Making Your Own Emotions
Moving from outside-in to inside-out
Making Your Own Emotions
Moving from outside-in to inside-out
Sam, a friend of mine recorded a video of a place they visited on holiday. They had a really good time so they posted it onto social media to show their friends.
They were surprised by one comment that was mean, and it made them upset.
Later the friends got together and started talking about it. “Upset?” One said defensively, “that was a real idiot, Ignore them”.
“Hiding their identity, anonymous keyboard warrior. They would never dare say that to your face if you met them in person.” said another, fuming. “That makes me see red”.
“You must feel hurt by that, we're on your side” said the third supportively.
My comment was a little different. “Upset. Annoyed. Angry. Empathy. Notice how that comment made you all feel. Same troll comment but you all had different emotions. How is that?”
Let me tell you about Professor Lisa Feldman-Barrett, who is changing our thinking about this. In about 1980 she was a psychology graduate progressing to work on her research.
The first thing new researchers do is copy some earlier experiment and reproduce the results. Lisa failed. She tried another experiment. Failed again.
In her own words she tried eight experiments over three years and failed them all. She began to think maybe she wasn't cut out for a life in research.
But she noticed one common pattern. The research was about emotions, and people couldn't clearly identify or consistently describe the feelings they called angry, annoyed, frustrated. Were they talking about different things?
Let's investigate what she did. There are some new ideas, but Lisa is brilliant at explaining her work. Stay with me here...
In our brain we have our lifetime memories of experiences (I already covered some of that in The Cat and the Wool if you need more). This experience ability is so much more than people think.
Take an apple. You can recognise an apple. Earlier your brain created a mental symbol with a matching word for apple. You recognise an apple but that's just the start.
Whether it's one apple, a pile of apples, or even half an apple you immediately recognise what it is.
Real apple, photo, video, painting and you still experience it as an apple. You even identify the media too!
Even a single red apple among twenty red cricket balls you can pick out the apple. Or if it's green, you still know it's an apple.
Isn't that amazing? Once you have your mental concept for apple, you can do almost anything with that concept. Even a three year old can!
When we see a hand sized red sphere we automatically jump to the conclusion that it's probably an apple.
We then simulate in our mind that it is an apple as we gather more facts. Is it slightly shiny? Is it not quite round? Are there greenish tints?
Lisa proposed that just as your brain constructs 'apple' from sensory data, it constructs emotions like 'anger' or 'joy' from your body's energy needs and past experiences.
The commonly accepted view is that the world flows into emotion circuits in our brain. This is different. She said that there are no special emotion circuits, our whole brain simulates and constructs our emotions and they flow out.
But why does our brain construct emotions at all? Lisa suggested it's all about energy...
Think about how Sam chose which moments to film at the ocean — your brain does the same thing, choosing which emotions to construct from the endless stream of possible feelings.
Did Sam magically arrive at the ocean to make a video? No, Sam simulated the ocean weeks earlier, then felt good about that simulation. They simulated a trip to the ocean, how they would travel, when they would go.
The ocean is a spectrum of light flowing into Sam's eyes, sound frequencies coming through the ears, and pressure waves touching the skin.
All of those can be measured by instruments, needles and dials. But no measurement captures the ocean itself. Sam constructs their happiness about ocean from their emotion concepts.
Finally Sam constructs a memory of the ocean in their mind, and on their phone, ready to share with friends. A beautiful, still, calm, azure ocean.
But as a child I used to live right on the coast and on the way to school I saw the ocean almost every day. My ocean is full of energy, swirling, powerful and grey.
We both call it ocean, but invisibly we simulate totally different objects.
By sharing their video of the ocean, Sam reveals detail about their own simulation to our friends.
That's what posting video is about. Sharing your personal view of the world.
Clear so far? Our brain simulates the world we see, not only physical objects, but concepts, ideas, beliefs, everything.
Why do we simulate so well? Lisa explains where it all comes from.
One of the critical things that your brain needs to simulate is what is about to happen physically, to your body. Your heart rate, blood flow, available glucose for energy, blood pressure.
Thousands of physical measurement and controls. It has to do this all the time, awake or asleep, to keep you alive.
This is homeostasis, which means keeping all your body systems in balance — and if anything gets pulled out of balance, to get it back in balance again as quick as possible.
But why does your brain use emotions specifically to manage this energy budget?
Because emotions trigger exactly the physical responses your body needs—anger increases heart rate for action, calm reduces it for rest.
Your body and a brain burn through huge amounts of energy (your brain steals about a third, and it doesn't even have any muscles!).
This is why simulation came about in the first place, so that your brain can keep your body's energy consumption to a minimum.
In evolution, animals that failed to control their body's energy consumption had far less chance to survive and have offspring.
Lisa took this concept a big step forward. She describes this as an energy body budget that has to be controlled and protected carefully.
This is where it gets most interesting: emotions don't come from fixed “emotion circuits” in our brains picking them up from outside.
Rather we use our inner experiential memory and simulation to create emotions to help regulate our body budget.
