How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett

The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose research overturns the long-standing belief that emotions are automatic, universal, and hardwired in different brain regions. Instead, Barrett shows, we construct each instance of emotion through a unique interplay of brain, body, and culture.

A lucid report from the cutting edge of emotion science, How Emotions Are Made reveals the profound real-world consequences of this breakthrough for everything from neuroscience and medicine to the legal system and even national security, laying bare the immense implications of our latest and most intimate scientific revolution.

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Why I Picked It Up

I love psychology but used to hate feeling. Still sort of do. Thus: a book explaining that, true to form, we have agency in regard to feeling because it's largely constructionist. (I explain this better in this post, but I'm just reviewing this one for now.)

In general, I like reading anything about why we tick, and I generally think knowing more about psychology makes me a better writer, and probably person. (Having just read Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters by John Steinbeck, I feel vindicated; he often referred to what both critics and psychiatrists would think about his characters and the way they behave—actions, intentions, and whether those match or mismatch. The job of a writer is to be curious, empathetic, and precise.)

A ton of other books I read reference Lisa Feldman Barrett as the expert in this particular flavor of scholarship, and that goes along with mastery, etc. If I can always name and parse through whatever I'm feeling—sensation, effect, intensity, action, etc.—then I can control myself entirely (supposedly.)

What I Thought About Going into It

Regardless, I ended up discussing this one with family members based on one very specific trivia "fun fact" they didn't believe—did the Romans smile? This book claims that there is no reference of them doing so, and that some behaviors we assume reflect innate emotion—like smiling—are actually learned. The argument against this is babies and newborns smiling, but even then, they are rapidly processing a whole lot of sensory information as soon as they're born, which does include expressions of emotions. Bookmarking that one.

My thesis in sort of investigating emotion is again, that I can be plenty emotional, but I'm also analytical. In many ways, I'm very similar behaviorally to the types of personalities that suppress all emotion, which is probably why I'm so interested in endurance, self-discipline, etc. and other matters in which you learn to push yourself past your limits of pain and dilute your singularity for a greater "good." But I’ve also historically had a few big swings when something broke through. I assume most perfectionists can land there!

My difference, however, is nowadays that I think I get my strength in this realm from being able to parse out and define the nuances within emotion and behavior i.e. to name whatever I'm experiencing within my system so entirely that it ceases to have power over me. I am acting irrationally because of XYZ reason, from XYZ source, and therefore to skirt that, I just need to do XYZ. So many things are the goddamn dopamine. I need a swear jar, but for psych studies I have no business citing in casual conversation. Of course, this is such a writer belief: the idea that if I can just articulate anything, I have power over it.

I like this approach better than whole (usually unconscious) suppression because I can discard the bad or irrational and exercise a likely excessive level of self-control without losing the good too. You minimize vulnerability still by controlling the process.

If you go through life demonizing emotion entirely, studies actually show that emotions are like muscles—you lose the ability to differentiate between them within your nervous system. Everything gets blurry, so your choice basically becomes feel or not feel. The latter is a tempting choice, but then life tends to take on a gray tint.

Do you then just feel activation vs. numbness? The good and the bad blur together, and that seems like a deeply confusing way to live. My suspicion is that this causes the kinds of intense highs, lows, and through-threads of numbness experienced by characters who basically embrace full-on solipsism—you're able to feel something, but you're automatically suspicious of emotion and shove it down. Or you feel a wave, act out, and then collapse into shame over having shown visible emotion at all.

Even Steinbeck had a gorgeous thought on the muddiness of feeling in a book of his I just read, Travels with Charley: In Search of America (which isn't surprising to me at all):

“A number of years ago I had some experience with being alone. For two succeeding years I was alone each winter for eight months at a stretch in the Sierra Nevada mountains on Lake Tahoe. I was the caretaker on a summer estate during the winter months when it was snowed in. And I made some observations then. As time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that the subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words.”

And again, I see a ton of agency within exercising emotion properly and gaining control over the "muscle" so to speak because of what Lisa Feldman Barrett argues for: that the emotion we feel is entirely constructionist based on the language we use to describe the activation within our nervous system. An example I use frequently: that fear and excitement are the same "sensations" within our systems, but we experience them vastly differently because we name them differently.

