Emotions, the classic thinking goes, are innate, basic parts of
our humanity. We are born with them, and when things happen to us, our
emotions wash over us.
"They happen to us, almost," says Lisa Feldman Barrett,
a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and a researcher
at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital.
She's also the author of a book called How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. In it, she argues for a new theory of emotions which is featured in the latest episode of NPR's program and podcast Invisibilia.
The
"classical view" of emotions as innate and limited in variety, she
says, "matches the way that many of us experience emotion, as if
something's happening outside of our control," she tells Shots.
"But
the problem with this set of ideas is that the data don't support them.
There's a lot of evidence which challenges this view from every domain
of science that's ever studied it."
Lisa Feldman Barrett spoke to Shots about her alternative theory of emotions. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
Where do our emotions come from? Do they tell
us truths about the world that should guide our behavior, or should we
be more skeptical of them? Alix Spiegel and co-host Hanna Rosin examine
how two people can look at the same thing and experience two different
emotions in the first episode of Season 3 of the NPR podcast Invisibilia.
The other way though is that we can invest effort in the present
to cultivate new experiences for future use in prediction. This is a
really nice discovery, because what it means is that your horizon of
control over your own experience is much broader than you might think.
For
example, if you look at cognitive behavioral therapy, if you look at
many of the books and articles which talk about cultivating compassion,
cultivating wonder, cultivating a number of pleasant experiences that
are thought to have beneficial effects, this is exactly what's
happening. Your past experience is one ingredient to making emotions in
the present.
On how states of displeasure and arousal are related to emotions
Those
feelings are not properties of emotion, they're properties of
consciousness because they're always with you, whether or not your brain
is using them as ingredients of emotion, or for thoughts or
perceptions. They are part of you and your experience of the world even
when you are not experiencing emotions.
For example you know
that's a delicious drink. That guy's a [jerk]. You know this is a
beautiful painting. These are these are examples of when affective
feelings from your body are very strong, but you are not making emotions
with them. You're making perceptions of the world or perceptions of
another person.
But when an effect is very intense, those are
the moments when the brain is usually making emotion out of them. [For
example], you can sometimes have a very strong feeling of fear when
you're feeling very unpleasant and very worked up. But fear can also be
pleasant. When you're on a roller coaster, for example. People pay money
to be afraid.
My point here is that in the classical view is
that anger is negative — sometimes positive, but usually negative. Fear
is negative, disgust is negative, happiness is positive.
But
what the evidence shows is, in fact, that the pleasantness or
unpleasantness of an emotion is really variable. So there are varieties
of sadness that can feel very pleasant, varieties of happiness that can
feel very unpleasant. And the quality really comes from these sensations
in your body.
from : http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/06/01/530103479/the-making-of-emotions-from-pleasurable-fear-to-bittersweet-relief