Introduction
Historic thinkers from Plato to Darwin believed that emotion
is an in-nate human reaction, an automatic reflex that must be
governed by our powers of reason. Lisa Feldman Barrett calls
this understanding the classical view of emotion.But neuroscience
is increasingly suggesting a new way of thinking about emotion,
which Barrett calls the constructed theory of emotion, may
be more accurate. This theory is based on evidence that we learn
our emotions; that is to say, our brain constructs emotional
experi-ences as part of a larger process of using concepts
to efficiently pre-dict how we should act and how much
energy we will need.
The Search for Emotion’s ‘Fingerprints’
In the 1960s, a group of psychologists led by Silvan S.
Tomkins cre-ated a set of photographs of carefully posed
facial expressions repre-senting basic emotions such as
fear, happiness, and surprise. They used their photographs
to test emotion recognition around the world.
When even members of an isolated tribe in Papua New
Guinea were able to correctly identify emotions using this basic
emotion method, the psychologists concluded that the language
of emotion must beuniversal.
Experiments since then, however, have revealed a curious counter-
point. Studies in facial electromyography (EMG), which measures the
movement of muscles in faces, have shown that expressions actually
vary a great deal; there is no one pattern that corresponds to one par-
ticular emotion. Other studies have highlighted the importance of con-
text: The same expression can be interpreted as anger or fear or dis-
gust, depending on the scenario within the photo.
Studies that measure brain activity and nervous system responses
like changes to heart rate or sweating produce a similar diversity of re-
sults. This is not to say that the human body doesn’t display mean-
ingful signs of emotion, just that these signs vary from person to per-
son. There is no one “fingerprint” that marks each emotion.
Emotions Are Constructed
If you’re served a pink creamy substance and are told that it’s ice
cream, you will probably experience disgust if it tastes like fish. If
you’re told it’s salmon mousse, however, you’re much more likely to
enjoy it. Taste is not an objective experience — it’s mediated by con-
cepts and expectations in the brain. Other senses work the same way.
Food that you would otherwise find appetizing will trigger an expe-
rience of disgust, for example, if you see it smeared on a diaper. A styl-
ized, partly abstracted image may look like just a bunch of blobs until
someone offers your brain a meaningful concept to apply to it, at
which point you’ll never be able to go back to seeing just a bunch of
blobs.
Evidence suggests that your brain processes internal sensations in
the same way. Depending on the context, you can experience an ache
in your stomach as anxiety, sickness, longing, or hunger, for example.
One study secretly injected participants with adrenaline and placedthem
in different contexts. Depending on the context, they experienced
the adrenaline rush as anger or as joy.
An instance of emotion is an interpretation, an application of mean-
ing to an experience. It is constructed based on a variety of cues —
physiological, experiencial, or social.
The Myth of Universal Emotions
The results of the basic emotion method studies — that emotions are
universal — have been called into question for a variety of reasons.
The original tests were mostly conducted by showing subjects a photo
of a face and asking them to pick from a list of six basic emotions —
happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise.
But when the list of emotions was removed from the test and re-
placed by an open-ended question like What is this emotion?, response
accuracy plummeted.
Studies among the Himba tribe of Namibia found that test subjects
grouped photos of faces not according to concepts of emotion, but
according to concepts of action — laughing, looking, etc.
These and other studies show that a human being only recognizes a
specific emotion in a face if they already have a concept of that emo-
tion linked to that facial expression. Consider the Romans, for exam-
ple, who didn’t smile to show happiness — there is no word
for“smile” in Latin. They showed happiness through other signals, and
so would be unlikely to recognize happiness in a smiling face.
The Origin of Feeling
If you feel relaxed, tired, or curious, you may experience those states
as pleasant or unpleasant, but they are not emotions. Scientists call
these basic feelings your affect, and they are generated by your brain’s
internal monitoring process, called interoception.
