PDF Summary:How Emotions Are Made, by Lisa Feldman Barrett

In How Emotions Are Made, neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett challenges many of society’s long-standing beliefs about emotions, calling into question everything from what emotions are, to where they come from and how to control them. Barrett’s research demonstrates that:

• It’s impossible to tell how other people are feeling just by looking at their facial expressions or body language.
• Certain emotions exist in some cultures but not in others.
• Factors as diverse as what you eat and what movies you watch can affect how well you manage your emotions.

Barrett introduces a new theory of emotion, which posits that emotions are neither innate nor universal; rather, your brain constructs them. Contrary to popular belief, humans aren’t at the mercy of animal emotions. We play a role in creating our own emotions—and we bear the responsibility for our emotional behavior.

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Reality: Simple feelings of pleasure and displeasure or calmness and agitation are not the same as complex emotional experiences such as joy and sadness. These basic feelings are your body's internal sensations, whereas emotions are the concepts that your brain assigns to the feelings to give them meaning.

Even though emotions are not the same across cultures, Barrett says that basic internal feelings on a spectrum from pleasure and displeasure and calmness to agitation are universal. These feelings are essentially summaries of your body’s inner state (they’re also called affect). They’re part of an internal process called interoception.

In interoception, your brain gets sensory input from inside your body, including information about your heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, temperature, hormones, metabolism, and so on. Then, in a process that Barrett dubs “body budgeting,” your brain makes predictions about what those internal sensations mean in terms of your body’s energy needs, and it regulates the body accordingly—by doing things such as speeding up your heart, slowing down breathing, releasing more cortisol, or metabolizing more glucose.

Interoception is a whole-brain process. This means that the brain is structured so that all of your decisions and actions, no matter how much you believe them to be rooted in logic and reason, are affected by your inner feelings.

(Shortform note: It’s theorized that children with sensory processing issues struggle with interoception—they may have difficulty recognizing that their bladder is full or deciphering between itchiness and pain. In addition to not recognizing physical sensations in their bodies, they can also have trouble connecting with emotions. For example, a child may not feel fear because she isn’t noticing the internal physical characteristics that are associated with fear, such as a racing heart.)

In addition, your brain is wired to listen to your internal sensory input more than it listens to external sensory input. Contrary to the popular belief that the things we see, hear, and smell influence what we feel, Barrett claims that the way we feel inside is more influential to perception and action than the outside world is.

As an example of the power of unanalyzed internal sensations, Barrett cites an experiment that found judges were more likely to deny inmates parole before lunch. Once the judges had eaten lunch, they began granting parole with their normal frequency. The judges had experienced a “bad” feeling in their gut as evidence that the inmates didn’t deserve to be paroled, rather than evidence that the judges were simply hungry. (Shortform note: As detailed in Noise, this type of unintentional bias can have life-changing consequences. Perhaps with more awareness of our internal sensations (and their effect on our emotions) we can avoid bias like this in the future.)

Interoception is always happening. It usually produces simple “good” and “bad” feelings, but sometimes you experience moments of intense interoceptive sensations as emotion. For example, on some days you may experience a vague sense of agitation and displeasure, but on other days and in other contexts, those feelings may become so intense as to manifest as anger.

(Shortform note: The vagus nerve is central to interoception. The vagus nerve is one of the main cranial nerves conveying information to and from the brain through the body’s sensory pathways. It is one of the longest and most widely distributed nerves in the human body (vagus means wandering in Latin). The way the vagus nerve works tends to demonstrate that the body’s inner sensations have more impact on the brain than the other way around: 80% of fibers in the vagus nerve ascend from organs such as the stomach and the heart to the brain, while only 20% descend in the reverse direction.)

Emotions Are Not Reactions; They’re Predictions

Myth: Emotions are uncontrollable reactions to external triggers.

Reality: Barrett argues that each person's brain constructs emotion by predicting what to do next based on what's happened in the past.

Barrett maintains that the purpose of the brain is to budget the body's internal resources (such as water, salt, glucose, and hormones) to keep you alive and healthy. The brain must continuously anticipate the body’s needs and attempt to meet them before they arise. To do this, it must make predictions about everything, including emotions.

