Summary ‘How Emotions Are Made’ – Lisa Feldman

Barrett
Chapter 1 The search for emotion “Fingerprints”
Emotional granularity → people vary tremendously in how they
differentiate their emotional experiences. Emotional granularity is about
accurately reading your internal emotional states when taking the classical
view into consideration → measuring an emotion objectively.
The fingerprint of an emotion is assumed to be similar enough from one
instance to the next, and in one person to the next, regardless of age,
sex, personality, or culture.
According to the classical view, each emotion is displayed on the face as a
particular pattern of movements, a facial expression. These movements
are part of the fingerprint of their respective emotions.
Facial feedback hypothesis → contorting your face into a particular
configuration causes the specific physiological changes associated with
that emotion in your body.
The same emotion category involves different bodily responses. Variation,
not uniformity, is the norm. different behaviors have different patterns of
bodily reactions to support their unique movements.
Emotion is not a thing, but a category of instances, and any emotion
category has tremendous variety.
Degeneracy → many to one → many combinations of neurons can produce
the same outcome. Brain areas or core systems are many to one, whereas
the classical view believed they were one to one.
Chapter 2 Emotions are constructed
Your past experiences, from direct encounters, from photos, movies and
books, give meaning to your present sensations. Experiential blindness →
not being able to see an image properly, e.g. the black bobs in the
picture. The process of construction remains invisible to you. Once you
have seen an image properly, it cannot be unseen.
Simulation → your brain changed the firing of its own sensory neurons in
the absence of incoming sensory input. Are your brain’s guesses of what’s
happening in the world. Simulation is the brain’s default mode for all
mental activity and holds a key to unlocking the mystery of how the brain
creates emotions. Your brain uses concepts to simulate the outside world.
Without concepts you would be experientially blind. Your brain uses
concepts to give meaning to internal and external sensations,
simultaneously.
An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean in
relation to what is going on around you in the world.
Theory of constructed emotions → your brain uses past experiences,
organized as concepts to guide your actions and give your sensations
 meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain
constructs instances of emotions. Emotions are not reactions to the world.
You are not a
passive receiver of sensory input, but an active constructor of your
emotions. From sensory input and past experiences your brain and
prescribes action.
Classical view → is intuitive, events in the world trigger emotions inside of
us. Its story features familiar characters like thoughts and feelings that
live in distinct brain areas. Theory of constructed emotions → your brain
invisibly constructs everything you experience, including emotions. Its
story features unfamiliar characters like simulation and concepts and
degeneracy, and it takes place throughout the whole brain at once.
Scientific tradition called construction/constructivism → experiences and
behaviors are created in the moment by biological processes within your
brain and body. The core ideas of this theory regarding emotions are:
1. An emotion category such as anger or disgust does not have a
fingerprint. One instance of anger need not look or feel like another, nor
will it be caused by the same neurons. Variation is the norm.
2. The emotions that you experience and perceive are not inevitable
consequences of your genes. What’s inevitable is that you’ll have some
kinds of concepts for making sense of sensory input from your body in the
world because, you brain has wiring for this purpose. Concepts are not
genetically predetermined. They are built-in only because you grew up in
a particular social context where those emotion concepts are meaningful
and useful, and your brain applies them outside your awareness to
construct your experiences.
The theory of constructed emotions incorporates ideas from construction
theories, these are:
1. Social construction → studies the role of social values and interests
in determining how we perceive and act in the world. How feelings and
perceptions are influenced by our social roles or beliefs. It ignores biology
and states that emotions are triggered differently depending on your
social role. They don’t study how these social circumstances affect your
brain’s wiring.
2. Psychological construction → your perceptions, thoughts, and
feelings are themselves constructed from more basic parts. It considers
emotions to be constructed by core systems in brain and body.
3. Neuroconstruction → experience wires the brain. Everyone’s brain is
wired differently based on past experiences and helps determine your
future experiences and perceptions.
Holism, emergent properties and degeneracy are the very antithesis of
fingerprints. The core assumptions of the classical view are: bodily and
neural fingerprints, ancient emotion circuits are passed down from
ancestral animals, and emotions are inborn and universal. The theory of
constructed emotions in contrast states that emotions are not inborn, and
if they are universal, it’s due to shared concepts. What’s universal is the
ability to form concepts that make our physical sensations meaningful.
