Believing is Seeing: Understanding Modern Emotion Science
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time learning about the science of emotion and how modern neuroscience has drastically changed our understanding of where emotions come from and the role that they serve. Enter one of the leading experts, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Northeastern University, who is among the top 0.1% of cited researchers in the world.
In her book, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, Dr.Barrett shows how the “classical view” of emotion, which argued that there are universal “fingerprints” of emotion that exist at birth, has been disproven over the past two decades. That conclusion begs the question: If we don’t have universal fingerprints that exist at birth, how exactly do we end up with emotions?
Dr.Barrett’s answer is what she calls the “Theory of Constructed Emotion.” During the first year of life, our brain learn patterns by engaging in statistical learning. That learning allows us to form concepts that help us make sense of the world around us. The words that the adults speak to us have a massive impact on the concepts we learn and the words that we end up using to make and perceive emotion. In fact, Dr.Barrett argues that it is incredibly difficult to experience emotion if we do not have an emotion word for it. As Dr.Barrett says,
“The objects you see, the sounds you hear…they all involve continuous sensory signals that are highly variable and ambiguous as they reach your brain. Your brain’s job is to predict them before they arrive, fill in missing details, and find regularities where possible, so that you experience a world of objects, people, music, and events, not the ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ that is really out there.” (p.86)
Emotions do more than help us make sense of what might otherwise be an ambiguous world. Everyday your body is running a budget to keep you alive. Think of all those things that keep your heart beating, your lungs breathing, your glucose metabolizing, etc. In simple terms, how you feel physically at any given point in time is some variation of feeling either unpleasant or pleasant and either calm or aroused. How we label that sensation impacts what we perceive both now and in the future. Based on hundreds of studies, it has become clear that our brain predicts body responses by drawing on prior experiences with similar concepts and situations. This is why even the mere thought of a demanding boss can elevate your heart rate!
One of the simplest ways you can learn to regulate emotions is to take good care of your body budget by doing things you’ve probably already been told are good for you: exercising, eating healthy, human connection, time outside, yoga, meditation, etc.
But I don’t want to talk about those things today. I want to talk about a practice that you may be less familiar with. It turns out that learning more emotion words and being able to make meaning of your experience with greater granularity can have a massive impact on how you live day to day. Dr. Barrett calls this “emotional categorization.”
“With practice, you can learn to deconstruct an affective feeling into mere physical sensations, rather than letting those sensations be a filter through which you view the world. You can dissolve anxiety into a fast beating heat. Once you can deconstruct sensations, you can recategorize them in some other way, using your rich set of concepts. Perhaps that pounding in your chest is not anxiety but anticipation, or even excitement.” (p.188)
Some examples to illustrate how this kind of practice can have an impact:
Let’s say you are feeling out of sorts but don’t know why. You might label that as anxiety. However, you might also take a step back and realize that you slept horribly the night before. If you’ve had one, or especially a few, consecutive nights of bad sleep I’m willing to bet this is the culprit. The out of sorts feeling is likely your body telling you that you need to rest and get some properly restorative sleep!
Another example where many of us already categorize quite well is being “hangry.” A wonderful term that describes feeling highly angry or irritable because you are hungry. If you know the word “hangry” and have a concept for it, you can probably distinguish that when you haven’t had enough to eat that day or have had too much time between meals, that feeling of extreme irritability that threatens to take over is not a sign that you are actually angry. You can hopefully distinguish that you are hungry and your body is telling you to please go eat something!
Lately I’ve been having a fun time inventing my own emotion concepts. On the golf course, I have invented the term “try hard-itis” to describe the state of trying too hard on the golf course, getting stressed out, and continuing to play worse and worse. When I label the feeling “try hard-itis” I give my brain and body a signal that I actually don’t need it to be in stress mode. Often, the label allows me to laugh at myself, calm down, and have fun which tends to lead to better play. Shocking!
Hopefully, what I’ve shown you is that we actually have more control over how we make sense of our experience than we think. It turns out that the idiom “seeing is believing” is largely inaccurate. What is more accurate is actually the idea that “believing is seeing.” The physical sensations we feel often come from what our brain predicts based on prior experience, and those predictions are strongly influenced by the concepts we learn and the emotion words we use to label our experience. I encourage you to get curious about your body budget, explore different ways to make meaning of physical sensation, and perhaps even have some fun inventing your own emotion words. And please do share any fun new words with the class!
Two notes:
*I am not a neuroscientist or psychologist. What I’ve done here is give you the “spark notes” version of research that I find to be incredibly interesting and impactful to day to day life. I highly suggest learning more from the experts themselves. To get started, check out the following:
Listen to Dr.Barrett on the 10 Percent Happier podcast here
Dr.Barrett’s perspective on whether or not emotions are “real”
“I am not saying emotions are illusions…I’m not saying that everything is relative. If that were true, civilization would fall apart. I am also not saying that emotions are ‘just in your head.’ That phrase trivializes the power of social reality. Money, reputation, laws, government, friendship, and all of our most fervent beliefs are also ‘just’ in human minds, but people live and die for them. They are real because people agree they’re real. But they, and emotions, exist only in the presence of human perceivers.” (p.140)