With all the stimuli your brain is constantly receiving, it would operate very slowly if it were always in “reaction” mode. Instead, before you take any action, your brain predicts what’s about to occur, and what your body will need for that to happen—for example, by giving you a shot of cortisol to help you get out of bed in the morning.

How do predictions work when it comes to emotions? Your brain makes predictions about your body’s needs, tests these predictions against sensory input, and updates its predictions accordingly—all within an instant.

For example, let’s say you’re walking to pick up something from the store. You see a puppy emerge from the bushes and start to cross the road just as a car comes speeding around the bend. In the split second in which this is happening, your brain doesn’t have time to process or react to all the sensory input it’s receiving. Instead, relying on your past experiences with accidents, cars driving too fast, and sadness about baby animals getting hurt, your brain predicts that the car will hit the puppy. It predicts that your heart will start thumping and your face will flush. It tells you to cry.

If the worst indeed happens, your predictions are confirmed; you may cry and feel sadness. On the other hand, if the car narrowly misses the puppy, your brain might use the new sensory input to correct its predictions, and you’ll feel relieved. More often than not, however, your brain will keep making the same predictions even when it receives evidence to the contrary. So even if the puppy escapes to the other side of the road, you may feel shaken and teary for a while afterward.

Barrett explains that when people lie completely still, with their eyes closed, and imagine certain emotional experiences, brain scans see major changes in the firing of neurons in their visual cortex and motor cortex. This happens even though the subjects aren’t receiving external sensory input from their eyes, and they don’t have any immediate plans to take action by moving their bodies. In fact, what’s happening is that their brains are making predictions about what they’re supposed to do next, which is causing neurons in their visual and motor cortices to fire.

(Shortform note: Barrett claims that your brain uses past experiences to make predictions about what’s about to happen. In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert says that, in much the same way, you create an image of what the future will look like based on what’s happened in the past. This can result in you making poor decisions about what will make you happy in the future, which in reality may look nothing like your past. Both Barrett and Gilbert thus acknowledge prediction error—the mismatch between what you anticipate will happen and what actually happens—but neither provides an adequate explanation for why the brain isn’t better at learning from its mistakes.)

Emotions Are Not Innate; They’re Constructed

Myth: Emotions are natural and innate.

Reality: Your brain makes emotions in the moment by applying the emotion concepts it’s learned to sensory input. Your brain is guessing at the meaning of external and internal sensory input based on prior experience.

You’ve now learned that your brain makes emotions by predicting what’s about to happen based on what’s happened in the past. But how, exactly, does this work?

Barrett asserts that the brain takes in external sensory input from your environment, as well as internal sensory input about the state of your body, and tries to make sense of these sensations using emotion concepts.

In essence, your brain is constantly trying to guess (predict) the meaning of sensory input, so it can determine how to budget your body’s resources and what action to take next. To do so, your brain relies on past experiences, organized as emotion concepts. These emotion concepts function as mental explanations for what’s going on inside and around you. If you didn’t have concepts, all the sensory input you received from the word would just be meaningless noise.

(Shortform note: Neurologists argue that smell can trigger memories and emotions more than the other senses, likely because of the proximity between the olfactory bulb and the limbic system (the part of the brain responsible for memory and emotion). The memories that arise from smell instantly relate to emotion. For example, if you have happy memories of spending time with your grandpa, who was a smoker, then the external input of cigarette smoke can elicit a positive emotion.)

As we’ve already seen, your infant brain compresses the sensory input it receives, creating similarities out of differences to make concepts. It takes all of your past experiences with a particular emotion and categorizes them into emotion concepts such as “joy,” “excitement,” or “despair.” Once you’ve learned these concepts, your brain can run this process in reverse, expanding the similarities into differences to do what Barrett calls “constructing an instance of a concept,” also known as predicting. All concepts that your brain makes are ways of regulating your body.

For example, say you have a gnawing in the pit of your stomach (internal sensory input), which your brain reads simply as “unpleasant and agitated” (interoception). You’re sitting in an antiseptic-smelling hospital, listening to nurses’ shoes scuffing the floor, and you’re about to undergo a medical procedure (external sensory input).