Just as Sam planned their holiday to manage their mood and energy, your brain constantly manages your body's energy budget through emotional construction.
When anticipating a fight requiring more energy, we create anger. If we need to save energy, we create calm.
Sam manages their body budget all the time without noticing, but by planning a holiday they are also planning to manage their body budget. To relax, to feel happy, to be calm.
Pondering where to go, Sam simulates the ocean, feels happy, decides to visit the ocean. Sam simulates reliving that ocean moment in future, decides to film the ocean. Sam decides to share the happiness with friends, posts the video where they can see it.
Lisa Feldman-Barrett describes this as the Theory of Constructed Emotion.
In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organised as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion.
Just like Sam edited their ocean video before posting, your brain edits emotional responses before you feel them.
At first this can be hard to accept. Your brain does such a good job at constructing everything, it's a totally believable illusion.
It gets even harder to accept because constructing emotion happens so quickly and automatically. We feel that we are reacting instantly to the outside world. The amount of brainpower needed to process this at the speed the world changes is impossible, even for our amazing brains.
The answer is that we already guessed and constructed a suitable emotion, from the inside outwards, ahead of time, to manage the world — then we check and make corrections as we go.
So, did the ocean create a sense of pleasure and fulfilment for Sam? Or did Sam create the sense of fulfilment from being by the ocean?
How does this help us to understand how our friends reacted to the negative comments to a positive video post?
Let's build it up from the foundations. Constructed emotion proposes that we all learn the basic emotional mind objects — that she calls emotion concepts — in the first few years of life.
As babies, we're born with no emotional concepts, just a driving need to be fed and kept comfortable.
Gradually we learn the emotion concepts of anger, fear, sadness, and happiness, (Disgust and surprise are partly wired into us at birth, so that we don't eat poisonous food and can react to danger).
Additional refinements of disgust and surprise are learned later. Along with many more emotion concepts.
Using emotion concepts to control your body budget it's helpful if you have a wider range and, even better, more subtle concepts that can be used for small differences in emotion,
Think about how we develop these emotion concepts. Our friend Alex is an artist and can name all the ocean's blue colours in Sam's video: azure, aquamarine, turquoise, Prussian, cerulean. Colour is an artist's core skill and Alex has many fine-grain colour concepts. I just call them all blue.
In the same way, there are many more subtle variations in emotion concepts: irritation, aggravation, frustration, hostility, disgruntlement. We learn new emotion concepts as we progress through life and gather experience.
Some don't even have equivalent English words. Schadenfreude, a German emotion word meaning “taking pleasure from someone else's misfortune when you think they need to be taken down a peg or two”.
Or hygge, a Danish concept of cosiness, comfort, and contentment evoked by simple, relaxing things in friendly company.
Having finer grained emotion concepts means finer control over your body budget, which has multiple beneficial effects on overall emotional control, personal energy and long term health.
Let's go back to the question I asked my friends. Different emotions arising from the same comment. How?
Each friend is like a different film-maker - they all saw the same comment, but each constructed a different emotional 'edit' based on their unique collection of emotion concepts.
They each used different perspective lenses and filters for their own emotional responses, so that they could best manage their personal body budget.
And here is an interesting point: now that you have your new theory of constructed emotion, understand emotion concepts, and the fact that you create them — you can have an entirely new level of emotional response.
Like my friends responding to Sam's video — they could choose to 'reshoot' their emotional response, constructing calm curiosity instead of anger, just as Sam the film-maker could have chosen different filters or angles for their ocean film.
My friends made the meaning — emotions based on their experience; to feel angry, to feel threatened by what are simply printed words. The words themselves don't have any emotion, they are just collections of letters.
People can choose to make totally different emotions.
Finally, did the words really upset Sam, or did they construct upset from a number of black pixels on a page that without Sam looking at them have absolutely no meaning?
Now my comment should make more sense. “Upset. Annoyed. Angry. Empathy. Notice how that comment made you all feel. Same words but you all had different emotions”.
The video was great by the way. I loved all the different blue moods of the ocean equally, even when I know it can also get quite grey and frightening,
Now that you understand something of the theory that emotions aren't created from outside-in but from inside-out, you can see that all the friends could learn to react differently. You could make this more real by exploring these questions in your own life:
Are there any situations where you often overreact?
Could you create more helpful emotions instead?
How many emotion concepts do you have, and can you count them?
Are there any new emotion concepts that you can learn?
How would you go about learning them?
What emotion concepts can you “borrow” from other cultures?
How can you create new habits (learn new responses) to enjoy life more?
And for those ready to dive deeper, here's a contemplative question that takes our metaphor to its ultimate conclusion: Repeat it softly and see what emerges.
If I am constructing my emotions from emotion concepts I've learned,
what else am I constructing?
If you enjoyed Making Your Own Emotions, come on the next step of our journey:
Would you like to go further with the Constructed Emotion Theory of Lisa Feldman-Barrett?
Or
Build on it with the addition of the Ego Development Theory of Jane Loevinger?
If you have something to share, contribute, or thoughts on the explorations at the end…