Similarly, I’m realising how woefully inadequate the English language is in describing my emotional experiences. As Feldman-Barrett says, it’s more like there are “50 shades of crappy.” (Angry, aggravated, alarmed, spiteful, grumpy, remorseful, gloomy, mortified, uneasy, dread-ridden, resentful, afraid, envious, woeful, melancholy. Feeling crappy after a hard day of work is totally different to feeling crappy after a disappointing email, or feeling crappy because my kids won’t eat their dinner. In my own life I’ve started paying attention to the nuance and variability of my experiences. This is an important distinction for those of us wanting to get better at managing our emotional experiences day-to-day because it suggests that we can teach our brain to label emotions more precisely and then use this information to help us to see things clearly and react (or not react) more effectively. While the so-called “classical view” suggests that emotions are hardwired in our brains or automatically triggered by events, Feldman-Barrett’s theory suggests that our brain constructs emotions. Although, lets note that many scientists don’t actually agree on what emotions are, so part of the problem may be that they’re all talking about different things.Īs the debate continues, there is one particularly noteworthy take-away from all this. (You can read more about Feldman-Barrett’s feud with the “father” of emotions research Paul Ekman here, here, here and here if you’re a nerd like I am).
Needless to say, all this is ruffling feathers in emotions research. In fact, she recently analysed more than 200 studies that measured the emotional states and corresponding bodily changes of more than 8,400 people and found that variation was found to be the norm. Both muffins and cupcakes are roughly the same shape and made with essentially the same ingredients, but by social agreement, one is called “dessert” and the other is labelled “breakfast food.” In the same way as baked goods take on meaning by being placed into generally agreed on "categories," emotions are given meaning through culture and context.įeldman-Barrett came to this view because, despite spending decades searching for universal biological signatures for emotions none have been found – be it in our brain or anywhere else in our body.
Rather than viewing them as being inborn, universal and automatic, she sees emotions as a type of learned social knowledge, like knowing the difference between muffins and cupcakes.
In her book How Emotions Are Made, Feldman-Barrett endeavours to completely rebrand emotions. The Serena Williams photograph is an example often used by emotions researcher Lisa Feldman-Barrett, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, when she explains the importance of culture and context in how we interpret emotions.
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