In How Emotions Are Made (2017), Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that emotions aren’t universal reflexes but predictive categories shaped by context, culture, and language.
Our emotions, according to the classical view, are artifacts of evolution, having long ago been advantageous for survival, and are now a fixed component of our biological nature. (xi)
Emotions are thus thought to be a kind of brute reflex, very often at odds with our rationality. (xi)
This kind of internal battle between emotion and reason is one of the great narratives of Western civilization. It helps define us as humans. Without rationality, you are merely an emotional beast. (xi)
The American legal system assumes that emotions are part of an inherent animal nature and cause us to perform foolish and even violent acts unless we control them with our rational thoughts. (xii)
People vary tremendously in how they differentiate their emotional experiences (emotional granularity). (3)
On different occasions, in different contexts, in different studies, within the same individual and across different individuals, the same emotion category involves different bodily responses. (15)
Despite tremendous time and investment, research has not revealed a consistent bodily fingerprint for even a single emotion. (15)
An emotion is not a thing but a category of instances, and any emotion category has tremendous variety. (16)
In population thinking (as proposed by Darwin) a category, such as a species of animal, is a population of unique members who vary from one another, with no fingerprint at their core. (16)
Brain regions like the amygdala are routinely important to emotion, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient for emotion. (19)
We found that no brain region contained the fingerprint for any single emotion. (22)
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. (23)
Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it. (27)
Construction treats the world like a sheet of pastry, and your concepts are cookie cutters that carve boundaries, not because the boundaries are natural, but because they’re useful or desirable. (28)
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. (30)
Through prediction and correction, your brain continually creates and revises your mental model of the world. (62)
Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout the day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features — pleasant/unpleasant, calm/agitated. (72)
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. (75)
Affect leads us to believe that objects and people in the world are inherently negative or positive. (75)
A bad feeling doesn’t always mean something is wrong. It just means you’re taxing your body’s budget. (76)
Affect is not just necessary for wisdom; it’s also irrevocably woven into the fabric of every decision. (80)
If the idea of the rational human mind is so toxic to the economy, and it’s not backed up by neuroscience, why does it persist? Because we humans have long believed that rationality makes us special in the animal kingdom. (81)
When you look at a rainbow, your brain downplays the variations within each color category and magnifies the differences between the categories, causing you to perceive bands of color. (84)
Categorization constructs every perception, thought, memory. (86)
Philosophers and scientists define a category as a collection of objects, events, or actions that are grouped together as equivalent for some purpose. They define a concept as a mental representation of a category. (87)
Categories, like cars and birds, are said to exist in the world, whereas concepts are said to exist in your brain, but if you think about it for a moment, who is creating the category? (87)
Categories, like concepts, exist in your brain. (87)
A prototype need not be found in nature, yet the brain can construct one when needed. (89)
You are not finding similarities in the world but creating them. (92)
Emotion concepts are goal-based (category defined by goal). (92)
Babies are born able to hear the differences between all sounds in all languages, but by the time they reach one year of age, statistical learning has reduced this ability to the sounds contained only in the languages they have heard spoken by live humans. (95)
Humans are not the only animals that learn statistically: non-human primates, dogs, and rats can do it, among others. Even single-celled animals engage in statistical learning and then prediction: they not only respond to changes in their environment but anticipate them. (96)
Words encourage infants to form goal-based concepts by inspiring them to represent things as equivalent. (98)
Their mental model of the world becomes similar to ours, so we can communicate, share experiences, and perceive the same world. (99)
Words invite infants to equate wildly dissimilar objects. (100)
I did not see a snake and categorize it. I did not feel the urge to run and categorize it. I did not feel my heart pounding and categorize it. I categorized sensations in order to see the snake, to feel my heart pounding, and to run. (109)
The seeds of emotion are planted in infancy, as you hear an emotion word (say, “annoyed”) over and over in highly varied situations. (110)
Each of your eyes transmits millions of tiny pieces of information to your brain in a moment, and you simply see “a book.” (116)
Emotions are meaning. They explain your interoceptive changes and corresponding affective feelings, in relation to the situation. They are a prescription for action. (126)
You need an emotion concept in order to experience or perceive the associated emotion. (141)
Words represent concepts, and concepts are tools of culture. (146)
In Czech culture, the concept of “Litost” is said to be untranslatable but roughly, “torment over one’s own misery combined with the desire for revenge.” (147)
The Japanese emotion concept “Arigata-meiwaku” is felt when someone has done you a favor that you didn’t want from them, and which may have caused difficulty for you, but you’re required to be grateful anyway. (147)
English has been a conceptual prison for the science of emotion. (148)
You absolutely do have choices about what you expose yourself to and therefore what you learn, which creates the concepts that ultimately drive your actions, whether they feel willful or not. (154)
The belief in essences is called essentialism. It presupposes that certain categories each have a true reality or nature. Within each category, the members are thought to share a deep, underlying property (an essence) that causes them to be similar, even if they have some superficial differences. (158)
Essentialism encourages people to believe that their senses reveal objective boundaries in nature. (158)
Words invite you to believe in an essence. (162)
The very words that help us to learn concepts can also trick us into believing that their categories reflect firm boundaries in nature. (163)
People who exhibit higher emotional granularity go to the doctor less frequently, use medication less frequently, and spend fewer days hospitalized for illness. (181)
People pay good money to therapists and life coaches to help them reframe situations, to find the most useful categorization in the service of action. (182)
Students achieve higher scores when they recategorize anxiety as merely a sign the body is coping. (189)
If you can categorize your discomfort as helpful, say, when you’re exercising hard, you can cultivate greater stamina. (189)
In Buddhism, some forms of meditation help to recategorize sensations as physical symptoms to reduce suffering. (190)
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. (192)
Parents who ask a child, “are you upset?” instead of the more general question, “how are you feeling?” are influencing the answer, co-constructing emotion and honing the child’s concepts toward being upset. (197)
Your perceptions of others are just guesses and not facts. (197)
Our new view of human nature, inspired by the theory of constructed emotion, dissolves the boundaries between mental and physical, including where illness is concerned. (199)
Your body budget fluctuates normally throughout the day, as your brain anticipates your body’s needs and shifts around your budgetary resources like oxygen, glucose, salt, and water. (200)
Pain is constructed in the same way emotions are made. (205)
Distinguishing between pain, stress, and emotion is a form of emotional granularity. (207)
It’s best to assume all animals can experience affect. (256)
Chimps and other primates don’t appear to have emotion concepts or social reality. (263)
Dogs might not feel fear, anger, and other emotions, but they do experience pleasure, distress, attachment (affective feelings). (268)
Book Notes
I love the concept of emotional granularity (each of us has a unique taxonomy of emotion) and the insight that words are categories that not only specify but also shape our feelings. I wonder how many colors of the feel wheel I have yet to experience directly.
It’s helpful to split affect (underlying physiological sensations) from emotion (labels and stories to define and explain sensations), but Lisa Feldman Barrett takes this idea too far.
We do not need words to feel the feelings. And, all animals have emotions. To suggest that dogs can’t experience fear or anger because they don’t use language is absurd.
The influence of words on emotions is subtle. Anger needs no label. But, if curious, we might better see and shape our anger by identifying that we are cranky or indignant.
As I work on Natural Information Architecture, I’m sharing notes and quotes from my sources of inspiration and provocation. As always, your questions and suggestions are welcome.