And this dovetails with my general emphasis on and fascination with self-fulfilling prophecy and confirmation bias. If you're an active person within your own life, you can convince yourself to just about everything—so you might as well pick a path that makes you happier. Shifting the language you use to describe something changes the thing itself because it shifts your perception of it.

Voice & Tone / About the Book

I found the book overall to be fascinating, albeit I thought that Lisa Feldman Barrett sometimes repeated herself. She frequently said "variation not uniformity is the norm" but it's also—for sure—a thesis.

It's a rich book and neurologically intriguing. There are plenty of graphs and studies she breaks down, plus an enormous appendix packed with definitions, clear references, and plenty of other scholarship. I absolutely love a thorough index.

It's well-organized, with chapters on aspects of emotional mastery, how emotions differ from culture to culture (because of the different languages we use to describe them.) For example, in some cultures, feeling is more collective vs. individual i.e. anger does not exist until there's a second party in the picture receiving that anger. I absolutely relished the linguistic precision of this book. Facial expressions, language, fingerprints, others' effects on us, social reality, etc.

It talked about how dopamine's released by prediction error (again) and how emotion is basically a formula of salience + context. Of course, I've also been talking nonstop about salience this year. I have a Post-It above my desk for writing that says "voice is as much what you notice as how you say it" to remind me that characters (and by default, people) pick up on different details depending on what they bring to the scene or conversation: their level of suspicion, openness, exhaustion, you name it.

(As a writer, this emotional awareness can maybe get me into trouble too: silly example, but it hurts my feelings that people automatically assume I'm psychoanalyzing or judging them when I'm unfortunately actually just very genuine about listening to and asking them about what they have to say.)

Like me, Lisa Feldman Barrett believes in perspectivism, not rationality. It would be absolutely impossible for someone to process enough about any given situation to have the full picture, so the idea that we're capable of stripping something down to an emotionless read is frankly...impossible. I don't believe rationality exists; the brain is just excellent at putting on enough blinders to ignore information beyond its chosen read (which, for the record, is also a conversation Cormac McCarthy has in Blood Meridian in the existential angst of longing for solipsism: whatever exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. Man's ultimate choice is the choice of his scope, and which greater judgements he can submit to.)

The coldest read is not inherently the most accurate one, and in fact, there's a study on that too: often, the "cold, rational" read is less accurate because it tends to be the protective one, and we tend to make worse decisions when we're in a loss-focused mindset. So there's a case for optimism, right there: statistically, you make better decisions when you're focused on what you will gain.

It's a good reminder for relationships too. People will see whatever they want, even when negative, which is why it's probably best to treat everyone with as open and generous a read as possible. (I've repeated myself on this point, but it never stops being a guide for me; that and awe are probably the themes of Words Like Silver overall.) We are all victims of self-fulfilling prophecy, so treat people like the best version of themselves and those things then likely become true. But I digress.

She asks good questions, both in the introduction and throughout the book (and even says that scientific revolutions tend to come not from the discoveries themselves but by asking the right questions.) Are you responsible for your decisions when emotional?

Feldman Barrett starts the book by seeking universal fingerprints of emotion and identifying the core question of neuroscience in this realm. Which comes first: the expression of an emotion or the emotion itself? (Basically the same question from Mind in Motion, which argues that action triggers thought rather than the other way around.) She argues that fingerprints of emotion don't exist—or signal the existence of universal "emotions"—because emotions are constructed by the feeler. They don't independently exist within each of us.

Lines I Loved & Highlighted

“Your past experiences—from direct encounters, from photos, from movies and books—give meaning to your present sensations. Additionally, the entire process of construction is invisible to you...purely physical sensations within your body have no objective psychological meaning. Once your concepts enter the picture, however, those sensations may take on additional meaning.”

She uses a great example of how she once went out on a date and felt dizzy, flushed, warm, etc. and interpreted that as attraction based on the context of the situation and the details of her physical sensation; when she got home and found out she had the flu, those same cues took on a completely different (negative) connotation.

