How Emotions Are Made

How Emotions Are Made explores the often misconstrued world of human feelings and the cutting-edge science behind how they’re formed.

In our society, we often think of emotions of something you can’t control, almost like a reflex. This classical view is the idea that emotions are more or less irrational reflexes leftover from our evolution. We even teach it in textbooks and see it all around us in the media. Further, there’s a notion that each emotion comes from a distinct part of the brain. This essentialist look on emotion also assumes that everyone experiences, expresses, and interprets emotions in the same way.

But think about it, do you always express anger in the same way? Of course not. The classical view doesn’t work because we can express every emotion in multiple ways. Sadness isn’t just one distinct feeling. Find a thesaurus and you’ll see the myriad of different variations, all of which have a slightly different feeling. This is because each emotional response is specific to the situation, rather than us experiencing the same few recurring emotions.

Experiments in emotion show that single emotions don’t originate in a specific region of the brain. In the author’s own research, she looked at brain scans during various emotions. Barrett saw that the “emotion” region of the brain is active even during perceptions and thoughts that aren’t emotional. She found that though societies may have expressive patterns, there isn’t a universal response in the brain to each emotion. Yet, as a society, we still perpetuate the classical view. We waste money in trying to find ways to identify emotions.

So if the classical view has it all wrong, what should we believe? The author advocates for the theory of constructed emotion. This is that we create emotions spontaneously and concurrently in more than one area of the brain. Furthermore, emotions are based on the individual. We form our feelings from a combination of unique sensory input and the brain’s best predictions. The theory is that the brain doesn’t just spontaneously create emotions per the situation. Rather, the source of emotions is in each person’s individual experiences. The brain makes predictions and anticipates sensory inputs such as vision or taste. Sensory inputs either affirm the mind’s predictions as correct or the brain learns and changes wrong predictions. This is why we experience a myriad of anger responses. Sometimes we may shout, others we might stay quiet. Each response has its own neural pathway and bodily movements. The brain uses prior experience and sensory input to predict which reaction will be best for the specific situation. The author compares this to Darwin’s theory of evolution, that each animal varies subtly depending on their environment.…