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July 27, 2018 - March 9, 2019
Darwin’s most famous book, On the Origin of Species, triggered a paradigm shift that transformed biology into a modern science. His greatest scientific achievement, so nicely summed up by the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, was freeing biology from “the paralyzing grip of essentialism.” Regarding emotion, however, Darwin made an inexplicable about-face thirteen years later by writing Expression, a book riddled with essentialism. In doing so, he abandoned his remarkable innovations and returned to essentialism’s paralyzing grip, at least where emotions are concerned.8
It is equally baffling, not to mention ironic, that the classical view of emotion is based on the very essentialism that Darwin is famous for vanquishing in biology. The classical view explicitly labels itself as “evolutionary” and assumes that emotions and their expressions are products of natural selection, yet natural selection is completely absent from Darwin’s thinking on emotion. Any essentialist view that wraps itself in the cloak of Darwin is demonstrating a profound misunderstanding of Darwin’s central ideas about evolution.
James actually wrote that each instance of emotion, not each category of emotion, comes from a unique bodily state. This is a wildly different statement. It means you can tremble in fear, jump in fear, freeze in fear, scream in fear, gasp in fear, hide in fear, attack in fear, and even laugh in the face of fear. Each occurrence of fear is associated with a different set of internal changes and sensations. The classical misinterpretation of James represents a 180-degree inversion of his meaning, as if he were claiming the existence of emotion essences, when ironically he was arguing against
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philosopher named John Dewey. He came up with his own theory of emotion by grafting Darwin’s essentialist views from Expression onto James’s anti-essentialist ideas, even though they are fundamentally incompatible. The result was a Frankenstein’s monster of a theory that inverted James’s meaning by assigning an essence to each emotion category. For the finishing touch, Dewey named his concoction after James, calling it “the James-Lange theory of emotion.”* Today, Dewey’s role in this jumble is forgotten, and countless publications attribute his theory to James.
The simplest reason is that essentialism is intuitive. We experience our own emotions as automatic reactions, so it’s easy to believe that they spring forth from ancient, dedicated parts of the brain. We also see emotions in blinks, furrowed brows, and other muscle twitches, and we hear emotions in the pitch and lilt of voices, without any sense of effort or agency. Therefore, it’s also easy to believe that we’ve been engineered by nature to recognize emotional displays and programmed to act on them. That’s a dubious conclusion, however. Millions of people around the world can instantly,
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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.15
That is, the word “sadness” guides you to create an emotion concept, which is a good thing. But the word also invites you to believe in a reason for that sameness: some deep, unobservable, or even unknowable quality that is responsible for their equivalence, giving them their true identity. That is, words invite you to believe in an essence, and that process is conceivably the psychological origin of essentialism.
“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.16
Emotion words reinforce the fiction that the equivalences we create are objectively real in the world, waiting to be discovered.17
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.
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.
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.
Expression covered all three parts of the classical view of human nature: that animals and humans share universal essences of emotion, that emotions seek expression in the face and body outside of our control, and that they are triggered by the outside world.
Broca localized the “inner beast” in what he believed to be an ancient “lobe” deep within the human brain. He named it le grand lobe limbique, or “the limbic lobe.” Broca did not brand his supposed lobe as the seat of emotion (actually, he thought it housed the sense of smell and other primitive survival circuitry), but he did treat limbic tissue as a single, unified entity, laying the first stone on a path toward essentializing it as the home of emotion. Over the next century, Broca’s limbic lobe morphed into a unified “limbic system” for emotion, guided by other believers in the classical
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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. Accordingly, it’s not the home of emotion in the brain, which is unsurprising because no single brain area is dedicated to emotion.
In Ancient Eastern philosophy, traditional Buddhism enumerated more than fifty discrete mental essences, called dharmas, some of which bear a striking resemblance to the so-called basic emotions of the classical view. Centuries later, a radical revision of Buddhism recast the dharmas as human constructions dependent on concepts.29
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.
In caricature, the classical view says “nature” and construction says “nurture,” and the result has been a wrestling match between straw men.
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.” To a behaviorist, “happiness” equaled smiling, “sadness”
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If your brain operates by prediction and construction and rewires itself through experience, then it’s no overstatement to say that if you change your current experiences today, you can change who you become tomorrow. The next few chapters delve into these implications in the areas of emotional intelligence, health, law, and our relationships with other animals.40
Modern culture, unfortunately, is engineered to screw up your body budget. Many of the products sold in supermarkets and chain restaurants are pseudo-food loaded with budget-warping refined sugar and bad fats. Schools and jobs require you to wake early and go to sleep late, leaving over 40 percent of Americans between the ages of thirteen and sixty-four regularly sleep-deprived, a condition that can lead to chronic misbudgeting and possibly depression and other mental illnesses. Advertisers play on your insecurities, suggesting you’ll be judged badly by your friends unless you buy the right
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When people feel crappy on a regular basis, quite a few of them self-medicate. Thirty percent of all medications consumed in the United States are taken to manage some form of distress. For these sufferers, their predictions are regularly not calibrated to their bodies’ actual expenditures, likely because their brain is misestimating the cost. So they feel miserable and take medication, or they turn to alcohol or certain street drugs like opiates.3
After attending to your body budget, the next best thing you can do for emotional health is to beef up your concepts, otherwise known as “becoming more emotionally intelligent.” People with a classical view mindset think about emotional intelligence as “detecting” other people’s emotions “accurately,” or experiencing happiness and avoiding sadness “at the right time.” With our new understanding of emotions, however, we can think about emotional intelligence in a new way. “Happiness” and “Sadness” are each populations of diverse instances. Therefore, emotional intelligence (EI) is about getting
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Goleman’s books offer a lot of reasonable, practical advice, but they don’t properly explain why his advice works. Their scientific justification is heavily influenced by the outdated “triune brain” model—if you regulate your alleged emotional inner beast effectively, then you’re emotionally intelligent.11
Emotional intelligence is better characterized in terms of concepts. Suppose you knew only two emotion concepts, “Feeling Awesome” and “Feeling Crappy.” Whenever you experienced emotion or perceived someone else as emotional, you could categorize only with this broad brush. Such a person cannot be very emotionally intelligent. In contrast, if you could distinguish finer meanings within “Awesome” (happy, content, thrilled, relaxed, joyful, hopeful, inspired, prideful, adoring, grateful, blissful . . .), and fifty shades of “Crappy” (angry, aggravated, alarmed, spiteful, grumpy, remorseful,
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What I’m describing is emotional granularity, the phenomenon (described in chapter 1) that some people construct finer-grained emotional experiences than others do. People who make highly granular experiences are emotion experts: they issue predictions and construct insta...
