Overview:
Emotions are a social construct used to explain body and brain information. Emotions vary from culture to culture as they are defined by human agreement. Different physical responses can represent the same emotion. Context provides much of the information needed to understand which emotion is active.

The brain is continuously predicting how to respond to a myriad of internal and environmental factors. The brain uses past experiences to construct meaning, to construct emotions, to determine how to handle sensory inputs. Past experiences are represented by concepts, which enable the extraction of meaning from inputs. Without concepts, inputs would just be noise.

Emotions are shaped by society, which means that each individual can shape how societies perceives concepts. The way each individual treats and speaks to others, shapes the micro wiring of their brain. Words do hurt physically and mentally, which means that each individual is responsible for how they treat other people. Different past experiences create conflict as each individual derives different meaning from the forthcoming experiences. Everyone is also responsible for how their brain makes predictions, because they can choose the experiences that change the forthcoming predictions.

What Are Emotions:
The classical paradigm asserts that emotions have essence. That each emotion has an identifiable pattern in body and brain. Evolutionary fixed so that the same patterns appear no matter where the individual is from.

The problem is that there has been no consistency in physical expressions indicating emotions. Rather than emotions having a physical fingerprint for each emotion, researchers find variety of physical reactions for the same emotion. Emotions and physical expressions match when actors show an expression without feeling the emotions.

Alternately there is the constructed emotions paradigm, in which humans actively construct emotions rather than being passive receivers of emotions. Emotions are a social reality. Emotional concepts are learned from culture, social agreements. The same changes within the body, such as heart rate, can have different meanings in different cultures. Experiences are constructed and requires a perceiver to create meaning of the data. They live in a social reality in the presence of human perceivers. Emotions are a social reality like many human organizations such as an occupation, and government. Emotion as a concept was invented in the seventeenth century.

Context changes the meaning of an expression, changing which emotion is shown. Each emotion depends on information from context, culture, internal and other surrounding influences. Situational context provides emotional cues more than facial expressions. An emotion is the brain’s creation to explain bodily sensations according to the situation.

There are culturally stereotypical symbols for emotions, but each emotion actually takes on various physical forms. Emotion is a category of instances with tremendous variety.

Within the classical paradigm, there is a brain area dedicated to every psychological function, to each emotion. This view has become problematic because there are those with brain impairments, but still possess the emotions that were supposed to be impaired. The brain contains core systems which shape a variety of mental states. Each core system has the ability to function for various other brain functions.

Making A Prediction:
The brain makes prediction on the potential responses to stimuli, given past experiences. As the brain is continually predicting, the world people experience is of their own creation, only to be reined in by the sensory world. Senses are not actually reactions to the world, but largely simulations of the world. Not passive receivers but active constructors of emotions. Real world is secondary, for believing is seeing.

The brain does not only make prediction due to external needs. Predictions regulate the body’s energy use, the body budget. Emotions and logic are not separate, for emotions regulate the body budget. If the prediction about the information is correct, the brain does not need any more energy. More energy is needed to rectify the wrong prediction. Prediction errors are normal and are not a problem. Too few prediction errors prevent learning. Too many prediction errors make everything appear as a hallucination.

Caveats?
When individuals communicate, they become responsible for each other’s experiences, for each other’s micro wiring, for each other’s physical and mental health. Some caveats for the book includes there is little reference on a practical way on how to seek out an appropriate understanding of someone else, to find a better method of interacting with others. Miscommunication is likely given that what is said and done can be interpreted in a variety of different ways based on prior experiences. ( )

This book defines the theory of constructed emotion

Thesis: Emotions are constructed - there is not an innate one-to-one correlation between a physical express and an emotion.

Research that suggested that there is a fixed set of facial expressions to codify emotions were based on flawed research. The research prejudiced the answers to fit the western model. Thus, the researchers methodology contaminated the results.