Contrary to the classical view of emotion, the human brain doesn’t
lie dormant until triggered by a relevant stimulus (such as a fear-
inducing snake). The brain’s neurons are constantly stimulating one
another. This intrinsic brain activity regulates your basic body functions
and is the source of dreams, but its most fundamental job is to make
predictions. Is that rustling in the grass a snake or the wind? Is that
person walking toward you a friendly co-worker or your intimidating
boss? Based on those predictions, your brain allocates the resources it
thinks you will need.
It turns out that every part of the brain that has been labeled as the
“home of emotion” is actually where this body-budgeting happens,
where decisions are made based on predictions to keep the body in
good health.
Every decision we make is guided in the same way by our intero-
ceptive network. There is no objective reasoning brain process versus
emotional brain process.
Concepts, Goals, and Words
The brain receives an overwhelming amount of sensory data. It makes
sense of this data by conceptualizing them. Newborn babies don’t
have the ability to recognize emotions, or even faces, but they do have
an innate ability for statistical learning, a process of learning by recog-
nizing patterns and turning the patterns into concepts. The pattern for
“face” is one of the first ones they learn.
The brain uses concepts to categorize the world. We can create con-
cepts around rough perceptual similarity — like the concept of “bird”
to describe everything from a penguin to a hummingbird. We can also
create concepts according to goals — “musical instrument” describes
a category of things that are not at all similar in physical form but can
all be used to create sound in a way that matches our concept of
music.
The brain constructs concepts of emotion in the same way. The
concept of “anger” includes instances of wildly different signals inwildly
different concepts. The common thread is not a physical “fin-
gerprint” but the concept itself, constructed based on our mental file
of all the different instances of anger we have experienced or heard
about.
How the Brain Makes Emotions
Neurons need a lot of energy to function, so it’s in your best interest
to use them as efficiently as possible. Labeling a set of sensory inputs
with a concept is a powerful shorthand. The more precise a concept is,
the more efficiently the brain can work and make its predictions,
deciding what to pay attention to and how to react. The part of your
brain that decides what to pay attention to is called the control network.
The brain produces thousands of predictions in each moment, and
like natural selection, only the ones most suited to the situation sur-
vive. The brain uses patterns and meanings learned through past expe-
rience to interpret and make predictions about present experience.
If you take the number 13 and put it between an A and a C, for exam-
ple, your brain may choose to interpret it as a B. In the same way, your
brain predicts an emotional value for a given situation depending on
the context and the affect you’re experiencing. Like any other concepts,
emotional concepts help us construct a meaningful interpretation ofthe
sensory and interoceptive input in order to accurately regulate the
body’s needs.
Emotions as Social Reality
Kevin planted a rare pink-flowered Queen Anne’s lace in his garden. A
friend stopping by saw it as a weed and pulled it out. The concepts of
“flower” and “weed” clearly aren’t physical reality the way an atom is.
But they are real in a different way. Concepts are a social reality. As far
as we know, humans are the only animals who can create social reality
out of mental concepts.
Social realities are incredibly powerful. Money is one example of a
social reality: Rectangles of paper have no inherent value, but as long
as we all agree to behave as though they do, we can exchange money
for things that do have value (although that value is also socially con-
structed).
Emotions are also social reality. You can’t communicate to some-
one that you feel angry unless they share a concept of anger and a con-
cept that certain actions in certain contexts indicate anger.
Among the Ifaluk people of Micronesia, an emotion such as anger
isnot considered an individual reaction, but an exchange between peo-
ple. Not all human cultures have a concept that corresponds with
anger at all, and many cultures have emotion concepts that don’t exist
in English.
Just like other concepts, emotion concepts are constructed by the
brain to make meaning, prescribe action, and regulate body function.
A New View of Human Nature
The classical view of emotion is a form of essentialism, the belief that
things have an essential form, and that deviations from that form are
merely errors. Darwin’s theory of natural selection destroyed essen-
tialism in biology, but emotional essentialism has lingered on.
Part of the problem is language itself. The way the brain uses con-
cepts to sort the world into categories suggests to us that if we label a
group of instances “sadness,” they must have some common “sad”
essence causing us to so label them.
