The Secret Life of the Brain - How Emotions Are Made

Great book, although I found a rather major flaw in one of early chapters -- the Minangkabau is an Asian tribe, not an African one.
Referring to this snippet from the book:
'This alternative explanation is borne out by their later experiment with an African tribe, the Minangkabau of West Sumatra. These volunteers had less understanding of Western emotions and did not show the same physical changes as Western test subjects; they also reported feeling the expected emotion much less frequently than the Western subjects did.'

There's some fascinating stuff here, but woo is it tough to get through. The author is clearly very knowledgeable about her subject. And it's quite a subject, she speaks intelligently about neuroscience and epistemology and builds a coherent and believable theory of what emotions are that will really make you think.

But it's dense. REALLY dense. Like, don't try to read this while the kids are awake dense. And she throws a LOT of personal anecdotes in, which is a weird combination. It's like talking to someone who is really smart, smart enough to know that their social skills maybe aren't all that, and they are overcompensating for it by trying a little too hard to be open and personable. It's kinda strange.

The first several chapters are explaining the science, and then the rest of the book is a slightly different topic for each chapter. The chapter most people will be most interested in, Mastering Your Emotions, is buried in the middle of the book. This is NOT a self-help book but rather a book of scientific theory, though, so don't expect a lot of new advice. There's nothing in this chapter that isn't covered in other books.

Where this book shines (and the reason I gave it four stars instead of three) is in the chapters on social reality, illness, and the law. These are intriguing, thoughtful chapters, and I don't think I will look at mood disorders the same way again.

All in all, a good choice for those with an interest in the subject and the time and space to read a difficult but worthwhile book.

The authors research on how we use prediction is worth further investigation. The book is made weak due to the author presenting her personal views on various topic without concrete research to support them. Additionally, much of the authors information of how the mind uses predictions is not original work.

Human life is emotional. This book will change your understanding of how that happens, and what it means. Easily best science book I've read this year. Really is playing in a higher league than most round-ups of new research. It's written by the actual researcher who conducted the ground-breaking work, and she can clearly explain the history, context and importance of the old and new ways to view emotions. Really excellent writing, great vocab, pacing, tone, humour. She overturns conventional wisdom and science, and then takes us on a tour of what our new understanding means for our future.

It's bang up to date, for example talks about Dylann Roof's shooting spree and Facebook's emotion emojis. Extensive notes, bibliography and appendixes for folks who want to dive deeper. Wide ranging. Technically spot on (I've published research into eyewitness reports and her summary is masterful). Full of fun examples and phrases. And never talks down to a reader that hasn't taken brain biology classes. We move from the accepted norms of viewing human emotions, that are intuitive and compelling, to the theory of constructed emotion in small smooth steps. And see the difference just like we see the Sun move around the sky every day, but understand the Earth actually revolves around the Sun.

I finished this book with a greatly enhanced understanding of the brain in general, human emotions in particular, and along the way enjoyed being inside a modern scientific paradigm shift. It changes for the better my view of what it means to be a human being.

I like books in which the author presents the reader with clear, comprehensible (and accessible, when possible) science, and also both presents and explains his or her more normative point of view. But for such books to be effective and persuasive, authors need both to know when and where they are departing from the 'just the facts, ma'am' posture, and to make sure that they give the readers clear signposts that that is what they are doing. Certainly there are authors and books that do this effectively. Robert Sapolsky's excellent collection of essays, "The Trouble with Testosterone" is one of them. Elizabeth Kolbert's "The Sixth Extinction" is another.

This book, sadly, is not in that category. The author does not always have a clear grasp of when she is doing what: reporting (what she takes to be evidence-backed) science, and putting forward a less grounded, more normative, and more idiosyncratic (not science) point of view.

In fact, I had trouble with both the science and the polemic. Certainly those who discuss the emotions who come from other fields would not apply agree with the author's gloss of accounts of the emotions. Notably, those from fields in which there has been more careful examination of the notion of the object of an emotion, and more careful analyses of meaning will, often enough, find the author's account alternately tendentious and insufficiently defended.

Others have commented on the shrill and unmodulated tone of the more overtly non-science portions of the discussion.

Barrett, the author, cheerfully, brutally overthrows hundreds of years of false assumptions related to our understanding of the human brain, the notion of self and the study of human emotion, doing away with the idea that brains are pre-loaded with shared concepts and ideals (emotion, truth, language, etc.). Instead of entering the world with an instruction manual or user’s guide already in place, our brains are gloriously complex prediction engines — highly attuned to (and also influenced by) our bodily systems, which require constant regulation, and able to make increasingly well-informed guesses about what we need to survive and thrive in the world around us.

Her point is that these brains of ours create the reality we see, and then move us through it accordingly. It’s an interesting point — “Changes in air pressure and wavelengths of light exist in the world, but to us, they are sounds and colors. We perceive them by going beyond the information given to us, making meaning from them using knowledge from past experience, that is, concepts.”

And so, our brains are constantly guessing about what’s around us and creating a navigable, experience-able “reality” of conceptual shortcuts, educated guesses, to optimize our survival chances. Those odds are further increased by our unique ability to use language to pass along concepts and information we find useful to future generations, and to shape the experiences of those surrounding us. “Words give us our own special form of telepathy.”

Emotions are one of the most useful concepts the brain relies upon to make predictions about, and sense of, social interactions, arguably our greatest strength as a species. There’s no one Platonic ideal of “anger,” rather it’s a fluid landscape of data points we weave together into one useful concept — the anger of an employer at a missed deadline is different from the anger of a disappointed parent is different from the anger of someone shouting on the street corner. All examples of anger, and all requiring different strategies but all benefiting from the mental short cut of “anger.”

Further, our brains are shaped by the social reality we create between similarly cognitively equipped humans. Especially in the realm of emotions, which are social constructs, that is, ultimately defined by the actors rather than objective conditions, the mental and emotional states of others clearly affect our own mental, emotional and biological states.

This a great book that, beyond just providing strong scientific evidence of her theory, moves strongly, if somewhat incompletely, into its applications — what does this created reality mean for our legal system, the pursuit of science, political and social issues, the mental states of animals and more?