Although you’ve never undergone this particular medical procedure, and you understand it to be quite simple and safe, you learned many years ago that feelings like this, in an environment such as this, mean “fear” (emotion concept). Based on all those past experiences with fear, your brain predicts that in this particular instance, you are having an experience of fear (emotion). This allows the brain to predict what the body will need to cope with this fear. This prediction causes your brain to release cortisol, which gives you a burst of energy; it also causes you to stand up and pace the hallway in an attempt to calm your nerves (body budgeting).

Your brain explains the gnawing in the pit of your stomach as “fear,” and it adjusts your body budget and your actions accordingly. All of this happens instantaneously.

Other Theories of Emotion

Theories of emotion tend to be divided along the “nature versus nurture” binary. Evolutionary psychologists, or “universalists,” say that emotions are innate—a product of evolution. Social constructionists argue that emotions and behavior are dictated by culture.

Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion rejects the former, but neither does it fully adopt the latter. She agrees with social constructionists that emotions have a social reality, meaning that they’re real because a group of people (your culture) has agreed that they’re real. But she contends that emotions aren’t solely social constructs; they’re part of a complex, whole-brain process designed to regulate your body budget as well as determine your actions.

Some theorists take a more middle-of-the-road approach. They argue that certain emotions are universal, but other emotions vary considerably from one culture to the next.

Emotion and Illness Are Not As Unrelated As They Seem

Myth: Illnesses such as anxiety, depression, chronic stress, and chronic pain are distinct problems with their own identifying features. They are unrelated to emotion.

Reality: The same systems in your body and brain that construct emotions also contribute to illness, argues Barrett. Just as your body budget is a key component of emotion, it is also a key component in creating pain and stress, and if it is chronically imbalanced, it can lead to illness.

Your brain constructs pain and stress in the same way as emotion. However, this doesn’t mean that they are the same. It does mean that in all three, the interoceptive network issues predictions that descend along the same pathways from the brain to the body and ascend along the same pathways carrying sensory input from the body to the brain. In addition, all three relate to balancing your body budget (in other words, regulating your body’s physiological state). According to Barrett, illnesses such as anxiety, depression, chronic stress, and chronic pain are all rooted in an imbalanced body budget.

How does an imbalanced body budget cause illness? Barrett explains that normally, your body budget changes throughout the day as your brain anticipates your body's needs and allocates resources accordingly. However, if your brain does a poor job of predicting your body’s needs, your body budget can get out of balance. For example, when something stressful occurs, your brain might anticipate that your body needs more energy than it actually does.

If this happens repeatedly, your body may release more cortisol than you need, causing inflammation to flare up. This drains your energy and makes you more prone to sickness, which in turn may cause you to sleep and eat poorly and exercise less. Finally, inflammation can cross from the body into the brain, and the brain can create it by itself. Inflammation in the brain causes changes in brain structure, particularly within the interoceptive network, which causes your body budget to be even more imbalanced. This can predispose you to disease.

(Shortform note: In When the Body Says No, physician and psychologist Gabor Maté also argues that chronic stress and illness are inextricably linked. Maté says that much of chronic stress is subconscious, so you don’t even realize you’re experiencing it. In fact, it’s often the people who believe themselves to be the least emotionally troubled who are at the highest risk because suppressing negative emotions is precisely what can lead to illness.)

However, the link between pain, stress, and emotions may mean that you can decrease inflammation using some of the same techniques you would use to master your emotions (discussed below). For example, by increasing your emotional granularity (ability to identify the specific emotion you’re feeling), you can help your brain calibrate your budget to your body’s needs. Studies show that people with higher emotional granularity go to the doctor and use medications less frequently, and spend fewer days hospitalized for illness.

Forgiveness and Letting Go of Anger As an Antidote to Illness

In addition to techniques such as increasing your emotional granularity, letting go of anger and resentment has been shown to improve one’s physical and mental health. Indeed, various religious and philosophical traditions have long preached the benefits of practicing forgiveness. But what exactly is forgiveness, and, given how hard it can be to achieve, does it really have any tangible value?

