'How do we construct emotions?'
'How do we construct emotions?'
3 videos by Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett. (Part 1)
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Do you remember the ‘Lie to Me’ TV series with Tim Roth (2009-2011)? I loved watching it because Roth could ‘read’ people and determine if someone was lying just by their body language, facial muscle movements, or expressions. It seemed so plausible that he and a programmed computer could tell if someone was lying by studying hundreds of expressions. Of course, there were murders and relationships and the general convoluted grey areas of the human condition that complicated things. Still, they leveraged this ‘science’ to solve crimes and other issues.
Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett has busted the whole premise of the TV series, which is why her work piqued my interest. Her research mapped facial expressions, scanned brains, and analysed hundreds of physiology studies to understand emotions.
Professor Barrett’s research has shown that physical movements have no intrinsic emotional meaning WE construct the meaning. So, how do we construct emotions?
I was first introduced to Professor Barrett’s work through Dr Susan David’s book Emotional Agility. It highlights two key pieces of research about emotions, one defined seven basic emotions: joy, anger, sadness, fear, surprise, contempt, and disgust, and the other was the constructivist perspective of Professor Barrett.112
‘… there are seven basic emotions … Emotions researchers actively debate the number of core emotions, with six to fifteen commonly cited. By any of these accounts, the so-called ‘negative’ emotions outnumber those labelled as ‘positive’. This basic emotions perspective is grounded in the theory that an irreducible number of key emotions are shared across cultures and species and have universal triggers (Ekman, 1999)2. This perspective can be contrasted with a ‘constructivist’ one (Barrett, 2015)3, which suggests that emotions do not have definable boundaries between them but, rather, that we actively construct our emotional experience based on the context.’ (Dr. Susan David)4
I followed this breadcrumb to Professor Barrett’s TED Talk, which I shared in this article, ‘How are emotions made?’ Her book, How Emotions Are Made, was published in 2018.
The researcher in me curiously followed this trail of breadcrumbs to discover new insights that have tilted my kaleidoscope view of things into a new pattern and colour spectrum.
These videos offer bite-size explanations of some of her findings. Each is less than 3 minutes.
YouTube Videos by Prof. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Can you detect other people’s emotions?
Key points from the video
Same face…different emotion.
The truth is that no one detects emotion in anyone else. Not you, not me, not judges or juries, not AI algorithms, not polygraph machines ..emotions are not what we think they are.
Why is the neuroscience of emotion important?
Key points from the video
Why is understanding the true nature of emotion so important? And why is it important to distinguish it from Emotion perception?
The science of emotion started with human experience it feels like emotions happen to you that you react to something that something in the world triggers a little circuit inside your brain but the true nature and complexity of emotion is much more fascinating than our own experience lets on.
Under the hood, emotions are not built into your brain from birth. They are built by your brain in specific situations from a set of basic ingredients.
You have a predicting brain, a body that causes you to feel affect, and a set of shared ‘Concepts’ that are absorbed into your brain as it develops throughout your lifetime.
Your Brain is Predictive, not reactive
Key points from the video
Can you hear with your eyes?
Experiential blindness exercise.
Every waking moment of your life your brain is using past experiences to predict and create your current experiences.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts and reactions to Professor Barrett’s research, particularly the fact that we cannot ‘read’ emotions on other people’s faces and that we construct our emotions and define our unique meaning .
To me, this is a wake up call that we hold unconscious societal bias of what we believe other people ‘should be expressing’ in their faces and body language that constitutes remorse, happiness, pain, anger, desire…Emotion perception versus what a person is actually feeling inside.
Imagine if your cultural reference points are completely different from someone else.
I’m continuing to ponder on Emotion Perception and the expectations we attach to it in order to relate to others.
If each emotion is an individual’s construct, emotions are boundless. They have an infinite spectrum that is only meaningful to the person experiencing it.
On the one hand, that could feel isolating, but on the other hand, it underscores why emotional granularity and communicating our experiences are so important, to feel connected but also to communicate our needs.