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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.
Therefore, the more finely grained your vocabulary, the more precisely your predicting brain can calibrate your budget to your body’s needs. In fact, people who exhibit higher emotional granularity go to the doctor less frequently, use medication less frequently, and spend fewer days hospitalized for illness. This is not magic; it’s what happens when you leverage the porous boundary between the social and the physical.13
So, learn as many new words as possible. Read books that are outside of your comfort zone, or listen to thought-provoking audio content like National Public Radio. Don’t be satisfied with “happy”: seek out and use more specific words like “ecstatic,” “blissful,” and “inspired.” Learn the difference between “discouraged” or “dejected” versus generically “sad.” As you build up the associated concepts, you’ll become able to construct your experiences more finely. And don’t limit yourself to words in your native language. Pick another language and seek out its concepts for which your language has
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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,
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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.
Each time you attend to positive things, you tweak your conceptual system, reinforcing concepts about those positive events and making them salient in your mental model of the world. It’s even better if you write about your experiences because, again, words lead to concept development, which will help you predict new moments to cultivate positivity.18
In contrast, when you ruminate about something unpleasant, you cause fluctuations in your body budget. Rumination is a vicious cycle: each time you dwell on (say) a recent breakup of a relationship, you add another instance to predict with, which expands your opportunity to ruminate. Certain concepts about your breakup, such as your final shouting match, or the look on your lover’s face as he or she walked away for the last time, become entrenched in your model of the world. These concepts, as patterns of neural activity, get easier and easier for your brain to re-create, like well-trodden
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If you are a parent, you can help your children develop the skills to become emotionally intelligent. Speak to them about emotions and other mental states as early as you can, even if you think they are too young to understand. Remember that infants develop concepts well before you realize it is happening. So look children straight in the eye, widen your eyes to grab their attention, and speak about bodily sensations and movements in terms of emotions and other mental states.
My husband and I never used “baby talk” with our daughter but spoke to her in fully formed, adult sentences from the time she was born, pausing afterward to let her “respond” in whatever way she could. People around us in the supermarket thought we were crazy, but we did wind up with an emotionally intelligent teenager who actually talks to adults.
In general, children with richer conceptual systems for emotion are poised for greater academic success. In one study conducted by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, schoolchildren were taught to broaden their knowledge and use of emotion words for twenty to thirty minutes per week. The results were improved social behavior and academic performance. Classrooms that employed this educational model were also better organized and were rated by blind observers as having better instructional support for students.22
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.
The same principles apply when you give your children feedback about their behavior. 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. That means children from lower-income homes have a more taxed body budget but fewer resources to deal with it.24
The simplest approach, believe it or not, is to move your body. 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. Get up and move around, even if you don’t feel like it. Turn on some music and dance around your home. Take a walk in a park. Why does this work? Moving your body can change your
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When changes in movement and context fail to help you master your emotions, the next big thing to try is recategorizing how you feel. This will require some explanation. 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
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With practice, you can learn to deconstruct an affective feeling into its mere physical sensations, rather than letting those sensations be a filter through which you view the world. You can dissolve anxiety into a fast-beating heart. Once you can deconstruct into physical sensations, then you can recategorize them in some other way, using your rich set of concepts. Perhaps that pounding in your chest is not anxiety but anticipation, or even excitement.
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.”
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. The more you do
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People who live with chronic pain, for example, commonly have catastrophic thoughts that appear to impact their lives even more than the intensity of the pain does. When they learn to separate their physical sensations from their unpleasant affect, they may use fewer opiate drugs and crave them less. This is a significant finding considering that nearly 6 percent of Americans use prescription medication for chronic pain each year, mostly addictive opiates that are now known to enhance pain symptoms with long-term use.
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). These material concerns may bring immediate gratification and pleasure but they also entrap you, like golden handcuffs, and cause persistent suffering, which we would call prolonged unpleasant affect. To a Buddhist, a self is worse than a passing physical
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So in my view, the self is a plain, ordinary concept just like “Tree,” “Things That Protect You from Stinging Insects,” and “Fear.”
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. 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.
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,
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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
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A Buddhist mindset would describe these feelings as the suffering that results from clinging to material wealth, reputation, power, and security in an effort to reify the self. In the language of the theory of constructed emotion, wealth, reputation, and the rest are firmly within your affective niche, impacting your body budget, which ultimately leads you to construct instances of unpleasant emotions. 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