It’s fascinating, liberating and a little dizzying to realize that we are each the product of a frenetic and continuous series of cognitive predictions that mostly occur without our direct knowledge or input, and are constantly shaped by our past, our health and nutrition and the culture we are embedded in:

“Every human being is the sum of his or her concepts, which become the predictions that drive behavior. The concepts in your head are not purely a matter of personal choice. Your predictions come from the cultural influences you were pickled in ... you still bear responsibility to overcome harmful ideology. The difficult truth is that each of us, ultimately, is responsible for our own predictions.”

Luckily, she gives some practical advice (though not enough; I hope a second book is forthcoming) for mitigating the negative concepts and filters that can affect lifestyle (Spoiler alert: eat healthfully, exercise, sleep well and embrace curiosity and skepticism and deepen emotional granularity.)

Highly recommend.

We have been taught that emotions are innate and universal. The argument of this book is that emotions are constructed through a process of learning that begins in infancy. Events happen and in what seems akin to machine learning we experience something in the world and the child is guided to an emotion; "Sally, are you sad your doll broke?" Statistical learning applies to much more than just emotion, its the basis of learning in general. As we get older, and now as adults, we use prediction and simulation constantly to infer what is happening with the world and with people around us.

I found this book a bit hard to follow and technical. I honestly have no idea if it is a trailblazing book introducing cutting-edge ideas in neuroscience and psychology to the general public, or a biased and speculative interpretation of a handful of experiments. Certainly the book is dismissive of much of the psychological research up to now, both the conclusions that are drawn and the programs based on that research. If there is no fear center then the drug studies aimed at calming that center are doomed to failure. Nor should there be much more promise in training autistic children to recognize emotions if they are not actually idiosyncratic movements of a person.

This is an excellent book for everyone, particularly for my work as a therapist. Emotions have always fascinated me, and many of us don't fully appreciate the presence they have in our lives. Barrett does an excellent job of presenting a well-balanced overview of what they are, where they come from, and the intricacies from the brain to society's perceptions of them. This works with the biological foundations and expands into the cultural and philosophical realm. I believe having a good basic understanding of emotions is essential. For instance, anxiety is rooted in the brain, and is very physical - this can be used to counteract it. Similarly, anger is often a secondary emotion, representing guilt, pain, fear, sadness, etc. Many of us are also unaware of the physical relationship emotion and biological well-being share, and Barrett does an excellent job covering a complex topic in a concise (as possible) medium.

With easily understood language and examples, this book presents research that challenges the long held beliefs that emotions are housed in different parts of the brain and are universally expressed and recognized. Alternatively, it shows that emotion is constructed in the moment, by core systems that interact across the whole brain, and shaped by experience as we develop and mature. The book also discusses the implications of this revised way of thinking about emotions.

There are 13 chapters that basically follow my description of the book. There are also appendices with more detailed information and extensive references. It took me a little while to get into the book, but once I got to the heart of the author’s explanation, I found the discussion absorbing.

My Favorite parts included aspects of Chapter 4 including the description of “interoception” or as the chapter title indicated “the origin of feeling.” These parts cover the way our brains address sensory input through simulation and prediction loops (see process diagram on page 63). The also go over the nature of our affect and degree of arousal (see the circumflex figure on page 74) that lead us to be more emotional than rational. Such findings call into question such models as homo economis and the triune brain (see comments on pages 80-81) and the basis for standard approaches to economics, mental health, and legal matters.

I also found elements of Chapter 5 particularly helpful as they explain how “concepts, goals, and words” work in enabling us to specify our emotions and create meaning (see concepts and goals table on page 91). Then there is the “concept cascade” diagram (on page 120) in Chapter 6 on “How the Brain Makes Emotion.”

After reading Barrett’s “How Emotions Are Made,” I am still thinking about how this updated research can be related to Daniel J. Siegel’s “Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation” and David Hawkin’s “Power vs. Force” (see my reviews). These ideas also seem to call for relooking at works such as Daniel H. Pink’s “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future?” that consider the various social implications of how our society and ways of operating are changing.

Read this book on this updated brain/emotions research for further contributions to these discussions.

The arduous reading of reviews on this book takes longer than you have. It was worth the 10$ to me to not have to read any more of the reviews, especially the verbose negative ones. The author can thank her detractors for that sale.

I bought the audible version and have listened to all of it now. I found the academic part stultifying, and the self-help part full of preachy bromides like get sleep, eat healthy food, don't scream at your children . I really don't understand all the ecstatic reviews.

How Emotions Are Made describes a new theory of how emotions are provoked, evoked, and created in the brain. The classical view, which is that emotions are spontaneously evoked by external stimuli and then provokes uncontrollable muscle twitches and reactions in the face and body language is wrong, writes Lisa Feldman Barrett. This is the approach espoused by Paul Ekman's work on finding out who's lying. Basically, she's saying that all the current work on emotional intelligence, etc. is simply outright incorrect.