She also points out how emotions themselves are not continuous states, but rather labels that exist in a single second or snapshot in which we are evaluating our brain activity and trying to decide what to do next.

“A physical event like a change in heart rate, blood pressure, or respiration becomes an emotional experience only when we, with emotion concepts that we have learned from our culture, imbue the sensations with additional functions by social agreement.”

“Even when you feel no sense of agency when experiencing emotion, which is most of the time, you are an active participant in that experience.”

“Using your concepts, your brain groups some things together and separates others. Your concepts are cookie cutters that carve boundaries because they’re useful or desirable. A hill and a mountain would be grouped but not a mountain and a lake.”

And she goes further in pointing out that just because a reality is social does not mean that it's not real; it does, literally, get under your skin and become how you interpret everything. In many ways, we operate in terms of constant prediction. Dopamine, for example, is released from prediction error.

“Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious.”

“But one thing is certain: every day in America, thousands of people appear before a jury of their peers and hope they will be judged fairly, when in reality they are judged by human brains that always perceive the world from a self-interested point of view. To believe otherwise is a fiction that is not supported by the architecture of the brain.”

“Instead think, 'We have a disagreement,' and engage your curiosity to learn your friend’s perspective. Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right.”

Side note: I've mentioned this before also, but the biggest shift in my own happiness within the last few years has been coming to genuine peace with the idea of people getting me wrong or misunderstanding me because they're being judgmental or defensive by default. Be curious, not judgmental etc. It's okay! Won't change how I act towards you, because I'm no longer offended by the misread. It doesn't change my self-image, even if I'd love the chance to correct it.

“The same emotion category (anger, joy, sadness) can evoke different bodily responses. Variation, not uniformity, is the norm.”

“Your genes turn on and off in different contexts, including the genes that shape your brain’s wiring. That means some of your synapses literally come into existence because other people talked to you or treated you in a certain way. The macro structure of your brain is largely predetermined, but the micro wiring is not.”

“Other people regulate your body budget (your brain’s prediction of your energy needs) in addition to your brain’s simulations and perceptions. When you interact with your friends, you and they synchronize breathing, heartbeats, and other physical signals — leading to tangible benefits. Holding hands with loved ones, or even keeping their photo on your desk, reduces activation in your body-budgeting regions and makes you less bothered by pain. If you’re standing at the bottom of a hill with friends, it will appear less steep and easier to climb than if you are alone. When you lose a close relationship and feel physically ill about it, part of the reason is that your loved one is no longer helping to regulate your budget. You feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself because, in a sense, you have.”

“What you feel alters your sight and hearing more than the other way around.”

“It’s possible for each person to change their emotion concepts and therefore their behavior.”

“Essentialism promises simple, single-cause explanations that reflect common sense, when in fact we live in a complex world.”

“Emotional intelligence is actually about getting your brain to construct the most useful instance of the most useful emotion concept in a given situation.”

Overall Thoughts

I honestly have so many thoughts on this book I need to book club. It's an absolute bible for how the brain works, whether you consider yourself an emotionally articulate person or consider yourself someone "above" the sensation of emotion. I've always been able to recognize emotion, but generally dislike that I feel it.

Some people see me as emotional. In high school and college, I had some people tell me I was a total robot. Depends on the context in which you see me. As a whole, I just dislike the slipperiness of emotion i.e. how it can disrupt my focus or plans, which is also why I've historically despised having crushes because I loathe that someone can affect me or throw me "off-balance." Total control, for me, tends to involve total independence too.

But this book argues how we all create our emotional states—which is not to dismiss very real psychological or psychiatric modes like depression or anything—which means that we might as well take an active role in taking responsibility for them and steer them towards what we want.

“People who make highly granular emotion concepts (i.e. content, joyful, prideful, adoring, grateful instead of just happy) construct instances finely tailored to fit each specific situation.”

The book did convince me largely that suppression overall is ultimately net-negative overall because then, when something breaks through, you don't feel that same sense of agency and control. Naming the nuance is a better method of control long-term because you aren't controlled by them—or lack of them—but admit your role in the language, scope, relationships, fuel, etc. affected by what you're packaging or assuming.