- Emotions are constructed
- Words are powerful in categorization
- Those with a limited set of emotional words have a limited ability to identify emotions

Contents
Introduction
1. The search for emotion’s “fingerprints”
2. Emotions are constructed
3. The mytho of universal emotions
4. The origin of feeling
5. Concepts, goals, and words
6. How the brain makes emotions
7. Emotions as social reality
8. A new view of human nature
9. Mastering your emotions
10. Emotions and illnes
11. Is a growling dog angry
12. From brain to mind: the new frontier
Thirteen more entries in the TOC

There is even an “Extended Endnote” wiki!
https://how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Home

From the Glossary: Some terms that need to be understood to understand this book:

Affect
Your simplest feeling that continually fluctuates between pleasant and unpleasant, and between calm and jittery.

Affective niche
Everything that has any relevance to your body budget in the present moment.

Affective realism
The phenomenon that interoception influences what you see, hear, and otherwise perceive.

Essentialism
The belief that essences exist in nature, e.g., that fear and happiness have distinct biological causes.

Interoception
The brain’s representation of sensations from your body’s organs, tissues, hormones, and immune system.

Theory of constructed emotion
My theory of emotion. In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion.

Triune brain
The myth that the brain evolved like a layer cake, with “cognitive” circuitry wrapped around “emotional” circuitry, allegedly permitting thoughts to control feelings.

Some related resources

https://www.centervention.com/list-of-emotions-135-words-that-express-feelings/
The list of emotions a typical pre-K child understands may be limited to happy, mad, sad, and scared. (A reference is given.)
They have programs for K-8

https://www.berkeleywellbeing.com/list-of-emotions.html
A long page. They have a short list of emotions in sections according to several different theories of emotion. Then there is a longer list of emotions. Followed by a Further Reading section. ( )

The book looks at our overly simplistic view of emotions and presents a more dynamic and fluid explanation as to how to see them. The story is actually much deeper than appears beause the solution to the failure of identifying specific emotions from behaviour leads us to crisis in many aspects of social function, from justice to teaching, and animal rights.

It is really a great book, the only thing I didn’t appreciate is that some of the analogies were flat. But the breadth of the work of the author is eminently commendable and an exciting read. ( )

“We are the architects of our own experience” affective realism, concept construction, and social reality form our experience of our emotional response. But our body budgeting brain doesn’t much care what is TRUE. If our brains predict, based on the above three features a social anxiety attack, a social anxiety attack we will have. Could have actually been unpleasant high arousal, but we construct the likely emotion.

