What are emotions?
The classical view says your brain is off, then something happens and a defined set of neurons fires to cause an emotion. So, say a snake slithers towards you – it supposedly triggers a built-in circuit for fear: your heart races, you sweat and you make a specific, universal facial expression that everybody in the world can recognise.
Every time you feel fear, the same neurons produce the same reaction, and that’s true not just for you but for every other healthy human in the world.
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So in the traditional picture, emotions are hardwired in all of us?
Right. Definitely happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. It is a very commonsensical view.
This view has held for nearly a century, but you say it is flawed. Why?
The problem is the data don’t bear it out. People don’t generally scowl when they are angry, they don’t pout when they’re sad, and they don’t widen their eyes when afraid.
I lost faith in the classical view at graduate school. I tried to reproduce a finding that had been published a number of times, which should reliably lead people to experience anxiety or depression. In eight experiments over three years, I was never able to replicate it.
When I looked closely at my data, I realised that my subjects weren’t distinguishing between anxiety and depression. So I figured I would just measure emotion objectively – without asking how they felt. I thought it would be straightforward because everybody knew that different emotions have unique facial and physical signals.
But it didn’t work. If you look at the literature on facial expressions, most studies that support universality use a kind of psychological cheat – experimenters might force subjects to pick from a small set of emotion words when shown a facial expression, or unwittingly train subjects in the appropriate emotion concepts.
My lab and others have shown that if you remove these cues, say, by asking subjects what a face means without a list of words to choose from, the whole effect falls apart. Studies of cardiovascular changes, brain imaging and measurements of the neurons themselves consistently call the classical view into doubt.
So what really goes on in our brains when we experience emotion?
Put simply, your brain constantly takes in information and tries to make sense of it to regulate your body appropriately. What caused this flash of light, your brain asks, or this change in air pressure, this ache or tightness? What are they most similar to from the past? This constant stream of guesses produces your feelings.
How does emotion arise from this process?
When the sensations from your body are very intense, your brain categorises them as an emotion. It does this using concepts. To understand how this works, think about money. It is a human-created concept: those pieces of paper have no objective value, but we impose a function on them that they would not have otherwise. Emotions are similarly made with concepts. If I smile at you, it has a meaning for both of us as happiness because we have learned and agree on that meaning.
Your brain makes an emotion by using learned concepts to make predictions and give your sensations meaning. It constructs a concept of fear in the moment and predicts that your change in heart rate, the feeling of tension and the urge to run are caused by fear. If you have anticipated correctly, then fear becomes the explanation for why your body is in this state. Sensations from your body and physical actions are not intrinsically emotional. They become part of an emotion when your brain makes them meaningful.
So fear and happiness only exist because we, as a society, decide they do?
Yes. Happiness exists because we impose functions on smiling, on bodily changes and on certain other behaviours. We have collective agreements about those functions.
Are you saying that you have to have a concept of an emotion in order to feel it?
Tahitians don’t have a concept for sadness, but they will still have that low, draggy, affective feeling that Westerners often construct sadness out of – though we could also construct fatigue, boredom and even hunger from it. If a Tahitian mother loses a child, she feels physical sickness. She feels the loss but there is no guarantee that she feels it the same way as someone from a different culture.
The Dutch have a concept called gezellig that is best translated as cosiness, comfort and a feeling of togetherness. It is not about feeling close to another person – it is more a way of experiencing a situation. The first time I felt gezellig, my brain combined conceptual knowledge of “close friend”, “love” and “delight” with a touch of “comfort” and “well-being”.
But the idea that emotions are hardwired and universal underlies many things…
Very much so. The example that really gets me is the training of autistic children to recognise the stereotyped expressions stipulated by the classical view. This training is supposed to improve children’s social functioning. But nothing changes for these kids because these facial expressions don’t generalise outside the lab.
Do other projects face similar problems?
Huge amounts of money are being spent on technology rooted in the idea that facial expressions are universal. For example, the US Transportation Security Administration spent $900 million on a method of reading faces and bodies that is rooted in the classical view. It didn’t work.