Because this is such a big claim, Barrett lays out all the laboratory and field work carefully: she goes through previous studies on the universality of human emotions, and points out how the field workers inadvertently corrupted their results by effectively teaching people of other cultures about western style emotional expression, rather than figuring out whether human facial musculature is involuntarily linked to human emotions. This is ground-breaking work and I find it convincing. In particular, Barrett provides us with a picture and tricks us into thinking what the facial expression is before granting us the context and showing that our perception is completely wrong. She also demonstrates that even when conducting emotion recognition in Western settings, if you eliminate cue words (i.e., disallow multiple choice questionnaires), the ability of most people to recognize emotion correctly drops by a huge amount.
Emotions are not expressed, displayed, or otherwise revealed in the face, body, and voice in any objective way, and anyone who determines innocence, guilt, or punishment needs to know this. You cannot recognize or detect anger, sadness, remorse, or any other emotion in another person—you can only guess, and some guesses are more informed than others. (pg. 244)
As a male of supposedly low emotional intelligence, I've always wondered how other people could so easily guess what others are feeling (there have been times when I've wondered whether I have autism because I was so bad at it). I'm gratified to know that Barrett's work proves that this is purely an illusion: juries are wrong about guilt so often that DNA evidence has exonerated many convicted "criminals." This is huge. It means that when you think someone's angry, they might not be. This is especially true when they come from a different culture with a different set of emotional expressions. Barrett provides evidence that this is even true of professional psychologists, who would guess wrong about their patients' emotional condition!
To improve at emotion perception, we must all give up the fiction that we know how other people feel. When you and a friend disagree about feelings, don’t assume that your friend is wrong like Dan’s ex-therapist did. Instead think, “We have a disagreement,” and engage your curiosity to learn your friend’s perspective. Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right. (pg. 195)
What new theory should substitute for the classical view, then? Barrett here agrees with Jeff Hawkins' theory of the mind: that the brain is basically a statistical learning prediction machine. She further elaborates on that theory thus: you grow up with caregivers who teach you what emotional responses are appropriate, and the greater culture around you guide you into reacting the way you do by reflex through practice. Then when you become an adult, you shape the culture and teach your children to behave like you do. This is so built into human culture that we don't question it and think that emotions are a primary aspect of our biology, rather than a construct of our minds:
No scientific innovation will miraculously reveal a biological fingerprint of any emotion. That’s because our emotions aren’t built-in, waiting to be revealed. They are made. By us. We don’t recognize emotions or identify emotions: we construct our own emotional experiences, and our perceptions of others’ emotions, on the spot, as needed, through a complex interplay of systems. Human beings are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits buried deep within animalistic parts of our highly evolved brain: we are architects of our own experience. (pg. 40)
This has huge implications for society and its general broken-ness and myths. For instance, the myth that women are more emotional than men (not true, they're not). It even affects the "science" of psychology:
Many psychologists, for example, do not realize that every psychological concept is social reality. We debate the differences between “will power” and “tenacity” and “grit” as if they were each distinct in nature, rather than constructions shared through collective intentionality. We separate “emotion,” “emotion regulation,” “self-regulation,” “memory,” “imagination,” “perception,” and scores of other mental categories, all of which can be explained as emerging from interoception and sensory input from the world, made meaningful by categorization, with assistance from the control network. These concepts are clearly social reality because not all cultures have them, whereas the brain is the brain is the brain. (pg. 287)
Barrett also points out in an entire chapter that the legal system which distinguishes between crimes of passion and crimes of pre-meditation is just a fiction, with case after case showing that juries can't tell the difference. In one case, a woman identified a man who raped her with utmost certainty, only to discover that he happened to be on TV being interviewed (about the unreliability of human memory --- ironically) while the event took place! Basically, human beings live in a socially-constructed fantasy world without a single resemblance to reality:
Nobody can completely escape affective realism. Your own perceptions are not like a photograph of the world. They are not even a painting of photographic quality, like a Vermeer. They are more like a Van Gogh or Monet. (Or on a very bad day, perhaps a Jackson Pollock.) (pg. 283)
Whether you end up agreeing or disagreeing with this book, I consider it ground-breaking and well worth the read. As y ou can see from this review, I found myself compelled to highlight quote after quote in the book. It's quite possibly the best book I've read this year. Highly recommended!

The first 170 pages of this book were eye opening. I never considered the probabilistic pattern recognition feedback loop mechanism to be the foundation of feelings as well. Barrett makes and interesting argument and presents data to support that notion. Really profound implications for each of is individually and collectively.

The rest of the book seemed to muddle theories with solutions a bit for my tastes, though the Legal chapter certainly showcases some huge flaws in fairness related to emotion.

There is a continued effort in the neurosciences to associate parts of the brain to different emotions, for example fear is in amygdala, and so on, as if the each emotion is triggered and happens in those brain regions only. The triune brain model is based on the idea that humans, with their neo-cortex, is an evolutionary upgrade than the animals. There is also an extended attempt to map the signature behavior for each emotion – fingerprints – as if emotions can be read off from the face and from bodily reactions such as heartrate, sweating, temperature, etc., and as if all emotional reactions are universal all over the world.

Lisa Barrett in her book, How emotions are made, debunks all these, and many more. Her hypothesis is that emotions and emotional reactions are not genetic but are constructed at each instance, and is strongly influenced by one’s experiences. Past emotional experiences – shaped by parents, uncles and aunts – are not necessarily stored in the brain in full, as-is memory pieces, but wire the neurons with varying synaptic strengths and, in an abstract sense, represents a concept – a summary of a collection of experiential instances that are treated as similar for some purpose. Then, when a new event occurs which demands a reaction, the brain predicts – based on concepts of past experiences, by data-mining the information that are in form of synapses in the brain – what the new event is and simulates the prediction by firing its own sensory neurons without any real incoming sensory inputs. If the physical feedback from the event into our sense organs – sensations – match the prediction – i.e., the simulation matches – it is OK, otherwise a correction is immediately made. This feedback loop, depending on the success or failure, and how soon it requires to settle in case of a failed prediction, leads to emotions and sensations are given a meaning. So emotions are constructed on the fly, for each instance, and is strongly dependent on one’s past experiences. No emotion is hardwired, but is strongly influenced by cultural and social upbringing. The so called rational thinking, bereft of emotions and past experiences is a toxic myth because we humans have come to believe that rationality makes us special in the animal kingdom. Affective realism, the term used to describe how we experience what we believe, is inevitable because of the wiring of the brain that happens during the formative years and nobody can escape it. But the good news is that our brain is plastic enough to be remolded by being curious and exposing ourselves to varied and new experiences. Complexity, not rationality, make it possible for us to be architect of our own experiences. Our genes allows us and others to remodel our brain and therefore our mind.

To be clear, humans, like any animals, do have basic inborn feelings. But these are very basic, ranging from pleasantness to unpleasantness, jittery to calm, but that’s about it. The rest of the emotions are developed as we grow, groomed by our surroundings, society, and culture. This means that by broadening our emotional experiences, we have the ability to make changes in our behavior all through our lives. There is full chapter on mastering our emotions using techniques as mundane as eating and exercising well to cultivating habits which rewire your brain by, for example, learning new words and emotions not in our daily vocabulary (for example, iktsuarpok, tingo, backpfeifengesicht, etc.) She also reevaluates the role of emotions in regards to illness, and to our legal system.

What about the proof for the hypothesis? While new experiments have been done, much is actually reinterpreting the existing data to support the construction theory of emotion. Empirical claims of fingerprints of emotions and brain blobs where particular emotions occur are not unambiguously supported. She presents many contradictions to the findings and says, “a theory of emotion must explain all evidence, not just the portion that that supports the theory. One must not point to fifty thousand black dogs as proof that all dogs are black”, and goes on to reinterpret data to show support for construction theory of emotions.