Am I missing something or is Lisa Feldman- Barrett trying to overturn the entire current thinking about emotion. Seems to me she is working very hard to introduce a totally new paradigm. (though, as she mentions late in the book a lot of relevant esearch to her project was done in the 1920's that somehow got overturned and forgotten). I've just copied a lot of the critical gems from the book in the following passages....with an occasional comment from me.
"The time-honored story of emotion goes something like this: We all have emotions built-in from birth. They are distinct, recognizable phenomena inside us. When something happens in the world, whether it's a gunshot or a flirtatious glance, our emotions come on quickly and automatically, as if someone has flipped a switch. We broadcast emotions on our faces by way of smiles, frowns, scowls, and other characteristic expressions that anyone can easily recognize. Our voices reveal our emotions through laughter, shouts, and cries. Our body posture betrays our feelings with every gesture and slouch".
"Our emotions, according to the classical view, are artifacts of evolution, having long ago been advantageous for survival, and are now a fixed component of our biological nature. As such, they are universal: people of every age, in every culture, in every part of the world should experience sadness more or less as you do.......This view of emotions has been around for millennia in various forms.......Plato believed a version of it. So did Hippocrates, Aristotle, the Buddha, René Descartes, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin. Today, prominent thinkers such as Steven Pinker, Paul Ekman, and the Dalai Lama also offer up descriptions of emotions rooted in the classical view. The classical view is found in virtually every introductory college textbook on psychology."
"And yet ... despite the distinguished intellectual pedigree of the classical view of emotion, and despite its immense influence in our culture and society, there is abundant scientific evidence that this view cannot possibly be true. Even after a century of effort, scientific research has not revealed a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion".
Lisa goes to considerable lengths to demonstrate/prove that the classical way of distinguishing emotions by looking at the facial expressions is just plain wrong....even when you measure muscle movements, instead of just looking at the face or pictures of the face there is no consistent, predictable marker for angry, sad, or fearful. And the same thing applies to bodily measurements such as finger temperature or heartbeat. I found this really interesting because all (or most of) the stuff that I've read about emotion claims that facial expressions are universal and people everywhere make the same expressions when fearful etc. And I recall reading Darwin's work making the same claims. And other work that cited consistent expressions of distaste by rats who they tasted something bitter. But, I'm more or less convinced by her data and claims that emotions don't have reliable bodily "fingerprints".
"So what are they, really? When scientists set aside the classical view and just look at the data, a radically different explanation for emotion comes to light. In short, we find that your emotions are not built-in but made from more basic parts. They are not universal but vary from culture to culture.........They are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that environment".......This view, which I [Feldman] calls the theory of constructed emotion, offers a very different interpretation".
"I learned long ago that "sadness" is something that may occur when certain bodily feelings coincide with terrible loss. Using bits and pieces of past experience, such as my knowledge of shootings and my previous sadness about them, my brain rapidly predicted what my body should do to cope with such tragedy. Its predictions caused my thumping heart, my flushed face, and the knots in my stomach......In this manner, my brain constructed my experience of emotion. My particular movements and sensations were not a fingerprint for sadness. With different predictions, my skin would cool rather than flush and my stomach would remain unknotted, yet my brain could still transform the resulting sensations into sadness".
"We are, I believe, in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of emotion, the mind, and the brain - a revolution that may compel us to radically rethink such central tenets of our society as our treatments for mental and physical illness, our understanding of personal relationships, our approaches to raising children, and ultimately our view of ourselves".
She relates a personal anecdote, which I found very convincing (and amusing). "Back when I was in graduate school, a guy in my psychology program asked me out on a date. I didn't know him very well and was reluctant to go be-cause, honestly, I wasn't particularly attracted to him, but I had been cooped up too long in the lab that day, so I agreed. As we sat together in a coffee shop, to my surprise, I felt my face flush several times as we spoke. My stomach fluttered and I started having trouble concentrating. Okay, I realized,! was wrong. I am clearly attracted to him. We parted an hour later - after I agreed to go out with him again - and I headed home, intrigued. I walked into my apartment, dropped my keys on the floor, threw up, and spent the next seven days in bed with the flu"..........My experience in the coffee shop, where I felt attraction when I had the flu, would be called an error or misattribution in the classical view, but it's no more a mistake than seeing a bee in a bunch of blobs. An influenza virus in my blood contributed to fever and flushing, and my brain made meaning from the sensations in the context of a lunch date, constructing a genuine feeling of attraction, in the normal way that the brain constructs any other mental state. If I'd had exactly the same bodily sensations while at home in bed with a thermometer, my brain might have constructed an instance of "Feeling Sick" using the same manufacturing process. (The classical view, in contrast, would require feelings of attraction and malaise to have different bodily fingerprints triggered by different brain circuitry.)"
"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 experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action".
On the concept of the triune brain which has taken on a life of its own she is quite adamant: "This illusory arrangement of layers, which is sometimes called the "triune brain" remains one of the most successful misconceptions in human biology. Carl Sagan popularized it in The Dragons of Eden, his bestselling (some would say largely fictional) account of how human intelligence evolved. Daniel Goleman employed it in his bestseller Emotional Intelligence. Nevertheless, humans don't have an animal brain gift-wrapped in cognition, as any expert in brain evolution knows"............"Mapping emotion onto just the middle part of the brain, and reason and logic onto the cortex, is just plain silly."
