Book SummaryHow Emotions Are Made, by Lisa Feldman Barrett

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of How Emotions Are Made

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 introduces a new theory of emotion, based on years of research, which posits that emotions are neither hardwired into our brains nor universally felt and recognized; rather, emotions help the brain to predict what will happen next based on what’s happened in the past—and to plan accordingly. Barrett calls this the theory of constructed emotion. As she sums it up in her TED talk, “Emotions don’t happen to you; they’re made by you.”

Lisa Feldman Barrett 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, Barrett is a director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory, which studies emotions and produced some of the research on which the book is based.

How Emotions Are Made was published in 2017 and widely covered in the popular press for its novel theory of emotion. For all its novelty, however, Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion entered a very crowded and contentious field: Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist whose own theory of emotion agrees in part with Barrett’s, has noted that there are as many theories of emotion as there are emotion theorists. Scientists have a hard time agreeing on the fundamental question of how to define emotion. Barrett’s theory is one response to that question.

How Emotions Are Made examines each element that the brain uses to make emotions (past...

How Emotions Are Made Summary Emotions Can’t Be Measured

Myth: Emotions are scientifically measurable. By observing someone’s facial expressions, monitoring physical changes in their body, or studying their brain activity, it’s possible to pinpoint what emotion they’re experiencing.

Reality: Barrett contends that emotions don’t exist objectively in nature, so there is no way to measure a person’s emotions to determine what they’re “really” feeling. Emotions are actually concepts that you learn as a baby and then apply in the moment to help you understand what's going on around you and inside you.

Emotions Don’t Correspond With Specific Facial Expressions, Physiological Changes, or Regions of the Brain

It’s long been thought that you can tell what other people are feeling solely by looking at their facial expressions—a smile means happiness, a frown means sadness, and so on. But Barrett points out that people move their faces in many different ways when experiencing the same type of emotion; they also move their faces in the same way when experiencing different emotions. For example, a person experiencing joy could smile, cry, or shout; a grimace could mean anger, disgust, surprise, or annoyance, to name just a few....

How Emotions Are Made Summary Emotions Aren’t Universal Across Cultures

Myth: People all over the world recognize and share the same emotions.

Reality: According to Barrett, the experiments on which this idea is based were flawed. In fact, different cultures have different emotions, as expressed through unique words describing emotion concepts that do not exist in other cultures.

Early Experiments Concluding That Emotions Are Universal Were Flawed

Barrett points out that there are thousands of studies claiming that emotions are universal, and popular media reinforces the idea that not only do specific facial expressions correspond with specific emotions, but those emotions are recognizable by people in vastly different cultures all over the world. Everyone recognizes that a frown means sadness, these studies say, and because we all recognize it, we also experience and share the same concept of sadness across the globe. (Shortform note: Charles Darwin’s 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, is one of the first written texts to put forth the theory of universal expressions, and [proponents of the belief still cite it...

How Emotions Are Made Summary Feelings and Emotions Are Not the Same Thing

Myth: Feelings and emotions are two words that mean the same thing.

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,...

How Emotions Are Made Summary 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...

How Emotions Are Made Summary 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...

How Emotions Are Made Summary 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...

How Emotions Are Made Summary 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...

Shortform Exercise: Change Your Emotions to Change Your Life

Changing your experiences can help your brain construct new emotions, which, in turn, affects how you feel on the inside and how you behave in the world. By changing your emotions, you can change your life.

Which challenging emotion(s) do you often struggle with in your life? Describe a recent instance in which you’ve experienced this emotion.