Interestingly, the classical interpretation of emotions – as hardwired, universal, and have been passed down to humans through evolution – got a boost by none other than Darwin! While Darwin correctly interpreted the evolution, heredity, and origin of species, by doing away from “essence” of each species and accepting variability of the population of each species as the norm, he misled future scientists in his book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, by implying that each emotion and behavior have a signature, an essence. “Even insects”, he wrote ridiculously, “express anger, terror, jealousy, and love.” Unfortunately, it led to now defunct behaviorism psychology of the 60s which attempted to explain every (human) behavior as being inherited and genetic. All through history, humans have tried to attribute the unknown to superpowers. It was Nature, then God(s), and ironically now, evolution, that we are all sculpted by evolution with not much say in what we make of ourselves! Nurture, cultural upbringing, and social realities are given step-motherly treatment, and this book tries to reverse it. Social realities are real in the sense that they strongly influences us when we are growing up, but they are not physical realities in the sense that they are in the DNA or are governed by physical laws; social realities are manmade. The saying that if you work hard, anything is possible (which some people downplay as just an ego/self-esteem booster) takes a literally true meaning and is supported by scientific reasoning. Construction theory makes you the agent of your own destiny but bounded by your surroundings. Social realities, which are a reflection of collective intentionality of a society, acts as a constraint, balancing the dilemma of getting along and getting ahead. Emotions – such as anger, gratitude, love, jealousy etc. – are tools to communicate, influence others, and manage our own requirements.

A good read!

“Construction aggress that you’re indeed the agent of your own destiny, but you are bounded by your surroundings. Your wiring, determined partly by your culture, influences your later options.”

An absolutely stand out a book by Lisa Feldman-Barrett. If you like to make sense of the brain and how it is ultimately the determiner of the reality we live, this book will assist with that.

If you like studies on the brain via research int he fields on psychology and neuroscience than I would encourage you to pick up a copy of this book.

Listen and read the full review at The Hidden Why dot com. Leigh Martinuzzi - The Hidden Why Guy

Most of us think that our emotions reflect our primitive selves, that we overlay with a network of superego controls. But Barrett found as an underegrad that someone under stress might feel both anxious and depressed despite the two emotional states being opposite in their physical effects. Barrett believes that we construct our emotions rather than uncovering them, using social narratives that explain how we feel and direct the feelings as well. This has implications for legal and educational treatment of those who "lose" or rather badly construct their tempers. It also explains why cognitive behavioral psychology tends to be more effective than revealing your id to a psychologist. Like they say in Criminal Minds, "Every unsub has a story. It is our job to change the ending of that story."

I have a Vine pre-publication copy of the book, which is usually physically similar to the corrected version. This may sound picky, but the deckle texture of the pages made it harder to read than a crisp thinner paper. I hope they change it as the book is well-worth reading.

This is a well-researched and informative book. It provides a much more up-to-date view of emotions than those that now dominate popular and professional thinking. The "Theory of Constructed Emotions" that the author presents is well-supported and the book is a very worthwhile read for those interested in emotion.
My only issue is the emphasis that is placed on the idea of "predictive neurons" -- the idea that our neurons are constantly making "best guesses" and predicting what we will experience, and then using "prediction errors" to initiate body movements. A more straightforward and understandable approach called Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) seems to be a better grounding for the first part of the book. I say this because, in addition to being "good theory" (as expressed in my book "Your Behavior", pp. 213-14), many PCT concepts concerning the importance of perception, error signals, hierarchical arrangements of neurons, circular processing loops, and other areas overlap with the "predictive processing" approach that the author presents, the major difference being that rather than neurons "predicting the future," PCT indicates that sensory neuron signals are compared with reference neural signals (expressing homeostatic set points, purposes, goals,... that we have) with important differences/errors, if any, initiating our actions.

An enjoyable read and an eye-opening experience. The insights are based on a great deal of original research and a thorough knowledge of the research of others. The author always makes it clear when she is certain, reasonably certain, or not certain and only hopeful that something is true. I am not a specialist in the field and cannot assess the correctness of the more far-reaching and/or technical issues, but the author makes a convincing case (to me) for her conclusions and their implications for everyday life.

Did you know the common view of emotions causes terrible death and destruction? That's one of the claims of this book, which styles itself part of a revolution that will overturn our intuitions and decades, even millennia, of theory about emotions. The wide-ranging, rich material is important and interesting; Barrett is an acknowledged leader in this field; and there are ample notes leading to additional material, much of it online should one wish to track down the details, including the work of those whose views she's arguing against.

Even so, the book is disappointing. As will emerge below, I see it more as one side of an incremental shift than a successful revolution. It seems to me that Barrett has a tendency to black-and-white, extreme thinking that exaggerates both sides of the issues in the book and doesn't do justice to the middle ground where the truth seems to be. That seems to contribute to a lack of clarity, as there are many statements that seem too extreme to mean what they appear to. As might be expected in a largely polemical work, the presentation of the evidence is not entirely evenhanded. And there's a lot of repetition of certain points. Readers will definitely get the message that Barrett thinks the classical view and emotion "fingerprints" (see below) are wrong.

For those who want some details, I offer the following as illustrations of my points, and as samples of a couple of the many issues in the book. If I've overlooked something that would affect my conclusions, please let me know in the comments.

*

My title is taken from the introduction:

"Belief in the classical view can even start wars. The Gulf War in Iraq [1990-91] was launched, in part, because Saddam Hussein's half-brother thought he could read the emotions of the American negotiators and informed Saddam that the United States wasn't serious about attacking. The subsequent war claimed the lives of 175,000 Iraqis and hundreds of coalition forces." (Page xiv in the advance reading copy I have--the pagination may differ in the final published version.)

The "classical view" is what Barrett calls the commonsense view of emotions, and what she regards as the once-standard scientific view that reflects that common sense. It's the view she continually reminds us that she is against. The quote vividly illustrates one kind of extremity: the view the author is dedicated to opposing isn't only wrong, as she sees it, but terribly so.

