Constructed Emotion

When things go wrong, my client, Mark, always blames his staff. He walks around the office with a sour face and is often angry. And his staff has learned to walk on eggshells to avoid his next angry outburst.

We used to think that these outbursts were an example of the “amygdala hijack,”, a term coined by Daniel Goleman, in his 1995 book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, to explain immediate, uncontrollable responses that are out of proportion to the circumstances.

But, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s 30 years of research has shown us that we’re not at the mercy of our amygdala. Rather, we construct our emotions on the spot from the incoming stimuli.

The New Theory of Constructed Emotion

In her book, How Emotions are Made, Dr. Feldman Barrett defines an emotion as your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean in relation to what is going on around you in the world.

Under this new theory, we construct our emotions on the spot from incoming sensations from both outside, such as the event itself, and inside the body (e.g., our heart rate, our breath). These sensations are filtered through our brain, which makes a prediction as to what they mean, resulting in our own emotional experience and our interpretation of the emotions of others. This happens in an instant, outside of conscious awareness.

Our brain has evolved over our lifetime and from our past experience, making each brain unique. Given the same incoming sensations, our emotional experience and interpretation of the emotions of others will be unique. And because the culture we were brought up in is part of our past experience, emotions are culturally specific.

We’re Not at the Mercy of Our Amygdala

What this new theory means for us is that we have more control over our emotions than we think. Although our incoming sensations are filtered through our past experience via our unique brain, we can reinterpret them to mean something more resourceful.

While it’s true that our brain creates our emotional experience or interpretation in an instant, we can catch ourselves and reinterpret the incoming sensations, even after the fact. And every time we do that, we’re changing our past experience, and consequently our brain, through something called neuroplasticity. The more we reinterpret our sensations in this new way, the easier and quicker the new response becomes because our brain has been rewired. What we need is not a blind faith in an emotion determined by our brain, but an awareness of our physical sensations so we can interpret them to mean something more resourceful.

Emotions are Not Universal

The new theory also means that emotions are not universal, and they don’t come with predetermined facial expressions or body language. Facial expressions and body language are only a clue to the emotion. In fact, we can never be certain of what someone else is feeling unless we ask them. Otherwise, it’s just a guess, based on our own past experience, not theirs. A well-known example is that of the nervous smile by some cultures. If we interpreted the smile as defiance rather than saving face, we would be incorrect.

Dr. Feldman Barrett stresses the importance of our body budget for good emotional intelligence. Emotions are also shaped by our mood, which is simply the sum of our body budget, or how our brain budgets the energy in our body to keep us alive and well. The most important thing we can do to keep our body budget in good shape is to make sure that we eat a healthy diet, exercise and get adequate sleep.

Let’s go back to my client, Mark. His brain took a triggering event (perhaps a staff member was late with a report), mixed it together with his inner sensations (racing heart, shallow breath, blood pumping, for example), ran them through his past experience via his unique brain, and called the combination of sensations “anger.” That’s because, many times in the past, beginning in childhood, this combination of sensations meant anger and have now formed part of his past experience. But, if he reinterpreted this combination of sensations as simply annoyance, disappointment or frustration, he’d respond differently.

How to Navigate Emotions under this New Theory

We can help our clients deal with a negative emotion by bringing it down to its component sensations: the triggering event and the bodily sensations. We can then help them interpret this combination of sensations in a new way to mean something more resourceful. Over time, this will become easier and quicker.

We can encourage them to use different, more specific words to label an emotion. We could use words such as annoyed, disappointed or frustrated, rather than angry. This will change our emotional experience.

And we can encourage them to keep a healthy lifestyle.

© Irena O’Brien and The Neuroscience School