Historically close knit households and communities could probably predict other people’s needs more readily, through shared experiences and thus, greater reference points to understand each others constructed emotions, and each member’s needs.
Times have changed, and what was a shared cohesive set of interconnected roles and responsibilities of one household has dramatically shifted. The needs of one person over a longer lifetime, are less easily communicated, less easily understood or met.
Professor Barrett’s work shows, what many of us have already experienced - tech cannot read human emotion on faces, and so, cannot decipher needs. Each expression requires context and an ‘interface’ to decode the meaning - right now that’s each of us!
How well can you predict a loved one’s emotions? How well can you articulate your own emotions?
Now I understand why I use so many hyphenated paradoxical emotion descriptions. For example ‘tragic-joy’ or ‘bittersweet-heartsink’. It also makes sense that another caregiver or someone grieving who’s had a similar experience can relate to my emotion-definitions more closely (but not entirely) than someone who has not had this experience yet. Poet Ali’s point about the language of being human, is a language of experience, resonates even more now.
Caregivers anticipate and translate the needs of their loved ones and become the ones who can most closely convey how their loved ones may be feeling to others.
This empathic connection can be both a blessing and a burden in it’s full emotional spectrum, and exacerbated if your loved one suffers from cognitive issues. The go-between buffer and translator can face frustrations from all sides.
Thoughts on how we can construct emotions?
Dr Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, Dr Susan David’s Emotional Agility and Prof. Barretts books can help us explore emotion constructs beyond ‘just’ happy or sad.
In this exploration, for me music will play a key role. Music has always been interwoven into my experiences. A piece of music can already mean ‘vacation-happy-with friends-family.’ Or it can evoke ‘taut-stress-grief’
But we can go further, remembering how art, food, and other things make us feel. A multi-sensorial emotional construct. Something that can go beyond a single word construct to define our own version of an emotion.
Language is an important means of communication, but words are also constructs in themselves. They can often mean different things in different languages given their cultural context.
This is where creatives, artists have an advantage in their ability to transcend words to express emotion, and share it with others.
I like the idea of exploring definitions and constructs of emotions beyond words.
What about you? How will you go about articulating and constructing your emotion?
How about involving friends and family so you can start sharing your emotions-vocabulary with them now?
I hope these bite sized insights haven’t been too hard to swallow. Lots of food for thought, right!!?
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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).
Ekman P. (1999). “Basic emotions,” in Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, eds Dalgleish T., Power M. J. (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons Ltd; ), 45–60. [Google Scholar]
Barrett LF. The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2017 Jan 1;12(1):1-23. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsw154. Erratum in: Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2017 Nov 1;12(11):1833. PMID: 27798257; PMCID: PMC5390700.
Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life (New York: Avery, 2016), 85.
Victoria, this is fascinating! This idea of how we construct (co-construct?) our understanding of each other's emotions could change interactions at a very fundamental level. Thank you for sharing this ♥️
Thanks for tagging me in your work and references. I’ve been immersing myself in it but not been able to respond till now🙃
Learning to regulate my emotions has been on the back end of this crazy healing journey I’ve been on. It’s also taken me beyond what is medically believed possible. Though if an “inability to regulate emotions” is one (less known) root cause medically, then I’m firmly of the belief that learning to regulate emotions is one way to counteract the disease. Preposterous when applying a medical lens I know😆 but like I say, one that’s taken me further than is medically believed possible.
As a result of the journey I’ve been on, you’ll most likely find me asking the question “how are you feeling?” And if it’s in my insta stories as it often is, followed up with “how are you really feeling?”
Additionally, after reading “freedom from the known” as part of my yoga teacher training, I no longer see emotions as positive or negative. I feel we’ve done ourselves a disservice with such a label - and from a healing perspective I don’t think it serves to see emotions as good/bad, right/wrong. We are meant to feel the full range of emotions, each serves a purpose and can act as a guide, gifting much needed insight. Sensitive is the new strong as they say.