The fatal error was thinking we can accurately read the emotions of others. Of course we seem to do that with some success everyday, and it's hard to imagine social life without the ability to read emotions with some accuracy. The commonsense view isn't that people can always accurately read emotions, and particularly not that we can read the emotions of professional negotiators who may be practiced in hiding them. But Barrett rejects the very idea of accurately reading emotions. She says, "I also do not speak of perceiving someone's emotion 'accurately'. Perceptions of emotion have no objective fingerprints in the face, body, and brain, so 'accuracy' has no scientific meaning." (40)

Is that true, is there no objective accuracy in reading instances of emotion? As she uses the term, a "fingerprint" is a set of objective qualities that *all* members of a group have in common that distinguishes them from *all* other things, what philosophers call an essence. That's a very strict standard. A proposed fingerprint for anger might be brows lowered and drawn together, face flushed, blood pressure raised, along with some other qualities in a combination *all* instances of anger share and that *no* other emotion shares. Whether emotions can be distinguished that way has long been a matter of dispute in psychology, and is a central issue in this book.

But even if it's granted that emotions vary or overlap in ways that don't allow for a fingerprint, as Barrett claims, it doesn't mean that accuracy in distinguishing emotions has no scientific meaning. Not all objective ways of distinguishing things rely on such narrow standards as fingerprints. Among the alternatives that might apply here are family resemblance and various degree-of-membership or probabilistic models.

These models represent a sort of middle ground between the ideal of pure, clean accuracy/objectivity inherent in the fingerprint (essence) model, and the subjectivist reaction against it, which is what Barrett tends to (see below). These models are more complex and messy, but they preserve important elements of objectivity.

Barrett recognizes a related idea in what she calls population thinking, which she credits to Darwin (16), but she doesn't consider how it might eventually help provide an accurate, objective way to usefully classify and identify instances of emotion. Rather she retreats back to her corner and accuses others of an error it isn't clear they make.

"When you adopt a mindset of variation and population thinking, so-called emotion fingerprints give way to better explanations. [...] Some scientists, using techniques from artificial intelligence, can train a software program to recognize many, many brain scans of people experiencing different emotions (say, anger and fear). The program computes a statistical pattern that summarizes each emotion category and then--here's the cool part--can actually analyze new scans and determine if they are closer to a summary pattern for anger or fear. This technique, called pattern classification, works so well that it's sometimes called 'neural mind-reading'." (23)

Sounds promising, she and those whose views she opposes seem to be reaching a potential common point of understanding. But she continues,

"Some of these scientists claim that the statistical summaries depict neural fingerprints for anger and fear. But that's a gigantic logical error. The statistical pattern for fear is not an actual brain state, just an abstract summary of instances of fear. These scientists are mistaking a mathematical average for the norm."

So no meeting of minds is approaching regarding this point, in her view, nor is the other view merely mistaken. Rather it's a "gigantic logical error." Elsewhere she calls ideas implicit in the pattern-based statistical approach the "antithesis" of emotion fingerprints. (19, 38) Black and white.

Having looked at some of the papers she's responding to (I'll give links in the first comment to this review--the store removes off-site links in reviews), it's far from apparent to me the scientists intend to claim what Barrett calls fingerprints, or rule out a non-fingerprint approach. The principle of interpretive charity suggests we try to read what they say in a way that makes sense. Those supporting the view of basic emotions that she takes issue with may be reinterpreting what it means to be a basic emotion. Maybe the difference isn't so black and white.

Regardless of what the authors of the work in question intend, their work and that of Barrett and colleagues do suggest potential middle ground for bringing the sides in this issue closer together, a point more concealed than illuminated by Barrett.

*

Barrett often talks like a subjectivist or cultural relativist about things that have an important objectivity. A particularly interesting example of the former is her treatment of her own experience on a date with a man she hadn't felt attracted to.

"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, I 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." (30)

Barrett explains that the feelings she took to indicate (or be) attraction were caused by the flu. She recognizes that most people would regard her "attraction" as an error or misattribution, but she calls it "a genuine feeling of attraction." (31) This is much like saying a hallucination of a horse is genuinely seeing a horse. In a way you do see a horse, but it's important to be able to distinguish that from seeing a real horse, which is why there are contrasts like genuine and hallucination. In keeping with the erasure of that distinction, she speaks of ordinary seeing as a form of hallucination. (26) Soon thereafter she opposes herself to the view that thinking, perceiving and dreaming are different things. (27-8)

She does pause to say there are limits, "Not everything is relative" (28), but she leaves little room for a sensible account of the limits, given her other remarks, and she offers no clear account of them.

*

"Facial expression," "recognizing," "detecting," "triggering" emotions, and "emotional reaction" are terms Barrett thinks should be banned. (39-40) She believes they imply fingerprints or that we don't participate "actively" in forming emotion. I don't think they imply such things, and this strikes me as seeing opposition where it isn't.

Really good book, except I think the author took her conjecture a little to far arguing there is no universality in emotion. My 4 month old son can laugh and acts happy, and I know he didn't learn that from anyone because I have been around him all of the time for his entire life. I think the author is on to something in arguing emotions are less universal than previously thought, but she takes it to the extreme. I like her model of how the mind creates emotions.

In this book, Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that she is among the researchers in psychology who are leading a much-needed revolution in how we understand emotions and their relationship to the mind and brain. She argues that emotions are created, not “triggered,” and points toward a needed shift from searching for “the fingerprints” of emotions toward what she calls “the theory of constructed emotion,” if we are to truly understand the relationship between emotion and the brain.

I think her arguments to develop this theory of constructed emotion are interesting. Culture can and does shape our (constructed) understand not only of the relationship of emotion, the brain and the mind, so the argument that we construct our emotions, while possibly revolutionary, isn’t really all that big of a leap after all.
All-in-all, this book is a good start to understanding this shift in thinking about the relationship between emotions and the brain, but it should not be the only thing that you read on this.

This is a scientific look at emotions. She dispels the notion that emotion are automatic or universal.
We pretty much create them, She also shows that it there are no universal external expression of emotions,
Pretty much blows holes in standard theory.

