'How are Emotions Made?'
An Introduction to Neuroscientist Professor Lisa Feldmann Barrett.
Hello, Dear Reader! Welcome to our new Carer Mentor community members! I appreciate your presence and your readership.
I’m Victoria. You can read why I’m publishing Carer Mentor here: Who Started Carer Mentor and Why?
The articles ‘Language of Being Human’, ‘Connecting with Dementia Sufferers’, and ‘Are you fluent in Caregiver?’ have highlighted the emotional burden that caregivers often carry to be the emotions-translators, communicators, and connectors for their loved ones—in addition to trying to navigate our own emotions.
In these next articles, I share the resources I found while curiously seeking how to navigate through the messy, paradoxical rollercoaster.
Dr. Brené Brown (Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience) underscores the importance of understanding our emotions.
Our ability to accurately recognize and label emotions is often referred to as emotional granularity. In the words of Harvard psychologist Susan David, “Learning to label emotions with a more nuanced vocabulary can be absolutely transformative.” 1 David explains that if we don’t have a sufficient emotional vocabulary, it is difficult to communicate our needs and to get the support that we need from others. But those who are able to distinguish between a range of various emotions “do much, much better at managing the ups and downs of ordinary existence than those who see everything in black and white.” In fact, research shows that the process of labeling emotional experience is related to greater emotion regulation and psychosocial well-being.23
The emotional turmoil of a caregiver is often underestimated. Care support tends to focus on acts of caring, and delivery of care to the loved one and less on supporting a caregiver.
‘HOW to’ navigate the emotional toll of caregiving is often neglected. This is why I feel that Susan David’s work on emotional agility is important to us.
What are emotions, how are they made, and how do we define them?4
For me, empathy has been about connecting with others from a place of curiosity and open-heartedness, presuming the possibility of understanding each other/the situation, learning, and then choosing how to respond.
I leaned into empathy and empowerment to lead multicultural diverse teams. Now, these skills are essential as a 24/7 caregiver.
This is part of my definition of empathy, constructed over years via a myriad of experiences. This is why Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work resonates.
Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett and The theory of constructed emotion proposes
Emotions should be modelled holistically as whole brain-body phenomena in context.
Emotions are constructions of the world, not reactions to it.
In every waking moment, your brain uses past experiences, organised as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning.
Professor. Lisa Feldman Barrett Biography from her Website
Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, is among the top 0.1% most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. She also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior.
In addition to the books Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain and How Emotions are Made, Dr. Barrett has published over 275 peer-reviewed, scientific papers appearing in Science, Nature Neuroscience, and other top journals in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, as well as six academic volumes published by Guilford Press. She writes regularly about science in the popular press, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Scientific American (see full list).
Emotions are not built into your brain from birth they are built by your brain in specific situations from a set of basic ingredients. - Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Lisa Feldman Barrett. TED Talk. (January 23, 2018 )
Can you look at someone's face and know what they're feeling? Does everyone experience happiness, sadness and anxiety the same way? What are emotions anyway? For the past 25 years, psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett has mapped facial expressions, scanned brains and analyzed hundreds of physiology studies to understand what emotions really are. She shares the results of her exhaustive research -- and explains how we may have more control over our emotions than we think.
A Shortened Transcript of the TED talk. I recommend watching the video.
Dr Barrett:
I have studied emotions as a scientist for the past 25 years, and in my lab, we have probed human faces by measuring electrical signals that cause your facial muscles to contract to make facial expressions. We have scrutinised the human body in emotion. We have analysed hundreds of physiology studies involving thousands of test subjects. We've scanned hundreds of brains, and examined every brain imaging study on emotion that has been published in the past 20 years.
And the results of all of this research are overwhelmingly consistent. It may feel to you like your emotions are hardwired and they just trigger and happen to you, but they don't. Your brain is not prewired with emotion circuits
Emotions are guesses.
Your brain constructs emotions and you have more control over those guesses than you might imagine. Bottom line is that emotions are not built into your brain at birth. They are just built.
