How Emotions Are Made

The Secret Life of the Brain

Lisa Feldman Barrett

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781328915436
• eBook ISBN: 9780544129962
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Sozialgeschichte

Preeminent psychologist Lisa Barrett lays out how the brain constructs emotions in a way that could revolutionize psychology, health care, the legal system, and our understanding of the human mind.
"Fascinating . . . A thought-provoking journey into emotion science."—The Wall Street Journal
"A singular book, remarkable for the freshness of its ideas and the boldness and clarity with which they are presented."—Scientific American
"A brilliant and original book on the science of emotion, by the deepest thinker about this topic since Darwin."—Daniel Gilbert, best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness
The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose research overturns the long-standing belief that emotions are automatic, universal, and hardwired in different brain regions. Instead, Barrett shows, we construct each instance of emotion through a unique interplay of brain, body, and culture.
A lucid report from the cutting edge of emotion science, How Emotions Are Made reveals the profound real-world consequences of this breakthrough for everything from neuroscience and medicine to the legal system and even national security, laying bare the immense implications of our latest and most intimate scientific revolution.

Notes

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This book has extended endnotes on the web at how-emotions-are-made.com, providing additional scientific details, commentary, and stories about the construction of emotion and related topics.

Many of the printed endnotes include a web link to heam.info (example: heam.info/malloy). These links are shortcuts to the appropriate pages at how-emotions-are-made.com.

Introduction: The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Assumption

1. “sacrificed their lives protecting students”: See the video and transcript at heam.info/malloy.

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2. by chance or by custom: Tracy and Randles 2011; Ekman and Cordaro 2011; Roseman 2011.

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3. newspaper articles that discuss emotion: From a study by my lab; see heam.info/magazines. emoticons inspired by Darwin’s writings: Sharrock 2013. See also heam.info/facebook-1.

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4. through “emotion analytics”: See references at heam.info/analytics-1. “team chemistry” from facial expressions: ESPN 2014. See also heam.info/bucks. training on the classical view: Until recently, the FBI National Academy offered a training course based on Paul Ekman’s research.

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5. a product of human agreement: Searle 1995.

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6. cost taxpayers $900 million: Government Accountability Office 2013. SPOT’s reincarnation, called HIDE (Hostile Intent Detection and Evaluation), may be consistent with newer evidence; see heam.info/spot-1.

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7. men . . . with fatal consequences: This differential treatment persists even when physicians are told that women are at high risk of a heart attack (Martin et al. 1998; Martin et al. 2004).

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8. and hundreds of coalition forces: Triandis 1994, 29.

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1. The Search for Emotion’s “Fingerprints”

1. they feel anxious: Higgins 1987.

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2. I described as emotional granularity: The discovery of emotional granularity inspired a new domain of emotion research; see heam.info/granularity-1.

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3. part of universal human nature: This book has had tremendous influence in psychology; see heam.info/darwin-1.

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4. small muscles on each side: Tassinary et al. 2007.

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5. sadness, and happiness: Ekman et al. 1969; Izard 1971; Tomkins and McCarter 1964.

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6. that best matches the face: E.g., Ekman et al. 1969; Izard 1971. face best matches the story: E.g., Ekman and Friesen 1971. This is called the “Dashiell” method, after its inventor, the psychologist John Dashiell (1927).

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7. (language) to posed faces: Ekman and Friesen 1971; Ekman et al. 1987. expected emotion words and stories: Ekman et al. 1969; Ekman and Friesen 1971. For an overview of the research program with the Fore of New Guinea, see Russell 1994. such as Japan and Korea: Russell 1994; Elfenbein and Ambady 2002.

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8. diagnostic fingerprints of emotion: “The strongest evidence for distinguishing one emotion from another comes from research on facial expressions. There is robust, consistent evidence of a universal facial expression for anger, fear, enjoyment, sadness and disgust” (Ekman 1992, 175–176).

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9. how much, and how often: Tassinary and Cacioppo 1992. each muscle during each emotion: Calculations control for random movements, or movements during a non-emotional comparison period.

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10. pleasant versus unpleasant feeling: Cacioppo et al. 2000.

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11. facial movements as they occur: Ekman and Friesen 1984. FACS was adapted from a method first developed by Swedish anatomist Carl-Herman Hjortsjö in 1969; see heam.info/FACS. consistently match the posed photos: Matsumoto, Keltner, et al. 2008. There are hundreds of published studies on emotional expressions, but this research was able to report only twenty-five studies where spontaneous facial movements were measured. Only half of those using FACS coding found that these movements matched the expected configurations, whereas all of those using a more relaxed version of FACS found a match. All found evidence supporting the claim that people make spontaneous facial movements during emotion matching the expected facial expressions. See heam.info/FACS.

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12. learn rules of social appropriateness: The classical view calls them “display rules” (Matsumoto, Yoo, et al. 2008). the two situations was indistinguishable: Camras et al. 2007. The FACS method in this study was specially designed for babies (Oster 2006). For more on infant emotions, see heam.info/infants-2. seeing facial movements at all: Babies show cultural differences as well; see heam.info/camras-1.

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13. to offending smells and tastes: Their facial movements have also been linked to non-emotional factors such as gaze direction, head position, and respiration (Oster 2005). from the basic emotion method: See heam.info/newborns-1. Nor do infants have distinctive cries for each emotion; see heam.info/newborns-2.

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14. disgust rather than anger: Aviezer et al. 2008.

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15. asked actors to portray them: Silvan S. Tomkins and Robert McCarter (1964) created the photos by drawing on earlier photos taken by the French neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne, who was cited in Darwin ([1872] 2005); see also Widen and Russell 2013.

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16. emotion experts—accomplished actors: This work was conducted by my former graduate student and now postdoctoral fellow Maria Gendron. to match written scenarios: Schatz and Ornstein 2006.

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17. her brow is slightly knitted: Sadly, Ms. Leo’s publicist declined my request to reproduce this instructive photograph.

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18. to improve your peripheral vision: Susskind et al. 2008.

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19. instruments of social communication: Fridlund 1991; Fernández-Dols and Ruiz-Belda 1995. the same each time: Barrett 2011b; Barrett et al. 2011. has a diagnostic facial expression: For evidence on whether non-human primates are similar to humans in their expressions, see heam.info/primates-1. For evidence on whether people blind since birth make facial expressions, see heam.info/blind-2.

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20. the journal Science in 1983: Ekman et al. 1983. in the autonomic nervous system: The autonomic nervous system controls the body’s internal organs, such as the heart, the lungs, etc. It is part of the peripheral nervous system (in contrast to the brain and spinal cord, which are considered the central nervous system). (a measure of sweat): Also known as an electrodermal response or a galvanic skin response; see heam.info/galvanic-1.

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21. to move particular facial muscles: A second task was used as well; see heam.info/recall-1.

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22. can be evoked this way: Facial muscles may move during emotion perception; see heam.info/faces-2.

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23. surprise, and disgust: Some of these ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction: The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Assumption
• The Search for Emotion’s “Fingerprints”
• Emotions Are Constructed
• The Myth of Universal Emotions
• The Origin of Feeling
• Concepts, Goals, and Words
• How the Brain Makes Emotions
• Emotions as Social Reality
• A New View of Human Nature
• Mastering Your Emotions
• Emotion and Illness
• Emotion and the Law
• Is a Growling Dog Angry?
• From Brain to Mind: The New Frontier
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Illustration Credits
• Index
• Sample Chapter from SEVEN AND A HALF LESSONS ABOUT THE BRAIN
• Buy the Book
• About the Author
• Connect on Social Media
• Footnotes