"When we share those abstractions with each other, by synchronizing our concepts during categorization, we can perceive each other's emotions and communicate........That, in a nutshell, is the theory of constructed emotion - an explanation for how you experience and perceive emotion effortlessly without the need for emotion fingerprints. The seeds of emotion are planted in infancy, as you hear an emotion word (say, "annoyed?) over and over in highly varied situations. The word "annoyed" holds this population of diverse instances together as a concept, "Annoyance"..............Your genes gave you a brain that can wire itself to its physical and social environment. The people around you, in your culture, maintain that environment with their concepts and help you live in that environment by transmitting those concepts from their brains to yours".
"Emotion categories, in my view, are made real through collective intentionality. To communicate to someone else that you feel angry both of you need a shared understanding of "Anger." If people agree that a particular constellation of facial actions and cardiovascular changes is anger in a given context, then it is so. You needn't be explicitly aware of this agreement."
"Humans are unique, however, because our collective intentionality involves mental concepts. We can look at a hammer, a chainsaw, and an ice pick and categorize them all as "Tools" then change our minds and categorize them all as "Murder Weapons" We can impose functions that would not otherwise exist, thereby inventing reality. We can work this magic because we have the second prerequisite for social reality: language.........emotion concepts are most easily learned with emotion words,.........From childhood we hear people say "fear" and "surprise" in particular contexts. The sound of each word (or, later in life, the written form of each word) creates enough statistical regularity within each category, and statistical differences between them, to get us started."
"Classical view theorists debate endlessly about how many emotions there are. Is love an emotion? How about awe? Curiosity? Hunger? Do synonyms like happy, cheerful, and delighted refer to different emotions? What about lust, desire, and passion: are they distinct? Are they emotions at all? From the standpoint of social reality, these debates are nonissues. Love (or curiosity, hunger, etc.) is an emotion as long as people agree that its instances serve the functions of an emotion".
"These latter two functions [emotion communication, social influence] require that other people - the ones you are communicating with or influencing agree that certain body states or physical actions serve particular functions in certain contexts".
"Likewise, all varieties of the classical view consider emotions like sadness and fear to have distinct essences. The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, for example, writes that an emotion's essence is a circuit in the subcortical regions of your brain. The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker writes that emotions are like mental organs, analogous to body organs for specialized func-tions, and that an emotion's essence is a set of genes. The evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides and the psychologist Paul Ekman assume that each emotion has an innate, unobservable essence, which they refer to as a metaphorical "program.""
"Essentialism is the culprit that has made the classical view supremely difficult to set aside. It encourages people to believe that their senses reveal objective boundaries in nature. Happiness and sadness look and feel different, the argument goes, so they must have different essences in the brain. People are almost always unaware that they essentialize;......Essentialism is also remarkably difficult to disprove. Since an essence can be an unobservable property, people are free to believe in essences even when they cannot be found. It's easy to come up with reasons why an experiment did not detect an essence: "we haven't looked everywhere yet,......words invite you to believe in an essence, and that process is conceivably the psychological origin of essentialism........So, essentialism is intuitive, logically impossible to disprove, part of our psychological and neural makeup, and a self-perpetuating scourge in science".
"Psychologists often recount stories of behaviorism in the same chilling tones as a ghost story around a campfire. It declared that thoughts, feelings, and the rest of the mind were unimportant to behavior or might not even exist. During this "dark ages" of emotion research, which lasted for several decades, nothing worthwhile was discovered on human emotion (suppos-edly)........Ultimately, most scientists reiected behaviorism because it ignores a basic fact: that each of has a mind."
"It's hard to give up the classical view when it represents deeply held beliefs about what it means to be human. Nevertheless, the facts remain that no one has found even a single reliable, broadly replicable, objectively measurable essence of emotion. When mountains of contrary data don't force people to give up their ideas, then they are no longer following the scientific method. They are following an ideology........The human brain, you see. is wired to mistake its perceptions for reality. Today, powerful tools have yielded a more evidence-based explanation that's almost impossible to ignore... yet some people still manage."
"The good news is that were in a golden age of mind and brain research".
Feldman starts to diverge from her subject a bit here to my way of thinking and delves into the interaction between emotions and health: "several notable and serious disorders may all be related to your immune system, which links your mental and physical health within your predicting brain. When bad predictions go unchecked, they may lead to a chronically unbalanced body budget, which contributes to inflammation in the brain and corrupts your interceptive predictions even further in a vicious cycle. In this manner, the same systems that construct emotion also can contribute to illness".
Likewise, maybe slightly off-theme she delves into the consequences of a wrongly held view of emotion in the legal system: "Jurors and judges are charged with an almost impossible task: to be a mind reader, or if you'd rather, a lie detector. They must decide if a person intended to cause harm.......But in a predicting brain, a judgment about someone else's intent is always a guess you construct based on the defendant's actions, not a fact you detect; and just as with emotions, there is no objective, perceiver-independent criterion of intent"
I must say, that I've found her arguments persuasive (and I've read a bit about concepts of emotion ....especially emotion and valuing....and, of course Hume'/s views on the "passion's role in decision making). I think this is an important work. Will she get a Nobel prize? I'll have to wait and see....but maybe not as she clearly didn't invent the concepts. Definitely worth five starts from me. ( )