Self-help book under the guise of science. The author's argument for the theory of constructed emotion was extremely poor. Rather than attempting to persuade the reader by thoroughly analyzing the evidence in support of and opposing that theory, she simply insists that her theory is correct without sufficient explanation. In fact, any explanation is very brief or in the form of a metaphor, which is exactly what one would expect from a self-help book.

The entire argument is built on the fact there seems to be no "fingerprint" of emotion. That we can't locate a precise pattern in an fMRI, in facial expression, or in body language to signify individual emotions (however that may be defined). The conclusion then drawn is that emotions are culturally and socially constructed from physical sensations, according to the theory. She does not address the implications of these physical sensations and what distinguishes them from emotion - if a distinction should even exist.

What was discussed was psychological perception of emotion. What was not discussed was the physiological conception of emotion. Hormones, neurotransmitters, etc. - not discussed.

Please note: I did not finish reading the book once I determined it was not going to be useful. Perhaps I would have changed my mind after reading the book in its entirety, and if I do I will update this review.

Lisa Feldman Barrett's book How Emotions Are Made is the most recent example of a neuroscientist's attempt to sweep away any notion of human identity—not to mention spirituality—through extreme relativism and reductionist science. In her theory of constructed emotion she repeatedly exaggerates cultural and emotional variation to the point where it is nearly impossible to advance any valid general notion of the human experience. In her worldview humans are so diverse, and their emotions so socially dependent, that those emotions exhibit the same wide variation we see in world currencies or languages. This is simply not true, but very much in keeping with the academic chicness of postmodernism and deconstruction that seeks to deny that there is any true reality whatsoever, only innumerable subjective versions of it.

I knew I was in for a rough ride with this book when I discovered that Barrett's key metaphor for how a mind works utterly failed. In demonstrating how a mind constructs a pattern of a bee from blotches on paper found in figure 2-1 (page 25) I saw no bee in the example, even when it was revealed in a photograph on page 308. I'm pretty good at recognizing patterns, but the closest I came was the extension of a shape that looked like part of a wing. Barrett's central example of a mind constructing reality (which she returns to repeatedly) simply does not work.

She maintains that we construct reality (as well as emotion) from our own experience and bias, not from the world as it is. This is not a particularly original proposition, but she again uses a bad example to demonstrate it: the subjectivity involved in perceiving color. It's true that our eyes and brain perceive color that doesn't exist in and of itself in the world, but almost all human brains do it the same way. Her argument that Russians see another version of blue in the rainbow is convincing of nothing regarding cultural variation. Big deal. The forgotten point is that we all see colors mostly the same, with perhaps slight variations in shade. And everyone sees the sky as blue on a normal day, not red or purple!

Another area in which Barrett overemphasizes human variation is language, citing several dubious examples of “untranslatable” words from other cultures that supposedly stand for concepts that people outside that culture cannot grasp. One is the Dutch word gezellig, indicating the warm feeling of friendship. Doesn't seem untranslatable to me. She even carries this thinking into English words, including the word emotion. She makes the ridiculous claim that the idea of emotion was an invention of the 16th century, as writers only used words like passions or sentiments previously. Excuse me, Ms. Barrett, but have you ever heard of a synonym?

To demonstrate how emotions are constructed by the brain, Barrett uses an example from her personal life that struck me as bizarre. She says that in graduate school a fellow student asked her to get a cup of coffee with him. Though she wasn't attracted to him, she agreed. She then says that while sitting with him she experienced a flushed feeling and concluded that she must have been wrong and that she was indeed attracted to the man. A few days later she came down with the flu and realized that she had misconstrued her physical symptoms for sexual attraction. Now I have been alive 63 years, and I have never misinterpreted a physical reaction as some kind of emotion, as in this story. This prime example of how an emotion is constructed seems quite faulty. It is not only reductionistic in the extreme, but very atypical. Yet it stands as Barrett's template for how the body and mind interact to create emotion.

In her chapter on emotion in animals, she doesn't go quite as far as Descartes—who saw them only as machines—but she comes close. She grants that they have affect (mood) but maintains that they lack emotions like ours because their neurology is not complex enough. She sees attribution of emotion in animals by humans as a form of anthropomorphism, which she labels “mental inference.” She claims that as a scientist, she must fight against this temptation. That's about as bloodless as you can get.

In her chapter on mastering emotions, Barrett lays her cards on the table and proclaims her sympathy for the Buddhist perspective, which argues that the self or the soul is an ever-shifting fiction. She finds an ally for neuroscience in Buddhism, which views human beings as contingent amalgamations of sensations, perceptions, and various mental and physical events. It's a match that fits well with Barrett's view of human nature that brooks no enduring essence or even identity. No self, no soul, no universals, no truth. She dismisses it all as “essentialism,” and her book in a nutshell is a tiresome screed against five thousand years of culture that she terms the “classical view.” Civilization and the perennial philosophy count for nothing. Behold, 21st-century neuroscience has all the answers!

Yet even in her propagandizing, Barrett is not consistent. She repeatedly calls her constructivist view of emotion a revolution in redefining human nature and society, then occasionally backs off, arguing only for a mild dose of healthy skepticism regarding such knowledge. Well, Professor Barrett, which is it—a revolution overthrowing an outdated worldview, or a slight adjustment? It seems pretty clear that her sympathies really lay with a new dogma, not humble doubt.

In her final chapter, Barrett states baldly: “Ironically, each of us has a brain that creates a mind that misunderstands itself” (page 287). If we can't trust our own thoughts and feelings, where does that leave us? We have no way of knowing anything. Back to Descartes, with an updated version: “I think faultily, therefore I must not exist!”

Reading this book left me continually irritated and demoralized. Its ideas felt so toxic and repetitive that by the end I could only read 10 or 12 pages at a time. For Barrett, scientism rules even in our most intimate realm—our deepest emotions—and she concludes that they are not real in any fundamental, objective sense. They are mere constructions rooted in nothing more than the calculating brain of a complex animal. God save us from such dehumanization.

Excellent book, reference and very insightful. Lisa Feldman Barrett did an exceptional job explaining and proving her position with science. Excellent, excellent, excellent - a must read or audio. Please Note: There is a caveat to this review.

She breaks with conventional psychology to scientifically substantiate her position which is great, however what I felt was lacking - was a practical way to utilize the information she presented as a practitioner of psycho therapy and practices.