Microsoft and Apple are trying to develop emotion-detection tools using the same stereotypes. They are going to fail, and when they do, instead of realising that they were trying to measure the wrong thing, they will probably abandon the entire enterprise. It’s really unfortunate, because their methods could be used to read emotion by learning the emotional vocabulary of individuals.
What about the common trope that women are more emotional than men?
This belief is pervasive in Western cultures. But when you measure people on a moment-to-moment basis or look at physiological changes, you don’t see any evidence for it. Some experiments find that women move their faces more than men – not just for emotion, but as a baseline. Given that the classical view of emotion puts so much importance on facial expressions, you could hypothesise that it helps to maintain the stereotype.
And this stereotype is extremely damaging – there is evidence that when you refer to a woman as emotional, it usually means too emotional. So there’s a catch-22: if a woman is emotional, she’s seen as childish or out of control. If she’s not emotional enough – she defies the stereotype – she’s seen as a cold, untrustworthy bitch. For men the rules are not so strict. This is a real problem in courtrooms. There are people who can’t get a fair trial because jurors – and judges – accept the stereotype and believe that, generally, emotions can be easily read.
“I have a word for the feeling you get after eating an entire bag of potato chips”
Does this view have other legal implications?
Much of the law is rooted in a Cartesian view of the mind, that we are basically animals at our core, wrapped in the safe rationality of cognition. The animalistic brain contains automatic emotional reactions that you try to control with cognition. But you don’t always succeed – and in this view you are less responsible for your behaviour when it has been hijacked by emotion. A crime of passion implies that your actions were caused by emotion, and this affects how people are sentenced.
If emotions are constructed, can we build them in different ways?
Yes. You are an architect of your own experience. Your experience in the here and now is constructed out of your past, because your brain can take bits and pieces of that past and recombine them in new ways. I’m not saying you can snap your fingers and change how you feel. But the horizon of your control is much bigger, much broader than you think.
For example: a student preparing for a test will be in a high arousal state. They might experience this arousal as anxiety, but they could learn to recategorise it as determination, which research shows will allow them to perform better on tests. This recategorisation can reduce stress, so they feel physically better too.
Can I really train my brain to feel differently?
You can cultivate experiences and curate concepts that give your brain the ingredients to make emotions more flexibly later. A great resource is emotion concepts from other cultures. For example, Japan has arigata-meiwaku, the negative feeling when someone does you a favour that you didn’t want, are perhaps inconvenienced by, yet must still be grateful for. Learn this concept and your brain can make emotions with it.
You can also create new emotion concepts in concert with others. In my house, we have “chiplessness”, which is what I feel when I finish something I really enjoyed but probably should not have done, like eating an entire bag of potato chips. It combines guilt and disappointment with a hint of desire.
When you feel angry or sad, or dejected, or chipless, you have a repertoire of things you can do. The more emotion concepts you know – not just one anger but many angers, each one fitting a particular situation – then the better you will be at regulating your emotions. Concepts are tools for living.
It is also important to maintain your physical health, because your brain uses body sensations to help make emotions. If you tax your body too much, the emotions you create are more negative.
What advice do you have for parents?
Research shows that teaching kids emotion words expands their vocabulary of concepts and improves academic performance. This may be in part because a larger vocabulary tunes emotions more finely to the situation – being “frustrated” or “irritated” instead of just “angry” – and that improves self-control.
Why has the idea that emotions are universal lasted so long?
Universality props up a particular theory of human nature – that there is only one kind of human mind with parts that we all share, like anger, sadness, fear and so on. But there’s a porous boundary between what’s outside and inside your head. Brains wire themselves to the physical and social world, making many kinds of minds. We are responsible for the social reality that helps to create the minds of the next generation.
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Lisa Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University in Boston. Her book How Emotions are Made: The secret life of the brain (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is out this month
This article appeared in print under the headline “Be the architect of your emotions”