Research conducted by the Stanford Forgiveness Project demonstrates that, after being taught a specific method for forgiveness, 27% of subjects experienced fewer physical complaints, such as pain, gastrointestinal upset, and dizziness. 70% reported a decrease in their feelings of hurt, and 13% experienced reduced anger.

According to Frederic Luskin, the Director of the Stanford Forgiveness Projects, forgiveness doesn’t have to mean reconciling with the person who hurt you or condoning their actions. Forgiveness is for you, not for the person who hurt you. As the saying goes, “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”

Forgiveness isn’t letting someone get away with hurting you; it’s attempting to achieve some peace around what happened, in part by employing calming practices to soothe your body’s stress response. This dovetails with Barrett’s research that an overactive stress response leads to inflammation, which in turn can cause illness and disease.

Your Emotions Don’t Absolve You of Responsibility for Your Actions

Myth: You’re not responsible for your emotions because they are passed down from an early animal ancestor and are built into your nervous system through evolution.

Reality: Your emotions aren’t hardwired into your brain; your brain constructs them using concepts. Your emotions are the product of every emotion concept you've ever learned, so Barrett maintains that you are responsible for learning new concepts to rewire your brain for different actions.

According to the traditional view of emotion, if you have an angry outburst, it’s not completely your fault, because your “anger circuits” just got activated. Barrett explains that this view of emotions finds its origins in part in Charles Darwin’s 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which theorizes that emotions are passed down to us, unchanging, from an early animal ancestor. As a result, humans are at the mercy of their animal emotions.

(Shortform note: Researchers at Cornell University recently discovered a genetic variation that makes carriers more susceptible to intense emotions than the average person, supporting the theory that there’s a biological component to how we feel and process emotions. The researchers do not indicate in any way, however, that this discovery absolves the carrier of personal responsibility for their behavior.)

Under Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion, however, you are responsible not only for how you handle your emotions but for the emotions themselves. Emotions aren’t the product of evolution; rather, they’re passed down from one generation to the next as cultural concepts, and your brain makes emotions using the concepts it’s learned.

If you have an angry outburst, your actions are shaped by all your past experiences (as concepts) that led up to that moment. As a baby, you can’t choose what concepts other people put into your head. But as an adult, you can choose what you expose yourself to and therefore what emotion concepts you learn. By changing your concepts, you can change your future emotions, and thus, your actions.

(Shortform note: One way that adults can “rewire” negative emotion concepts from childhood is through EMDR therapy—a practice in which the patient briefly revisits a traumatic memory while following a structured eye movement stimulation. This practice is becoming increasingly common in psychotherapy for treatment of PTSD.)

How Our Outdated Understanding of Emotions Creates Inequity in the Legal System

Barrett believes that society’s outdated view of emotions is reflected in our legal system. Nowhere is this more evident than in the idea that a criminal defendant isn't fully responsible for his actions if he acted “in the heat of passion.” For example, if a man walked in on his wife in bed with another man and, overwhelmed by anger and jealousy, he shot the man, he’d most likely receive a more lenient sentence than if he’d planned and carried out a murder for a non-emotional reason.

In actuality, although people may feel that their intense emotions have caused them to lose control of their actions, their brain (assuming it’s healthy) is always in control. The brain is always making predictions about which actions to take next, even if an individual is not aware this is happening.

Similarly, jurors make determinations about witnesses based on the witness’s facial expressions and body language. At a death penalty hearing, for example, whether a defendant displays remorse may be the difference between life in prison and the death penalty. But remorse, like all other emotions, has no single fingerprint. It’s not possible to determine how a witness is feeling inside simply by looking at their facial expressions and body language.

Because these and other aspects of the legal system are based on an inaccurate model of how emotions work, judges and juries often reach inequitable, inconsistent conclusions, punishing those who don’t deserve it and failing to punish those who do.

The Field of Law and Emotion

Barrett’s observations regarding the legal system’s outdated view of emotions can be situated within the larger context of the field of Law and Emotion, which argues that the law is not, as it has traditionally been understood, based purely on logic and reason. Law and emotion scholarship recognizes that emotion shapes the law, and the law needs to understand emotion accurately in order to function.