Emotions are social reality. The words and concepts of your culture help to
shape your brain wiring and your physical changes during emotion.
Facial expressions → facial configuration, because English has no word for
the set of facial muscle movements that the classical view treats as a
coordinated unit.
Emotion → instance of emotion because, it could refer to a single instance
of an emotion, or it could mean the whole category of said emotion.
General emotions → emotion category because, each word names a
population of diverse instances.
Recognize/detect emotion → perceive an instance of emotion because,
they apply that an emotion category has a fingerprint that exists in nature
independent of any perceiver, waiting to be found.
with it to keep you alive and well. Intrinsic brain activity are nonstop
predictions (without any need for a stimulus from the outside world).
Besides anticipating on sensory input from outside the skull, predictions
also explain it. Predictions are also used to initiate your body’s
movements. If your brain predicts perfectly, then the actual sensory input
carries no new information beyond the prediction. So the input needn’t
travel any further in the brain (efficient)= the simulation becomes your
experience. Evolution literally wired your brain for efficient prediction
because humans are bombarded by sensory input.
Through prediction and correction, your brain continually creates and
revises your mental model of the world. It is an ongoing simulation that
constructs everything you perceive while determining how you act.
Prediction error= when predictions are not correct (based on past
experience in comparison to actual situation). If predictions don’t match
with the actual sensory input from the world, the predictions must resolve
the errors.
Prediction loop= This loop holds at many levels throughout your brain
(neurons with other neurons, regions with other regions)
→ predict → simulate → compare → resolve errors → predict
Solving prediction errors 1 Change the prediction- 2 Stick with the original
prediction- it filters the sensory input so it’s consistent with the prediction.
In short, the brain is structured as billions of prediction loops creating
intrinsic brain activity. Visual, auditory, gustatory (taste), somatosensory
(touch), olfactory (smell) and motor predictions travel throughout the
brain, influencing and constraining each other. These predictions are held
in check by sensory inputs from the outside world, which your brain might
prioritize or ignore.
In many cases, the outside world is irrelevant to your experience. In a
sense, your brain is wired for delusion: through continual prediction, you
experience a world of your own creation that is held in check by the
sensory world. Once your predictions are correct enough, they explain the
meaning of your sensations (brains default mode). And the brain can
predict and imagine the future at will. ...
 Most important prediction of your brain is your body’s energy needs to
stay alive. Important is that any movement of your body is accompanied
by a movement in your body (shift position to catch a ball, breath more
deeply). This occurs every moment of your life, interoception is therefore
continuous.
From the viewpoint of your brain, your body is also part of the world that
need to be explained. A single interoceptive cue can have a lot of causes.
Your brain must explain bodily sensations to make them meaningful by
prediction.
Interoception is only experienced in general terms: feelings of pleasure,
displeasure, arousal, or calmness. Sometimes, you experience moments
of intense interoceptive sensations, emotions. Thus, your brain gives your
sensations meaning in every waking moment. Some of those sensations
are interoceptive sensations, and the resulting meaning can be an
instance of emotion.
Interoception is a whole brain process in which several regions work
together in a special way. Interoceptive network → controls your body,
budgets your energy resources, and represents your internal sensations.
General parts of the interoceptive network (figure 4-4) 1 Body-budgeting
regions = the set of brain regions that send predictions to the body to
control its internal environment (speed up the heart, slow down breathing,
release more cortisol etc.) 2 Primary interoceptive cortex = brain region
that represents sensations inside your body.
Interoceptive predictions = sensory predictions, each time the body-
budgeting regions predict a motor change, they also predict the sensory
consequences of that change. The interoceptive predictions flow to your
primary interoceptive cortex where they are simulated. The neurons in the
primary interoceptive cortex compare the simulation to the sensory input,
computing any relevant prediction error, completing the loop, and
ultimately creating interoceptive sensations.
Why important to emotion? Because every brain region that is be claimed
to be a home of emotion in humans, is a body-budgeting region within the
interoceptive network, which don’t react in emotion (the brain is not
reactive!).
Regulation of body budget without actual physical movement, by
imagination and by other people. ...
Affect = the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each
day. Two features:
 Valence = how pleasant or unpleasant you feel
 Arousal = how calm or agitated you feel
Affect depends on interoception. That means affect is a constant current
throughout your live, even when you are completely still or asleep.
Affective feelings are summaries of your budgetary state.
