off. If the amygdala truly housed the circuit for fear, then this habituation should not occur—the circuit should fire in an obligatory way whenever it is presented with a triggering “fear” stimulus. From these contrary results, it became clear to me—and ultimately to many other scientists—that the amygdala is not the home of fear in the brain.41

I hope you’ve caught the pattern emerging here: variation is the norm. Emotion fingerprints are a myth. If we want to truly understand emotions, we must start taking that variation seriously. We must consider that an emotion word, like “anger,” does not refer to a specific response with a unique physical fingerprint but to a group of highly variable instances that are tied to specific situations. What we colloquially call emotions, such as anger, fear, and happiness, are better thought of as emotion categories, because each is a collection of diverse instances.

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.

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.

In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion.

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. …

In the theory of constructed emotion, a category of emotion such as sadness, fear, or anger has no distinct brain location, and each instance of emotion is a whole-brain state to be studied and understood. Therefore we ask how, not where, emotions are made. The more neutral question, “How does the brain create an instance of fear?” does not presume a neural fingerprint behind the scenes, only that experiences and perceptions of fear are real and worthy of study.

Bread has its own emergent properties, like “crustiness” and “chewiness,” that are not present in its ingredients alone.

Holism, emergent properties, and degeneracy are the very antithesis of fingerprints.

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. Your body-budgeting regions also make you breathe more deeply to get more oxygen into your bloodstream and dilate your arteries to get that oxygen to your muscles more quickly so your body can move. All of this internal motion is accompanied by interoceptive sensations, though you are not wired to experience them precisely. So, your interoceptive network controls your body, budgets your energy resources, and represents your internal sensations, all at the same time.

As it turns out, people spend at least half their waking hours simulating rather than paying attention to the world around them, and this pure simulation strongly drives their feelings.33

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.

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.

In these moments of affective realism, we experience affect as a property of an object or event in the outside world, rather than as our own experience. “I feel bad, therefore you must have done something bad. You are a bad person.” In my lab, when we manipulate people’s affect without their knowing, it influences whether they experience a stranger as trustworthy, competent, attractive, or likable, and they even see the person’s face differently.

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.)

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

degeneracy (different sets of neurons producing the same outcome).

Your brain was not programmed by nature to recognize facial expressions and other so-called emotional displays and then to reflexively act on them. The emotional information is in your perception.

I’d like to add the Greek word stenahoria to English, which refers to a feeling of doom, hopelessness, suffocation, and constriction.

But sometimes we are blessed with supervisors who personify the German emotion word Backpfeifengesicht, meaning “a face in need of a fist.”

“Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”

By virtue of the fact that we share a concept, my movement initiates a prediction in your brain . . . a uniquely human brand of magic. It is categorization as a cooperative act.

It takes more than one brain to create a mind.

If you grow up in a society full of anger or hate, you can’t be blamed for having the associated concepts, but as an adult, you can choose to educate yourself and learn additional concepts. It’s certainly not an easy task, but it is doable. This is another basis for my frequent claim, “You are an architect of your experience.”

It’s easy to come up with reasons why an experiment did not detect an essence: “we haven’t looked everywhere yet,” or “it’s inside this complicated biological structure we can’t see into yet,” or “our tools today aren’t sufficiently powerful to find the essence, but one day they will be.” These hopeful thoughts are heartfelt but logically impossible to prove false. Essentialism inoculates itself against counterevidence.

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.

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.” The devil is in the details, and the details give us the theory of constructed emotion.

Recategorization is a tool of the emotion expert. The more concepts that you know and the more instances that you can construct, the more effectively you can recategorize in this manner to master your emotions and regulate your behavior. For instance, if you’re about to take a test and feel affectively worked up, you might categorize your feeling as harmful anxiety (“Oh no, I’m doomed!”) or as helpful anticipation (“I’m energized and ready to go!”). 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.”

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.

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.

Complexity is a metric to describe any structure that efficiently creates and transmits information. A system with high complexity can create many new patterns by combining bits and pieces of old patterns.

These incoming sensations, like any experience, can rewire your brain. So you’re not only an architect of your experience, you’re also an electrician.

Your experiences are not a window into reality. Rather, your brain is wired to model your world, driven by what is relevant for your body budget, and then you experience that model as reality. Your moment-to-moment experience may feel like one discrete mental state followed by another, like beads on a string, but as you have learned in this book, your brain activity is continuous throughout intrinsic, core networks. Your experiences might seem to be triggered by the world outside the skull, but they’re formed in a storm of prediction and correction. Ironically, each of us has a brain that creates a mind that misunderstands itself.

Certainty leads us to miss other explanations. I’m not saying that we are dumb or ill-equipped to grasp reality. I’m saying there is no single reality to grasp.

A healthy dose of skepticism yields a worldview that is different from the genetically just world of the classical view. Your place in society is not random but neither is it inevitable.

Progress in science isn’t always about finding the answers; it’s about asking better questions. Today, those questions have forced a paradigm shift in the science of emotion, and more broadly in the science of mind and brain.