According to Law and Emotion scholars, the law should not rely on untested or inaccurate assumptions about emotions but should make choices and design institutions in light of the best available scientific knowledge about how emotions work. This field of study emerged around the same time as legal scholars in other areas, such as feminism and critical race theory, began challenging the idea that the law exists independently of social and political influences.

One recent study found, for example, that while witness testimony shouldn’t be given more credibility simply because it’s conveyed with emotion, this is in fact often the case. In addition, the emotional intensity of an event can distort a witness’s memory, but witnesses often testify about inaccurate memories in an emotional way, which makes them more likely to be believed.

How to Control Your Emotions and Better Understand Others’ Emotions

Because emotions are essentially your brain’s best guesses about what to do next and are based on past experiences, changing your experiences can help you change your future actions and, ultimately, who you’ll become.

Barrett recommends three primary methods for controlling your emotions:

1. Maintain a balanced body budget. How you feel inside has a huge impact on your emotions. A “bad” feeling doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong; it can just mean that you’re overloading your body budget—your inner physical state. A balanced body budget is necessary for a healthy emotional life.

Barrett argues that many aspects of modern culture are designed to throw off your body budget: processed food with lots of sugar and bad fats, schools and jobs that require you to get up early and go to bed late, and people expecting you to be available via cellphone at all hours. All of these things can make you feel bad, which in turn can make you self-medicate. (Shortform note: Too much sugar in your diet, common in modern culture, is now being linked to increased risk for depression.)

To keep your body budget balanced, Barrett prescribes eating healthy foods, exercising or simply moving your body, and getting enough sleep. All animals, including humans, use motion to balance their body budget. Activities such as yoga or massage can also make you feel more comfortable.

Your physical surroundings affect your body budget, too, so Barrett says that one way to balance it is to spend less time in noisy, crowded spaces, and more time in places with greenery and natural light. Changing your location or situation in other ways can also help. (Shortform note: The American Psychological Association says that short-term benefits of spending time in nature include a reduction in stress and improved cognitive ability. They claim that even being exposed to nature sounds, such as birds chirping, produces these effects.)

Interacting with people you’re close to can also help you regulate your body budget. Without realizing it, you and your friends, family, and other loved ones synchronize your breathing and heart beats each time you talk or spend time together. (Shortform note: A 2019 study determined that the quality of a person’s social circle (based on cellphone activity) was a better indicator of stress levels than was data from their fitness trackers.)

In fact, communicating emotions itself helps people balance each other’s body budgets. This can even happen over the phone, by email, or just by thinking about someone.

Exercise, Sleep, and the Brain

The connection between exercise, sleep, and brain function is well-established. For example, in Brain Rules, developmental molecular biologist John Medina explains that exercise improves cognition and other essential brain functions by increasing blood flow to the brain. Oxygen-rich blood helps neurons stay young and operational, and it also removes toxins from the blood. Sleep is also crucial for healthy brain functioning.

The science is clear that exercise and sleep have a positive impact on both the brain and the body. Barrett adds to this science by demonstrating how your body budget—summarized by your simple internal sensations of pleasure, displeasure, calmness, and agitation—forms the building blocks for your emotions, such that sleep, exercise, and other activities that help balance your body budget increase your emotional well-being.

2. Develop a rich set of emotion concepts. As noted earlier, being versed in a large number of specific emotion concepts and able to differentiate precisely between them is called emotional granularity. If you have high emotional granularity, it means that rather than just identifying that you feel “bad,” you’re able to construct and identify a variety of more specific emotion concepts such as angry, grumpy, aggravated, annoyed, gloomy, and sad, and apply those concepts to what you could be feeling in the moment. Studies show that people with high emotional granularity can predict and categorize sensations more efficiently, so they are better able to balance their body budgets and tailor their actions to fit their environment.

In some studies, people who could distinguish more finely between unpleasant emotions were 30% more flexible when regulating their emotions, less likely to drink excessively when stressed, and less likely to retaliate aggressively against someone who’d hurt them.