The brain constantly uses past experience to predict which objects and
events will impact your body budget, changing your affect. Affective
niche= these objects and events, everything that has relevance to your
body budget in the present moment.
Psychologist James A. Russel: showed that you can describe your affect in
the moment as a single point on a two-dimensional space, the circumplex
(figure 4-5). The two dimensions represent valence and arousal, with
distance from the origin representing intensity.
Affective realism= when you experience affect without knowing the cause,
you are more likely to treat affect as information about the world, rather
than your experience of the world. It is a common but powerful form of
naïve realism, the belief that one’s senses provide an accurate and
objective representation of the world. Affect leads us to believe that
objects and people in the word are inherently negative or positive. You
see what your brain believes. ...
Sensations you feel from your body don’t always reflect the actual state of
your body. That’s because the sensations you feel do not always reflect
the actual state of your body, because familiar sensations are not really
coming from inside your body. They are driven by simulations in your
interoceptive network. In short, you feel what your brain believes. Affect
primarily comes from prediction.
Everything you feel is based on prediction from your knowledge and past
experience. Believing is feeling.
Goal-based concepts are super flexible and adaptive to the situation.
Concepts are remarkably malleable and context-dependent, because your
goals can change to fit the situation. The goal is the only thing that holds
together the category.
When you categorize, your brain is not finding similarities in the world but
creating them. When your brain needs a concept, it constructs one on the
fly, mixing and matching from a population of instances from your past
experience, to best fit your goals in a particular situation. – key to
understanding how emotions are made.
Emotion concepts are goal-based concepts (lot of different kinds of
happiness). As long as your instances concern the same goal (detecting
danger) in the same situation (a turbulent airplane ride), you and your
friend can communicate, using synchronized concepts.
Categorization = variation of concepts is the norm. Some instances of
concepts are more effective in a particular context to achieve a particular
goal (like theory of natural selection of Darwin). ...
Statistical learning= a new-born brain has the ability to learn patterns, to
learn regularities and probabilities around you. Statistical learning in
humans was first discovered in studies of language development. Babies
have a natural interest in listening to speech, perhaps because the sounds
occurred alongside body budgeting from birth. As they hear the sounds
streaming along, they gradually infer the boundaries between phonemes,
syllables, and words. Babies are born able to hear the differences between
all sounds in all languages, but by the time they reach one year of age,
statistical learning has reduced this ability to the sounds contained only in
the languages they have heard spoken by live humans. Babies become
wired for their native languages by statistical learning. Same learning in
vision and sound, assumable also in rest senses and interoceptive
sensations.
Babies use statistical learning to make predictions about the world,
guiding their actions (infants crawled to the cup with lollypops that was
statistically more likely to contain their preferred colour because it came
from the jar where the that colour was in majority). → estimating
probabilities based on patterns of observation and learn, to maximize the
desirable outcomes.
Human infants also learn that some of the information they need about
the world resides in the minds of the people around them. Example of
mental inference is the realization that an object has positive value for
someone else.
Statistical learning alone does not equip humans to learn purely mental,
goal-based concepts whose instances share no perceptual similarities.
Instances of an emotion category such as ‘fear’ don’t have enough
statistical regularity to allow a human brain to build a concept based on
perceptual similarities. You need words!
Infants automatically try to guess the goal behind another person’s
actions; they form a hypothesis (based on past experience in similar
situations) and predict the outcome that will occur several minutes later.
Statistical learning alone does not equip humans to learn purely mental,
goal-based concepts whose instances share no perceptual similarities ( →
speech needed). From infancy, children understand that speech is a way
to access information inside other people’s minds (attuned to babytalk).
Even before infants understand what words mean, the sounds of the
words introduce statistical regularity that speeds concept learning.
Mental similarities = goals, intentions and preferences, that are spoken
words which give the brain access to information that resides in the minds
of other people. This similarity is called the goal of the concept.
Social reality = in which two or more people agree that something purely
mental is real, is a foundation of human culture and civilization (these
mental similarities). ...
Hypothesis: emotion words hold the key to understanding how children
learn emotion concepts in the absence of biological fingerprints and in the
presence of tremendous variation (words spoken by other humans in the
child’s affective niche who use emotion concepts).
Development of a conceptual system in children for emotion. Which
includes all the emotion concepts they have learned in their lives,
anchored by the words that name those concepts. They categorize
different facial and bodily configurations as the same emotion, and a
single configuration as many different emotions. Variation is the norm.