First off, the premise that emotions aren't universal, aren't set in stone and do not control us is an invaluable one to consider immediately, especially to the extent that this book aims to (including how it affects convictions, sentencing, and gender stereotypes). Dr. Barrett is passionate about challenging the status quo in order to, for example, address connections that are observed in chronic illness (including that of depression and anxiety), but have yet to be explained.
Her concepts, like that of a body budget and emotional granularity, are what every person should be well acquainted with in order to become healthier. The value of these concepts cannot be overstated.

Weaknesses of this book lie in two things:

A. The ratio between speculation and actual detailed data
It's frustrating to hear brief, rushed mentions of evidence and studies without much detail. Most of the time, she will mention only one study for each large claim. Dr. Barrett gives us glimpses and then rushes on to elaborate at great length on her own hypotheticals. I lost count of how many times she writes things like "it's possible" and the straightforward "I speculate that."
This leads to some moments of weak reasoning veiled in rhetoric. Here are some examples:
1. Dr. Barrett had to take her daughter to the doctor frequently when she was a toddler for ear infections. The exam, done gently, increased her pain. Soon she recognized where they were going and would cry before they even arrived. This is proof that her daughter created the pain of the exam in her brain and felt it before there was the external simulation that would cause the pain and that is why she cried beforehand. Hence, people can create the feeling of pain in their brains. No more evidence. Case closed.
2. Dr. Barrett will paint a picture of what it's like in the mind of a person with autism through the lens of her claims, followed by her explicit statement that this is what it must be like because it matches some of the things said by some people with autism. Case closed.
As a high school teacher, I require that students look for evidence in the articles and books they research and to check that claims and evidence connect logically. Sadly, there isn't much here.

B. Dr. Barrett's ego which is mostly exhibited in three ways:
1. Name dropping, often tactlessly. Lack of data on people with autism? Mention an anecdote from Temple Grandin. Need an example of someone emoting? Use the example of the mayor of Newtown, Connecticut after the Sandy Hook shooting. Use it repeatedly. To persuade readers to take up your scientific cause. There are more examples, often to garner pop culture cred.
2. Personal examples, often to prove herself as an example as a great parent (you should do as she has done) and as a brave, outspoken scientist (Is it necessary to hear how another scientist offered to politically attack her over her ideas only to hear her 'clever' comeback?).
3. Her sense of humor. Admittedly, it's part of her voice and fortunately it's restrained here, but it still makes it less enjoyable to listen to. Look up her lectures online and you'll see Dr. Barrett chastise audiences for not laughing at her flat, unfunny jokes, reminiscent of Jed Bush telling an audience when to clap.

The success of this book lies in the value of the core concepts, but what would set these concepts on fire would be less messenger and more evidence.

Ms Barrett's energy and enthusiasm for her work come through her writing in a way that capture my interest and imagination! She is also a very articulate and skillful writer.
This book is a clear challenge to a century of popular attitudes toward emotional health and development, and I only hope the integrity of science and medicine are equal to the job! Unfortunately, many of us "believe what we want to believe" and indulge in "willful ignorance."
Perhaps the best minds--the Lisa Barretts-- will prevail and open us up to a higher plane,an elevated evolution.

D Bischoff

This book has changed how I understand my own brain functioning, and so it has changed my life. I am now going to read it again, to make sure I didn't miss anything. The author patiently understands the science to laypeople like me, and provides many interesting tidbits and real-life examples along the way. As a lawyer, I I found the section on the law particularly interesting, but every chapter was riveting. Great book!!

This book is quite different from ones I have read before and it has really over turned much of what I knew about this subject, not that I knew much. I listened to the audible version which was well narrated and easy to listen too. Highly recommended if you are at all interested in how the mind interacts with the body.

Created an emotion like I wasted time and money. All over the place and not very smart for it parading as an academic publication. Do not tell me that an apple isn't red because a tribe in Papua New Guinea groups colors differently from us and they call it brown, it is still red, they just call it brown. This is a point that I think you made earlier in the book when you mentioned that your husband registers colors differently from you, the color is still the same, you just place different labels on them. Also don't tell me that a tree falling in the forest doesn't make noise if a person doesn't hear it, energy is released, atoms are moved, it just is perceived differently. If you want to go down that path then I can tell you that the apple isn't really an apple because really it's just atoms. Also you don't need to go down the path of telling me about how economics are a social contract because paper money is just pictures of dead people with no real value. Stop pontificating and talk about the subject, and use some logic, seriously.

I can't experience sadness without understanding the concept of sadness? Um, no you have reached the academic zen plane of pomposity and uselessness where you believe that your field of study would not exist without your study of that field. This book is so bad I think I have to throw out my kindle now, because I don't look at it the same and it doesn't look at me the same. That is how I know conclusively that the book is wrong because it made me feel an emotion of waste and like I've been taken advantage of, without being able to name the emotion or having been coached on the concept of it.

This book is a constant tangent, random facts and thoughts that are discussed more in depth than the actual concepts being discussed. If you want to discuss random things do so, or make a calendar of upside down dogs or kittens standing on jell-o, something useful. But don't cram them into a discussion masquerading as academia.

Lays out the following insight: Some emotions are built in, others are learned. If you want a lot of anecdotal evidence and neuroscience, get the book. Otherwise, I just told you in eight words what Ms. Barrett took 400 pages to say. You're welcome.

Claims to describe a revolution in understanding emotion. Starts soundly enough, with a review of the science suggesting that to some degree, we construct emotions by taking sensory input and fitting them to what we believe to be the appropriate social context. Emotion, in other words, is a Jamesian gestalt. From there, it veers into absurdity. Claims to overturn the thousands of studies showing that all peoples identify more or less the same suite of emotional reactions. Claims all emotion is a cultural construct. Makes this claim on the basis of fairly scanty field data, while apparently ignoring relevant field data and brain imaging data from Paul Ekman and others. Claims that “the concept of emotion itself is an invention of the 17th century”, a colonial export foisted on hapless primitive peoples. Though apparently not all: claims the !Kung have no concept of fear, eskimos no concept of anger, Taitians no concept of sadness. These claims are true in the quibbling, semantic sense that no two languages have perfect synonyms for everything; in the sense that eskimos also have no concept of, say, food, since “food” is not an inuit word. But it’s pretty daft as science. I stopped reading when she started talking about how she’s turning her young daughter into an emotional savant by explaining to her which emotions to feel in which situations.