But consider this: A culture may designate people with a certain skin
color as inferior. This social reality will mean that people with that skin
color are treated worse, receive lower salaries, and therefore on aver-
age live in poorer conditions. Growing up in these conditions has a
negative effect on children’s brain structure, perpetuating the cycle.
The concept that creates this unequal reality is a cultural construc-
tion: It’s learned, and it can be unlearned. Similarly, having anemotional
experience of fear or disgust or anger can be unlearned.
Studies have been done on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that dimin-
ish people’s anger at the opposing side by showing them key events in
a less negative light. Their brains learned to predict an experience of
sadness or understanding instead of anger.
You may feel as though you are experiencing an essential reaction,
but your brain is constructing it for you based on its concepts and
predictions of your experience.
Mastering Your Emotions
Your interoceptive network monitors the state of your body and works
with the rest of your brain to create predictions, which it then uses to
adjust your body budget. Your body budget is affected not just by
physical things like sleep (or lack thereof) and food (healthy or not),
but also by social experiences such as rejection or connection.
You can change the effect an experience has on your body budget by
recategorizing it. In one study, it was established that when its partic-
ipants, who were about to take an exam, recategorized the butterflies
in their stomach as excitement, or even just as a natural physical reac-
tion, they performed better on the exam than those who categorized
the butterflies as anxiety. In other words, the concepts we apply to
make meaning from our affect (the signals our interoceptive network
sends) change our experience.
The ability to distinguish one emotional concept from another is
called emotional granularity. Someone who has very low emotional
granularity might have just one concept for “feeling good” and one
concept for “feeling bad,” while someone with high granularity can
distinguish between feeling “discouraged” and feeling “dejected.” The
more granularity you have, the more efficiently your brain can work.
Studies have shown that people with high granularity take less medi-
cation, have more successful social relationships, and perform better
in school.
Emotion and Illness
It’s normal for your body budget to get thrown off balance sometimes.
But ongoing imbalances are bad news for your health. With chronic
stress, for example, the brain continually prompts the body to release
more cortisol than you actually need to function, which leads to chron-
ic inflammation. Scientists have discovered that the brain itself can de-
velop inflammation, interfering with the interoceptive network and the
control network and reducing the body’s ability to make predictions to
correct the imbalance.
Conditions such as depression, anxiety, and chronic pain have long
been treated as distinct ailments, despite their overlapping symptoms.
Constructed emotion theory suggests that all of them are at least in
part responses to an imbalanced body budget and lowered predictive
abilities.
Research suggests that the line between psychological and physical
diseases is artificial. Physical and emotional experiences are
bothgoverned by the interoceptive networks that regulate your body budget
based on your brain’s conceptual predictions. People with fewer social
connections have more inflammation. Growing up in adversity puts
people at a higher risk for heart disease and cancer. Sleep deprivation,
exposure to violence (real or staged), and social media all have mea-
surable negative effects on your body budget.
Addictions to opioids, junk food, alcohol, and other experiences
that make us feel good in the moment can develop when we try to re-
lieve the unpleasant symptoms of an imbalanced body budget.
Emotion and the Law
The US legal system, along with many others, distinguishes between
crimes committed in the “heat of passion” and premeditated crimes.
This approach is grounded in the view of the human brain as a con-
stant battleground between emotion and reason; but as we’ve seen,
neuroscience does not support this view. The brain constructs both
reason and emotion. You may or may not feel as though you are in
control, but that experience is also one that your brain constructs.
The law measures people who have committed a crime against the
standard of “a reasonable person.” This “reasonable person” is an-
other constructed concept, a stereotype developed around a cultural
view of which emotions are appropriate in which contexts.
The reasonable person stereotype has some unfortunate conse-
quences, namely that different kinds of people end up being punished
differently for the same action. Men who kill their partners in a fit of
anger, for example, are more likely to succeed in heat-of-passiondefenses
than women, especially black women.