Regularity in emotion concepts: an instance of an emotion concept helps
to make sense of longer continuous streams of sensory input, dividing
them into distinct events.
Concept learning continues throughout life. You can learn a new emotion
word which appears in your primary language, making a new concept. Or
you can learn new emotion concepts which can modify those of your
primary language.
Emotion words = they reflect the varied emotional meanings you
construct from mere physical signals in the world using your emotion
knowledge. You acquired that knowledge from persons in your affective
niche. ...
When you have he conceptual system in your brain, you need not
explicitly recall or speak an emotion word to construct an instance of an
emotion. In fact, you can experience and perceive an emotion if you don’t
have a word for it.
Conceptual combination = the power of the brain’s conceptual system to
combine existing concepts to create your very first instance of a novel
concept of emotion. Conceptual combination as basic function of the
conceptual system. It is powerful but less efficient than a word.
When a mind has an impoverished conceptual system for emotion, it can
not perceive emotion. Alexithymia = people who are suffering with
difficulty for experiencing emotion by themselves and others. They also
have a restricted emotion vocabulary and have difficulty remembering
emotion words. Clues that concepts are critical for experiencing and
perceiving emotion. ...
Concepts are linked to your body budget, both are linked to everything
you do and perceive.
Learning concepts in a multisensory way (the entire sensory context in the
moment). Your brain samples from your larger conceptual system
according to your goal in a given situation. The winning instance guides
you to regulate your body budget. All categorizations are based on
probabilities, you are predicting and explaining the meaning of sensations
based on probability and experience each time you hear an emotion word
or face an array of sensations.
Theory of constructed emotion, an explanation for how you experience
and perceive emotion:
Concept cascade reveals neural reasons for claims in the book: 1 Cascade
of predictions explains why an experience feels triggered rather than
constructed. You’re simulating an instance even before categorization is
complete. 2 Explains that every thought, memory, emotion, or perception
that you construct in your life includes something about the state of your
body. Namely, your interoceptive network (which regulates your body
budget) is launching these cascades. 3 The cascade highlights the neural
advantages of high emotional granularity, the phenomenon of
constructing more precise emotional experiences. Preciseness leads to
efficiency; a biological payoff. 4 Population thinking, because multiple
predictions make up a concept in the moment. You construct a large
population of predictions, each of which has its own cascade. That
population is a concept. It represents summaries that fit your goal of
similar situations.
M. Edelman called experiences ‘the remembered present’, and he was
correct. An instance of a concept, as an entire brain state, is an
anticipatory guess about how you should act in the present moment and
what your sensations mean. ...
Control network= helps resolving uncertainties and helps construct
instances of emotion. When the interoceptive network is launching
hundreds of competing instances of different concepts (each a brain wide
cascade), your control network assists in efficiently constructing and
selecting among the candidate instances so that your brain can pick a
winner. Result is akin to natural selection: in which the instances most
suitable to the current environment survive to shape your perception and
action.
Control network and interoceptive network are critical for constructing
emotion and contain most of the major hubs for communication
throughout the brain.  brain’s body-budgeting regions. Through these
massive connections, they broadcast predictions that alter what you
perceive. Therefore, at the level of brain circuitry no decision can be free
of affect. ...
To make meaning is to go beyond the information given, by virtue of your
knowledge and the context around you.
Emotions are meaning. They explain your interoceptive changes and
corresponding affective feelings, in relation to the situation. They are a
prescription for action. The brain systems that implement concepts, such
as interoceptive and control network, are the biology of meaning making.
Chapter 7 ‘Emotions As Social Reality’
A sound, is not an events that is detected in the world but they are
experiences constructed when the world interacts with a body that detects
changes in air pressure, and a brain that can make those changes
meaningful.
Changes in air pressure and wavelengths of light exist in the world, but to
us they are sounds and colours. We perceive them by going beyond the
information given to us, making meaning from them using knowledge
from past experience, that is, concepts. Every perception is constructed by
a perceiver, usually with sensory inputs from the world.
‘Are emotions real?’. This riddle forces us to confront our assumptions
about the nature of reality and our role in creating it. Real can be seen as
perceiver-independent categories (supposed to exist in the natural world
whether or not humans are present) or as perceiver-dependent categories
(a
perceiver is required in order to exist). An example of perceiver-
dependent categories are emotions. Muscle movements and bodily
changes become functional as instances of emotion only when you
categorize them that way, giving them new functions as experiences and
perceptions. Without emotion concepts, these new functions don’t exist.