A very interesting look into how Lisa currently believes our brains create our emotions. Lisa pushes well against the tide of established beliefs and makes a fairly good case for her theories.

But, we’ll probably throw this one on the “scrap-head-of-wild-scientific-ideas-that-came-and-went” in a few years time, along with all the other thoughts that currently suit the zeitgeist.

Interesting though. ( )

A friend recommended a podcast episode featuring this author during a chat about feelings, so I went straight to the source and read the whole book. As such, I was reading this from the perspective of self-help: I wanted to better understand feelings and emotions in a framework that makes sense to me. From that perspective, this was a perfect read. I'm an atheist and a skeptic and pretty intellectually-driven as a person. I'm very familiar with the idea of being "more in touch with your feelings", but I feel like this is the first time I've seen someone try to explain what that might mean in a way that is comprehensible to someone who is not very in touch with their feelings. It's like in yoga classes when they tell you to "release" this or "extend through" that and fundamentally I don't know what they're talking about. That contrasts with doing Feldenkrais and small-group Pilates where it isn't assumed that you already have the knowledge the class is supposedly teaching and so I'm learning to get in touch with my body, rather than just learning that I'm not as in touch with my body as the yoga instructor.

Probably the key lesson for me in this book was that we construct our emotions on the basis of our feelings (as well as our perceptions, history and context) and our feelings are based in our physical body. It's not possible to feel rage without a pounding heart, not because we feel angry and then our heart starts pounding, but because a pounding heart is one of the signs that the brain uses to determine whether or not we're angry. "Interoception" is the perception of sensations within the body and it is fundamental to emotion. In fact, it's fundamental to pretty much everything. How we interpret the world is radically changed by how we feel inside. Being more in touch with feelings can make us better at understanding emotions, but also make us better able to care for ourselves and to give us a clearer perception of the world around us.

As well as the things listed above, I'm a pluralist, and so although this book is quite polemical for a work of popular science, I take all of its claims with a pinch of salt. I'm not a neuroscientist or psychologist, so I don't have to decide how true this stuff is in relation to other theories. It's enough to know there is truth here and I find it a helpful way to think about feelings. As a result, I skipped through some of the later chapters, because unless I'm 100% on board with a theory, I find it a bid dull to read applications of it. Nevertheless, the chapter on practical things to do was good, if not exactly revolutionary, and I feel this book has made me not just better able to understand myself, but has given me extra motivation to take care of myself in fundamental ways. ( )

Good intro to social construction ideas coming from neurology ( )

3.5 stars if I could have. Rounded down instead of up because of the length - not a huge book but it could have been shorter easily.

What I liked was some good ideas about emotions being to a large part socially constructed things, not simple modules like "despair" or "jealousy" that all humans share. In general she made very good points against essentialism in psychology and in all areas, and I really agree about that.

I didn't like the writing style much. I couldn't have done a better job myself of course, so I feel a little bad sniping. But I'm sure she's more of a scientist than a writer. ( )

Even if you don't take her positive argument, Feldman Barrett's deconstruction of an essentialist approach to emotions--a platonic ideal of emotions that are universally shared by every person and culture--is absolutely convincing. Mental states depicted as the result of a stochastic cascade of interactions in your body provide a far more useful picture of emotions than our relatively lazy narrative of emotions.