Juries are supposed to be impartial. But when each person con-
structs their perceptions based on their past experiences, that’s not
possible. Consider the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston
Marathon bomber. A key factor in whether he would receive the death
penalty was whether he showed remorse. When he sat expressionless
through his trial, it was generally understood that he felt no remorse.
But there is no one way to express remorse. The idea that a jury can
accurately read another’s emotions is laughable.
Is a Growling Dog Angry?
Many scientific studies have claimed to prove the existence of emotion
in animals, discovering the “fear circuits” in rats, for example. But all
that these studies prove is that animals experience affect — pleasant
or unpleasant sensations, attachment or avoidance, and so on. These
sensations come from the interoceptive network, and trigger survival
mechanisms such as the “fight-or-flight” response. This is not the
same thing as experiencing emotion.
Animals can understand concepts, make predictions, and act ac-
cording to those predictions. Macaque monkeys will learn to sort toys
into categories in return for food rewards. Drug-sniffing dogs are
trained to respond in different ways to different categories of smells.
But to say that a growling dog is angry, or that lab rats are afraid, is
an example of mental inference fallacy. Our human minds construct a
perception of emotion based on our own predictions of the situation.
Guessing what other humans are thinking and feeling helps usfunction
as social beings. But we also happily ascribe emotion to inan-
imate objects. Our projections are not proof that an object or animal is
experiencing emotion.The animal mind, as far as science has been
able to discover, does not have the necessary brain circuitry to con-
struct purely mental concepts like emotion, or to perceive them in hu-
mans.
From Brain to Mind: The New Frontier
No two human brains are the same. Each brain has a unique arrange-
ment of cortical ridges, different numbers of neurons in different brain
regions, and different levels of connectivity between or within net-
works.
Brains also change from moment to moment, and over the course
of a lifetime, wire themselves based on the physical and social realities
they experience. A human brain can create many different kinds of
human minds — minds that speak different languages, experience the
same sensations differently, and label those experiences with different
concepts.
Despite this great variability, the brain is not a blank slate. Three
commonalities appear across the spectrum of human brains:
•Concepts. Your brain learns and creates concepts to help regu-
late your body budget efficiently. Additionally, your brain wires
itself according to the concepts it learns and creates.
From Brain to Mind: The New Frontier
No two human brains are the same. Each brain has a unique arrange-
ment of cortical ridges, different numbers of neurons in different brain
regions, and different levels of connectivity between or within net-
works.
•Affective realism. Your beliefs about the world change your expe-
rience of the world. You embrace interpretations of an experience
that correspond with your past experiences, and ignore or dis-
credit interpretations that contradict your past experiences.
•Social reality. As infants grow, they learn from the humans
around them to construct a common social reality. Creating and
teaching purely mental concepts like “money” and “weeds” and
“race” is an ability that no other animal has demonstrated.
Conclusion
Our emotions are concepts constructed by our brains to help us inter-
pret sensory and interoceptive input, make predictions, and use those
predictions to regulate our body budgets. Just because you have an
overwhelming experience of anger doesn’t mean that anger is a reflex
that is overpowering your reason, that everyone experiences anger in a
similar fashion, or even that anger is necessarily a universal human
emotion.
At the same time, our constructed reality has a measurable effect on
the world that we often don’t acknowledge. Exam takers who catego-
rized their butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling as anxiety did worse on
the exam than those who categorized their feelings as excitement or
simply a physical response to the situation. Judges are more likely to
sentence someone just before lunch than just after because hunger
influences their experience of reality without their awareness of it.
Chil- dren who are taught more emotional concepts are more
successful inschool and in life.
Our ability to create social reality out of mental concepts is some-
thing of a human superpower — but it’s important to be aware that
our concepts are just one way to assign meaning to the patterns we
see in the world. Assuming that our concepts indicate inherent truth
leads to inflexibility and prejudice. The theory of constructed emotion
asks us to take an open-minded, even skeptical, approach to our own
experiences and judgments of the world, to be aware that what we per-
ceive is not an absolute reality, and to embrace uncertainty as part of
the adventure of being human.
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