‘Real in nature’ and ‘illusory’ is a false dichotomy. Fear and anger are real
to a group of people who agree that certain changes in the body, on the
face, and so on, are meaningful as emotions. So, emotion concepts have
social reality. They exist in your human mind that is conjured in your
human brain, which is part of nature. The biological processes of
categorization, which are rooted in physical reality and are observable in
the brain and body, create socially real categories.
--
Human civilization is literally build with social reality. We categorize. We
take things that exist in nature and impose new functions on them that go
beyond their physical properties. Then we transmit these concepts to each
other, wiring each other’s brain for the social world (core of social reality).
‘How do emotions become real?’. The answer lies in building a bridge from
the perceiver- independent biology of the brain and body, to the everyday
folk concepts that we live our lives around. Emotions become real to us
through two human capabilities that are prerequisites for social reality:
collective intentionality (shared knowledge in which a group of people
agrees that concepts exists- categorization as a cooperative act) and
language (with words we can impose functions that world not otherwise
exist, thereby reinventing reality). The two abilities build on one another
in complex ways and the combination also allows people to categorize
cooperatively, which is the basis of communication and social influence.
-Words invite to form concepts by grouping together physically dissimilar
things for some purpose. -Words have power to let place ideas directly
into another person’s head. -Words encourage mental inference: figuring
out the intentions, goals and beliefs of others.
You need a word to teach a concept efficiently. Collective intentionality
requires that everyone in a group shares a similar concept. People can
form certain concepts without knowing the word (face). But certain
concepts require words (pretend telephones). Similarly, emotion concepts
are most easily learned with emotion words. Emotion categories don’t
have consistent fingerprints in the face, body, or brain. This means that
instances of a single emotion concept need no physical similarity for your
brain to group them together. So we, as a culture, introduce mental
similarity using words. Nobody knows whether the concepts form before
the words or vice versa, but it is clear that words are vitally linked to the
way we develop and transmit purely mental concepts.
--
Individual functions of emotions: -The first stems from the fact that
emotion concepts, like all concepts, make meaning. Different
categorizations represent different meaning: that is, different likely
explanations for your physical state in this situation, based on your past
experience. This explains your sensations and actions. -The second
function stems from the fact that concepts prescribe action. An instance of
emotion, constructed from a prediction, tailors your action to meet a
particular goal in a particular situation, using past experience.
‘Emotion from another culture’, its instances are just as real to others as
your own emotions are to you. Beyond individual emotion concepts,
different cultures don’t even agree on what ‘emotion’ means. When you
move to another culture, there is emotion acculturation. From a new
culture you acquire new concepts, which translate into new predictions.
Using those predictions, you become able to experience and perceive the
emotions of your newly adopted home. → people’s emotions do not only
vary from culture to culture, they can also transform.
A brain that is bathed in the situations of a new culture is probably
somewhat like an infant’s brain: driven more by prediction error than
prediction. Lacking the emotion concepts of the new culture, the
immigrant brain soaks up sensory input and builds new concepts. These
new emotional patterns don’t replace the old ones, though they may
cause interference. You can’t predict efficiently when you don’t know the
local concepts. You must get by with conceptual combination, which can
be effortful and yields only an approximate meaning. Or you will be awash
in prediction error much of the time. The process of acculturation
therefore taxes your body budget.
--
The theory of constructed emotion explains how you experience and
perceive emotion in the absence of any consistent, biological fingerprints
in the face, body, or brain. Your brain continually predicts and simulates
all the sensory inputs from inside and outside your body, so it
understands what they mean and what to do about them. These
predictions travel through your cortex, cascading from the body-budgeting
circuitry in your interoceptive network to your primary sensory cortices, to
create distributed, brain-wide simulations, each of which is an instance of
a concept. The simulation that’s closest to your actual situation is the
winner that becomes your experience, and if it’s an instance of emotion
concept, then your experience emotion. This whole process occurs, with
the help of your control network, in the service of regulating your body
budget to keep you alive and healthy. In the process, you impact the body
budgets of those around you, to help you survive to propagate your genes
into the next generation. This is how brains and bodies create social
reality. This is also how emotions become real.