Where it falls apart is when the author ventures further afield from her expertise on distinguishing essentialism from more modern takes on emotion and begins applying this in real world examples. It's not so much that she's wrong about the importance of emotions to jurisprudence and so on, so much as its a case of not being an expert in those fields too. It's like having an expert fishing hook designer tell you how to fish. It seems like it would make sense to have a deep understanding of a part of the activity, but it really doesn't mean such an expert has the necessary contextual knowledge of the applied field to tell you anything profound.

The kicker for me was near the end of the book when Feldman Barrett refers to Steven Pinker's characteristic dismissal of politically correct objections to his statements about black poverty and related issues. It's just inane to say that such a statement makes relative sense within Pjnker's constructed reality--it falls into a rhetorical trap to leave context out of the issue and thereby throw a soft ball on anything that depends on history to make sense of (i.e. racism and most other social and institutional concerns that this research would apply to). ( )

The arguments for a constructivist theory of emotion are laid out and reviewed. Although this is not the first attempt to do so, the tone seems to suggest otherwise. The language is at times anthropocentric. A positive note: the book is well and clearly written. The conclusions might force some eyebrow to raise. Eventually worth reading if you're interested in the debate. ( )

An amazing explanation of the constructionist theory of emotions. The book carefully lays out the central constructs of the theory, the evidence for them and disassembles the apparent theory for the essentialist classical theory that emotions are fixed entities in the brain. The second half of the book is a very useful guide to the implications for personal development, the legal system and our relationships with animals.

This is one of those books that profoundly shifts my perspective on the world and myself. I suspect I can’t “unsee” the implications.

Strong recommend! ( )

تقدم المؤلفة في كتابها عدداً كبيراً من الأمثلة التي توضح كيف يخلق الدماغ المشاعر من خلال نظام معقد ينظم مستويات الطاقة في الجسم وكيفية إنفاقها. تقول أنّ ما نفكر فيه غالباً على أنه "عاطفة" فطرية هو، في الواقع، تركيبة ناتجة من العلاقة بين الثقافة والدماغ وتفسيراتنا الخاصة لأحاسيسنا الجسدية، وهو ما يخالف النظرية الكلاسيكية القائلة أن المشاعر حصيلة ردات فعل دماغية محددة بصفات موحدة وموروثة.
لا أعلم مدى التأييد أو المعارضة التي لاقاها الكتاب ضمن أوساط علم الأعصاب، إلا أنه مثير للاهتمام بلا شك. ( )

You read a lot of books, but sometimes one comes along that changes the way you look at the world . And in this case also yourself. Lucid, clear and funny. ( )

Ballsy, ambitious, I'm 70% convinced. ( )

An interesting exploration of the way our brains construct reality, including emotions. Makes the argument against "essentialism" (the idea that emotions are essential elements, born into us, recognizable, and characterized by a common set of traits) and instead suggests they are socially, linguistically constructed categories culturally agreed upon, which we use to predict and explain reality. The explanations of the neurological basis of this structure are a little hard to follow at times, which is appropriate for such a counter-intuitive process as the brain.

As always with arguments made from a strong knowledge base, lots of experience, and a great deal of research, the central assertions are sound. Every time the author ventures out of her expertise zone you can tell she's not as firmly grounded, and largely speculating. For instance, her assertion that a language's names for emotions indicate a different experience of reality is too much like the somewhat discredited Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

The chapter on using the implications of the book in our own lives is brief and thin. I wonder if an editor insisted on including it. ( )

A fantastic book on how "Essentialism", a concept that means things have a set of characteristics that make them what they are, has been used to explain how and where emotions are made and located in the brain, and how this method is totally wrong.

This book, at times, absolutely blew my mind. Using rigorous studies in psychology and neuroscience, Barrett and her lab has shattered all the old ideas of how we form emotions, and even how we form ourselves. If you are at all interested in psychology, read this book. ( )