Barrett identifies a variety of ways to increase your emotional granularity:

• Try new foods.
• Go on trips.
• Read books and watch movies.
• Have new experiences.
• Learn new words.
• Keep track of your positive experiences each day.

In addition, if you are a parent, you can help your child increase their emotional granularity by talking to them about emotions early on, using a wide variety of words.

Increasing Your Emotional Vocabulary

While she doesn’t call it “emotional granularity,” researcher and speaker Brené Brown is so invested in the idea that increasing your emotional vocabulary can improve your life and deepen your connections with others that she wrote a book—Atlas of the Heart—cataloging 87 distinct emotions to help you do so. Brown says that many people can only recognize three emotions: happiness, sadness, and anger. This lack of vocabulary blocks people from being able to fully experience and share their feelings with others, which makes it hard to form connections.

Both Barrett and Brown recognize the value of increasing your emotional vocabulary; Brown takes it a step further by describing how doing so can strengthen your relationships and providing detailed explanations of emotions ranging from grief to shame to excitement.

3. Learn to distinguish between emotions and physical sensations, and to recategorize your emotions. For example, if you’re about to give a speech and you feel nervous, you could deconstruct this emotion into its underlying physical sensations, such as sweaty hands and a fast-beating heart. You could then reconstruct it another way—as excitement for the opportunity to share your ideas with others, rather than dread about standing in front of a room full of strangers. In fact, studies show that students perform better on math tests when they recategorize anxiety as merely a sign that the body is coping.

Barrett indicates that mindfulness meditation can help with distinguishing between thoughts and emotions, on the one hand, and physical sensations, on the other. Cultivating and experiencing awe—the feeling of being in the presence of something vastly greater than yourself—can also help you get some distance from yourself.

Buddhism and Managing Your Emotions

Barrett alludes to the fact that the idea of “recategorizing” your emotions has its roots in Buddhism.

In fact, Buddhism has long recognized the importance of differentiating between negative feelings and the mental suffering that the human brain piles on top of those feelings. This is illustrated by the Buddhist concept of the two arrows, which instructs that when something bad happens to us, we are hit with the first “arrow” of emotional or physical pain. But the second arrow, we shoot ourselves: It is the mental suffering our thoughts create.

For example, we may feel unpleasant and agitated inside, but rather than sitting with and acknowledging those feelings, we may think, “I feel so awful! Why is this happening to me? Am I depressed? Am I sick? I can’t take this anymore!” If we can recognize that our thoughts are the second arrow, we can remove that additional layer of pain, and be left with simple discomfort.

In Radical Acceptance, psychologist and Buddhist Tara Brach advises dealing with negative feelings by using the two aspects of radical acceptance: recognition and compassion. Recognition, which Buddhists often call mindfulness, is the practice of simply observing your feelings as they arise in the moment. Compassion means responding to your own feelings as you would to a beloved friend. Rather than berating yourself for your negative feelings, respond to them with kindness and care.

When it comes to understanding other people’s emotions, Barrett emphasizes that our perceptions of others’ emotions are just guesses, which are accurate only when they match the other person’s experience. People are better able to communicate and understand each other’s emotions when they are in sync, meaning they share a cultural background or past experiences, and their nonverbal behaviors coordinate. Two people can also “co-construct” emotions depending on the words they choose. For example, if a parent asks a child, “Are you upset?” instead of “How are you feeling?” they influence the likelihood that the child will experience a negative emotion.

The traditional view of emotions is that the responsibility for understanding them lies with the perceiver because emotions are supposedly universally displayed. Under the theory of constructed emotion, if you want your emotions to be understood, you have a responsibility to describe them accurately and transmit clear cues, so other people aren’t just guessing.

(Shortform note: The theory of constructed emotion may affect how therapists and counselors interact with clients. Some research suggests that, because emotions can be co-constructed, therapists should not “mirror” a client’s emotions back to them, as is typical, by stating how they feel because this risks suggesting the “right” emotion in a given situation. Instead, therapists should tentatively test various emotion words in a creative, co-constructed process with clients. This gives the client space to reflect on and identify their own emotions.)