At timestamp 3:43 the "experiential blindness," exercise
Predictions are basically the way your brain works. They’re the basis of every experience that you have and every action that you take. Predictions are primal.
They help us to make sense of the world in a quick and efficient way. Your brain does not react to the world. Using past experience, your brain predicts and constructs your experience of the world.
The way that we see emotions in others are deeply rooted in predictions.
To us, it feels like we just look at someone's face, and we just read the emotion that's there in their facial expressions the way that we would read words on a page.
But actually, your brain is predicting. It's using past experience based on similar situations to try to make meaning.
Emotions that you seem to detect in other people actually come in part from what's inside your own head. And this is true in a courtroom, but it's also true in the classroom, in the bedroom, and in the boardroom.
Tech companies that are spending millions of research dollars to build emotion-detection systems, are fundamentally asking the wrong question, because they're trying to detect emotions in the face and the body, but emotions aren't in your face and body.
Physical movements have no intrinsic emotional meaning. WE have to make them meaningful.
A human or something else has to connect to the emotions, to the context, and that makes them meaningful. That's how we know that a smile might mean sadness and a cry might mean happiness, and a stoic, still face, might mean that you are angrily plotting the demise of your enemy.
The way that you experience your own emotion is exactly the same process.
Your brain is basically making predictions, guesses, that it's constructing in the moment with billions of neurones working together.
Your brain does come prewired to make some feelings, simple feelings that come from the physiology of your body.
When you're born, you can make feelings like calmness and agitation, excitement, comfort, discomfort. But these simple feelings are not emotions. They're actually with you every waking moment of your life.
They are simple summaries of what's going on inside your body, kind of like a barometer. But they have very little detail, and you need that detail to know what to do next. What do you about these feelings?
And so how does your brain give you that detail? Well, that's what predictions are. Predictions link the sensations in your body that give you these simple feelings with what's going on around you in the world so that you know what to do. And sometimes, those constructions are emotions.
For example, if you were to walk into a bakery, your brain might predict that you will encounter the delicious aroma of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.
And our brains might cause our stomachs to churn a little bit, to prepare for eating those cookies. And if we are correct, if in fact some cookies have just come out of the oven, then our brains will have constructed hunger, and we are prepared to munch down those cookies and digest them in a very efficient way, priming our bodies
But here's the thing. That churning stomach, if it occurs in a different situation, it can have a completely different meaning. So if your brain were to predict a churning stomach in, say, a hospital room while you're waiting for test results, then your brain will be constructing dread or worry or anxiety, and it might cause you to, maybe, wring your hands or take a deep breath or even cry.
Same physical sensation, same churning stomach, different experience.
Emotions which seem to happen to you are actually made by you.
You are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits which are buried deep inside some ancient part of your brain.
You have more control over your emotions than you think you do.
Your brain is wired so that if you change the ingredients that your brain uses to make emotion, then you can transform your emotional life.
If you change those ingredients today, you're basically teaching your brain how to predict differently tomorrow, and this is what I call being the architect of your experience.
Emotional Intelligence in action
Research shows that when students learn, to reframe this —hammering heartbeat, sweaty hands before a test into a kind of energised determination instead of anxiety, they perform better on tests.
And that determination seeds their brain to predict differently in the future so that they can get ‘their butterflies flying in formation’. If they do that often enough, they not only can pass a test but it will be easier for them to pass their courses, and they might even finish college, which has a huge impact on their future earning potential.
This is emotional intelligence in action. It’s possible to cultivate this emotional intelligence and use it in your everyday life.
Imagine waking up in the morning, you feel this horrible dread, you know, this real wretchedness, and immediately, your mind starts to race. Your mind racing is prediction. Your brain is searching to find an explanation for those sensations in your body that you experience as wretchedness.
Your brain is trying to explain what caused those sensations so that you know what to do about them. But those sensations might not be an indication that anything is wrong with your life. They might have a purely physical cause.
