How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

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 core of this book is quite good:
- we assume our emotional concepts (happiness, fear, anger) are universal, and even extend to related mammals, when in fact they are socially constructed. I think the author does a good job of demonstrating the social nature of emotion, and tearing down the classical view of emotion
- emotions, feelings, affect originate from within, rather than being events that happen to us. Page 57: “Your river of feelings might feel like it's going over you, but actually you're the river's source”
- we can be misguided about the origin of our affect, and make fundamental attribution errors. This can negatively affect our decision making
- emotions don't have concrete ‘fingerprints', emotions are really statistical clumps with a wide range of variance
- emotions aren't rooted to a single part of the brain. I was quite surprised to learn that you can experience fear, even without an amygdala!

I do think this book could be much shorter than it is without losing it's essential points. Some of the chapters here are quite speculative, and much weaker than the early core. In ‘Mastering Your Emotions', she quotes the emotional intelligence guy saying “For star performance in all jobs, in every field, emotional competence is twice as important as purely cognitive abilities”. What is EI if not a cognitive ability? Assuming that he means IQ, I remain unconvinced that EI can account for any variance in job performance not already caught by IQ, agreeableness, and maybe conscientiousness. Our author then goes on to say we can improve our emotional regulation by learning more words and listening to ‘thought-provoking audio content like National Public Radio'. Ugh, ok? She does at least present a study in favor of the former, but it's not clear from the text whether the effect was due to more granular description of the participants' emotions, or them dissociating more from their affect/emotion (would also like to see replications).

I stopped during the legal system chapter, where a lot of strong claims seemed to be drawn from flimsy evidence (2017 was pre-replication crisis in social psychology, right?), and I figured I wasn't going to learn much more from the last few chapters.

This book has insidiously been changing my life. I find myself engaging differently in some conversations. Definitely reading differently, especially anything to do with communication. There are some books I may want to reread in light of this new perspective. And perspective is all it is: just a reframing of a mental model.

Barrett in no way denies or invalidates emotions; what she does is suggest that they're not as universal as we think. Not across humans, certainly not across species. Affect is more universal, but we build emotions from that plus self-awareness plus the all-important social/cultural environment. It's nature and nurture both, and just like that fruitless debate, people get into trouble when they start looking for gene-for-this or brain-region-for-that. Barrett's model helps us see complex emotions as constructs, which she hopes can change the focus of research and, should those directions prove fruitful, eventually society and even law.

Barrett does seem a little too smitten with her own thesis, a little too certain. I do hope her model pans out, yields new insights, and proves useful. But this is science: it may not.