It even has tangible suggestions to improve your granularity and feeling. Like I've mentioned, it's always easiest for me to do any "self-care" suggestions when there is a genuine, logical reason for me to versus being a you should be kinder to yourself suggestion from someone I love. I've been talking about getting a massage after [redacted book process] for...at this point, about six years, and this book actually gives concrete data suggesting it's one of the things you can do to be emotionally healthier. That, learn new languages, distinguish sensations within your body, etc.

I've already been an active gratitude list gal:

“Track your positive experiences every day. Each time you attend to positive things, you tweak your conceptual system, reinforcing concepts about those positive events and making them salient in your mental model of the world. Words lead to concept development, which will help you predict new moments to cultivate positivity.”

I also feel like a perspective of "pure" rationalism being naïve keeps me more humble and open to new information, which hopefully makes me a better and more adaptive participant in existence—but who knows. I try to stay on top of interoception and how my body feels, and when it's useful to push past those signals (i.e. gym) or to listen to them (get more sleep, reduce caffeine, whatever actionable step I can take to "feel better.") Also a good reminder that being physical, rooted in reality, outside, engaged with others, etc. is ultimately best based on sheer biology. Which is why I've tried to be less hyperindependent overall.

I think a lot about the panic of being in the end stages of an all-consuming life dream last year, and how much adrenaline (and, realistically, panic) I had flowing through me at a given time. I've said this before, but this year is night-and-day to that. In some ways, I couldn't have completely ignored the interoception or intensity of that period, but it was a lot, as someone who generally does not like the vulnerability of emotion, especially seen by others. I'm much more likely to withdraw into solitude until I "get myself in order" but this book (and others like it) have helped me figure out a method of control that doesn't require isolation or suppression. I think anyone who's high-powered or wired in a way like I am—high, high standards—probably grapples with the shame of feeling anything that seems to derail them, in that sense. Again, I'm learning to "let people in" without feeling like I'm giving something up by letting them see me, but that's sort of a personal thing to share. (It's good practice for me!)

In many ways, reading such a detailed take on emotion has definitely made me more visibly even (to myself or to others) because I can so clearly recognize, identify, and choose between various reads of a given situation. I’m not frustrated that I feel anything at all breaking through. Like I mentioned, I've always been analytical in that sense, but I used to ride the wave more or assume that it was a failure of control to feel something grab ahold of me—I could only control my restraint around it.

Like I described in my review of How to Think About Exercise, je déteste supposed self-help—but wrap it in hard science or philosophy and I'm more likely to internalize it. So I can feel the ripple effect of this one in my daily living. I think privacy and independence and solitude will always be core pillars for me and what I respect (both in myself and with others around me), but I do think a lot about what's chosen vs. unchosen within our scope. In this sense, feeling any emotion at all—and then choosing to share it or not share it—becomes a choice not minimized by my methods of processing. As the book explains, if you can articulate the very precision of your emotional landscape, you can actually be incredibly forceful in picking the reads (salience) or threads of feeling that most benefit you to assume. The labeling and choice create the power here—backed by neuroscience.

Nowadays, I'm much more likely to exercise my conscious choice in what I pay attention to and what I do about it without hating the sensation of feeling emotion at all as a sign that I'm not purely discipline. I hate feeling messy; I only feel messy when I’m emotional. But that's the perfectionist in me speaking; I suppose right now I find description more disciplined than denial, and redefining fluency in this realm to be a strength that makes me even more autonomous. The concreteness of this book helped me psychologically in a way practically nothing else has, especially because its purpose feels more academic.

Even as a writer, this is a fantastic book to tackle at a craft level if you want to get even more precise and persuasive in terms of characterization, voice, etc. Because building up skill in one will build up skill in the other. My nonfiction interests feed my fiction, and vice versa! I'll definitely cite it as a must-read for...basically everyone, and I'd love to have more conversations about it with others: what you agree with and what you don't.

I’m fun on Substack.

For fans of:

The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin; Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman; Why We Click by Kate Murphy; Mind in Motion by Barbara Tversky; The Molecule of More by Daniel Lieberman and Michael E. Long; etc.