Maybe you're tired. Maybe you didn't sleep enough. Maybe you're hungry. Maybe you're dehydrated. The next time that you feel intense distress, ask yourself: Could this have a purely physical cause? Is it possible that you can transform emotional suffering into just mere physical discomfort?
There are no quick easy or simple expert solutions but you have more control over your emotions than you might imagine.
We have the capacity to dial down emotional suffering and its consequences in our lives by learning how to construct your experiences differently.
This can be empowering and inspiring and is backed up by decades of research evidence.
More control also means more responsibility.
If you are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits which are buried deep inside your brain somewhere and which trigger automatically, then who's responsible, who is responsible when you behave badly? We are.
Not because we're culpable for our emotions, but because the actions and the experiences that we make today become our brain's predictions for tomorrow.
Sometimes we are responsible for something not because we're to blame but because we're the only ones who can change it.
Responsibility is a big word and sometimes people feel the need to resist the scientific evidence that emotions are built and not built in.
The idea that we are responsible for our own emotions seems very hard to swallow. But just take a deep breath, maybe get yourself a glass of water if you need to, and embrace it. Embrace that responsibility, because it is the path to a healthier body, a more just and informed legal system, and a more flexible and potent emotional life.
End. If you want to read more click on this quote by Dr Barrett to go to her TED article
Deciphering our emotions, understanding our constructs could enable us to evolve our emotional intelligence. Perhaps we can learn to make space to help ourselves reframe the emotion and navigate it more easily over time. ‘Emotional agility in action’.
Poet Ali eloquently showed us how we can speak the language of being human—the language of experiences. There is an opportunity for us to learn more about emotional constructs and be more fluent in the holistic language of ‘caregiver’.
Imagine what we could do if we could connect more of our caregiving experiences through conversations in our communities. Perhaps then, we can offer more integrated support, to each other, in different caregiving periods in our lives. A listening ear, a curious and open heart. Empathy.
“There are only four kinds of people in the world—those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.” -Rosalynn Carter, Former First Lady of the United States
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Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life (New York: Avery, 2016), 85.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, James Gross, Tamlin Conner Christensen, and Michael Benvenuto, “Knowing What You’re Feeling and Knowing What to Do About It: Mapping the Relation between Emotion Differentiation and Emotion Regulation,” Cognition and Emotion 15, no. 6 (2001):713–24. doi: 10.1080/02699930143000239.
Yasemin Erbas, Eva Ceulemans, Madeline Lee Pe, Peter Koval, and Peter Kuppens, “Negative Emotion Differentiation: Its Personality and Well-being Correlates and a Comparison of Different Assessment Methods,” Cognition and Emotion 28, no. 7 (2014):1196–1213. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2013.875890.
There are numerous ways that researchers and studies define emotions, every person has a different perspective. Dr Brené Brown describes why:
The matter is complex because human emotions and experiences are studied from the perspective of philosophy, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and mental health (to name just a few disciplines), and research topics include studies of facial expression, physiology, brain imaging, genetics, personality traits, cross-cultural analysis, and more. Some researchers place all emotions into one of two categories—low arousal and high arousal—while others like to label them positive and negative. The approaches to understanding emotion are nearly endless. - Dr Brene Brown. Atlas of the Heart
The quote by Dr. Brené Brown made me think of how collectively we are struggling to understand the our world since the internet provides information in black or white sensationalist terms. And the fact that emotions are something we learn makes sense when you deal with someone with, say, autism, as I have as a teacher, or with students from a different generation. Trying to be empathic in those situations can be a real challenge. Then there's the (small) leap to learned behavior which is related to learned emotions or responses. But ultimately, I suppose it comes down to be self-aware enough to watch yourself and others during emotional times. Thanks, Victoria for this thought-provoking post.
A great post. I especially liked your words below
Sometimes we are responsible for something not because we're to blame but because we're the only ones who can change it.
It speaks to a term I coined in the early days after my son died, ‘responsible grieving.’ I was aware that I was the only one who could really make any decisions on how I now handled this tragedy…
Thanks for all the work you’ve done here Victoria 🙏❤️