The Nature of Emotions: Innate Reactions or Learned Constructs Shaped by Context?
Fear, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust — we tend to believe that we are born with a set of innate emotions that reflect our reactions to the world. However, in her book How Emotions Are Made, psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett offers a different model, suggesting that emotions do not simply reflect the world, but actually create it for us. Here’s a brief overview of Barrett’s idea and the evidence behind it.
The Classic Model of Emotions
The traditional view of emotions goes like this: you are born with a set of basic emotions — happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. You experience these emotions when you encounter a stimulus. The stimulus triggers a chain reaction in the brain, which in turn causes a bodily response that makes you act in a certain way. In short, emotions happen to you.
Barrett’s New Theory
“That’s not how it works at all,” says Lisa Feldman Barrett, professor of psychology at Northeastern University. In her latest book, Barrett brings together research from neuroscience, biology, and anthropology to propose a fundamentally new theory of emotions.
Barrett argues that emotions do not simply reflect the world for us — they actually create it. This happens through a process called interoception — the way we assess the state of our own bodies. Interoception is the process of sensing, conducting, perceiving, and processing information in the central nervous system that arises from the stimulation of internal organ receptors (interoceptors).
Interoception monitors the body’s internal processes and sends data to the brain in the form of four basic signals: satisfaction, dissatisfaction, arousal, and calm. According to Barrett, emotions are formed as the brain tries to make sense of this raw data, filtering it through our past experiences and learned concepts.
Emotions and Cultural Differences
According to this concept, emotions do not objectively reflect external events. In an episode of NPR’s Invisibilia podcast, Barrett noted:
“For every category of emotion that we discuss in the U.S. and believe to be biologically basic and universal, there is at least one culture in the world that actually does not have the same concept of that emotion, and within which people simply do not experience those emotions.”
She draws a parallel with vision, describing cases where people born blind due to corneal damage remained blind for some time after a transplant:
“They don’t see for days, sometimes weeks or even years. They can’t see because they have no concept of it. Their brains lack the past visual experience needed to process the visual stimuli they receive. If you look at it from the classic perspective, there’s nothing stopping them from seeing, but they can’t.”
Key Takeaways and Criticisms
The key takeaway from Barrett’s theory is that we may have more control over our emotions and more responsibility for them than previously thought. According to her theory, we can fundamentally change our emotional experiences by acquiring or letting go of certain knowledge.
However, the theory is not without its drawbacks. If Barrett is right, what should society say to those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder? Should they just find positive experiences? Barrett responds:
“I see the risks in what I’m saying. But science is science. We need to draw people’s attention to what it tells us, so that in the current social and cultural context, people can discuss the possible consequences of these discoveries. You know, I think it’s very dangerous to treat things as objective if they’re not.”