My fields are evolutionary psychology, positive psychology, and neuropsychology. In addition to teaching these subjects, I also have a private counseling practice where I help people learn to distinguish between their emotions and reason. Most of the problems we experience in our lives and relationships occur because we fail to regulate our emotions through the use of reason. Buddha's metaphor of the elephant is representative of our powerful emotions and the rider on the elephant represents our reason. The elephant is big and powerful as are our emotions. Ninety-five percent of our thoughts and behaviors stem from our emotions. Only 5% come from our reason. Moment-by-moment, day-by-day, we humans are in a constant battle to control and use our emotions constructively while trying to prevent them from creating problems for us.

People who seek out counseling do so because their emotions have gotten them into trouble and created difficulties for them in their relationships with others and life in general. The decisions we make about our behavior occur at the intersection of emotion and reason and determine our path in life.

Evolutionary psychology teaches us that human behavior is the product of genetic predispositions AND environment. Environment is everything that happens to us from conception on throughout the rest of our lives. We have ancient brains in modern bodies. We have brain modules that we have inherited from our ancestors over the last 6 million years of human history. These genetic predispositions are very powerful and create the foundation or framework upon which environment acts to create human thought and behavior. Evolutionary natural selection is a feedback loop that works on genetic predispositions, brain modules to further modify these genetic predispositions, which we then pass on to our children.

Human behavior is always the product of genetic predispositions and environment. Evolutionary psychology is a relatively new science dating to the 1970's, but only in the last twenty years has gained traction.

In reading the introduction, the author outlines her general thesis, with which I disagree. The author appears to be writing from the perspective of the Social Science Model which places too much emphasis on culture and virtually no emphasis on genetic predispositions. Evolutionary psychology rejects the Social Sciences Model which has prevailed in academia for most of the twentieth century. The Social Science Model claims that human behavior is primarily the product of culture. That theory has been debunked with powerful scientific research evidence from evolutionary psychology. Many social scientists still cling to this theory in spite of evidence to the contrary (confirmation bias).

The author explains her classical view of emotion and then rejects it. She then presents her theory of constructed emotion and argues it is the best theory to explain human emotion. Both the classical view and the constructed theory of emotion are incomplete. Only evolutionary psychology properly accounts for human behavior as a product of both genetic predispositions and environment (culture).

The author also makes a claim in the introduction regarding doctor's failing to properly diagnose heart problems in women because they dismiss the symptoms as anxiety. She goes on to claim that women over 65 die more frequently from heart attacks than men because doctors fail to distinguish between anxiety and symptoms of heart problems. When I read this I thought, "I must be having a bad dream, and I hope I wake up and find that the author really didn't write this." Well, unfortunately, I was awake and she does make this claim without evidence; it is only an assertion. Furthermore, she confuses correlation with causation. Even if it is true, and I doubt it, that more women die of heart attacks than men, that does not mean the cause of these deaths can be attributed to the failure of doctors to properly diagnose heart problems in women!

The author goes on to write that she objects to the idea that women are more emotional than men. Well, women are more emotional than men and it is a evolutionary product of natural selection. Moreover, there is abundant evidence to support this fact.

I sense that the author is a disgruntled feminist with an agenda that has shaped and colored her evaluation of the scientific evidence. Science is descriptive not prescriptive. We may not like many things that science teaches us, but it doesn't change the truth. What is natural is not always good, but it still is a fact and feature of human nature.

Bottom line: This book presents an aberrant view of human emotion and how emotions are created that does not square with abundant scientific evidence contrary to it.

The author's introduction seems to incorporate the Social Science Model in her thinking. If she has not studied evolutionary psychology and evaluated the theory, everything she writes about emotions is suspect.

I bought the Audible version first. I liked the beginning so much i bought two hardcover books. One for me and another for a good friend in the same field. Then i got to her chapter on "The Law" and realized she was taking a knee and was a SJW ( Social Justice Warrior). I had a hard time finishing the book and still have not taken the book out of the the store box.
I want to hear about science not your opinion about how the founders were idiots who didn't understand the brain and how we should get rid of the Jury system and 2nd Amendment amongst other leftist theology. It makes me question everything i read before it. Its like spilling red wine on a new white carpet.
I just started listening to another "famous" neuroscientist's new book on Audible and at least he started his liberal tirade early on so i could put up my filters of what he says.
I guess when the conservatives talk about how liberals have infected the halls of academia, this is what they mean!
Sad that there has to be a liberal commentary on everything today...i was ready to rate this book 5 stars in the beginning.

She gets a two star instead of a one star because there is a lot of good research condensed in one spot...but i will have to go through it and make my own interpretations after knowing how much of a SJW she is.

“Construction aggress that you’re indeed the agent of your own destiny, but you are bounded by your surroundings. Your wiring, determined partly by your culture, influences your later options.”

An absolutely stand out a book by Lisa Feldman-Barrett. If you like to make sense of the brain and how it is ultimately the determiner of the reality we live, this book will assist with that.

If you like studies on the brain via research int he fields on psychology and neuroscience than I would encourage you to pick up a copy of this book.

Listen and read the full review at The Hidden Why dot com. Leigh Martinuzzi - The Hidden Why Guy

This is coming from someone who is interested in how his own emotions work. Barrett does a great job using real life examples in applying her theory of construction. Many of Barrett's theories go against conventional wisdom and throws a lot of ideas out there. If applied and experimented with in your personal life, you may also find it very interesting. Some parts of the book were hard to understand because of the technical writing for those of you who are not super sciencey. Each chapter deals with a different idea but is woven together nicely throughout the book, for example: Emotions as a social reality, Emotion and Illness, Emotion and the Law, Concepts, Goals, and Words, Mastering Your Emotions. I loved it, I question the world much more after reading this book.

This treatise is shot through with information that is scientifically false. It’s as if it was whimsically written several decades ago before our now clear understanding of certain brain mechanisms, pawning a cracked premise (one born of a desperate desire to control, I suppose) that lays balderdash upon nonsense, repudiating minds of substance along the way. It’s galling to even discuss.