How emotions are made: the secret life of the brain 

Lisa Feldman Barrett is professor of psychology at Northeastern University and director of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Affective Sciences. She is the editor and founder, along with James Russell, of Emotion Review.

Among his many awards and recognitions are the IMH Independent Scientific Research Award (2002–2007), Distinguished Service Award in Psychological Sciences, American Psychological Association (2013), President of the Association for Psychological Sciences (2019–2020), Guggenheim Fellowship in Neuroscience (2019), among others. Some of his publications are:

• Barrett, LF, Adolphs, R., Martinez, A., Marseille, S., & Pollak, S. (2019). Emotional expressions reconsidered: Challenges to inferring emotion in human facial movements. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 20, 1–68.
• Barrett, L.F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: An active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, doi: 10.1093/scan/nsw154.
• Barrett, L.F., & Bar, M. (2009). See it with feeling: Affective predictions in the human brain. Royal Society Phil Trans B, 364, 1325–1334.
• Barrett, LF, & Bliss-Moreau, E. (2009). Affect as a psychological primitive. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 41, 167–218.
• Barrett, LF, Lindquist, K., Bliss-Moreau, E., Duncan, S., Gendron, M., Mize, J., & Brennan, L. (2007). Of mice and men: Natural kinds of emotion in the mammalian brain? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2, 297–312
• Barrett, L.F., Lindquist, K., & Gendron, M. (2007). Language as a context for emotion perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 11, 327–332.
• Barrett, L.F. (2006). Emotions as natural kinds? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1, 28–58.
• Barrett, L.F. (2006). Solving the emotion paradox: Categorization and the experience of emotion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 20–46.
• Barrett, LF, & Barrett, DJ (2001). Computerized experience-sampling: How technology facilitates the study of conscious experience. Social Science Computer Review, 19, 175–185.
• Feldman, LA (1995b). Valence focus and arousal focus: Individual differences in the structure of affective experience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 153–166.

How emotions are made: the secret life of the brain (also published in Spanish, in 2018 by Paidós) begins with three chapters where the author presents the gradual and incipient change in psychology, from a classic perspective in emotion research ( what she calls «the fingerprints perspective») towards the study of specific forms of emotional construction. This aspect is deepened in chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7, focused on the way emotions are built. Chapters 8 through 12 are dedicated to practical implications of this approach, and the last chapter 13 sheds light on the creation of the human mind based on neuroscience.

The first chapter is entitled The search for the emotion‘s “fingerprints” . The author recounts her experience trying to investigate the experience of anxiety and depression in people, encountering difficulties that at the same time opened doors or research questions: people cannot distinguish anxiety from depression, can it be trained?, is it a difficulty in distinguishing from distinctive sensory data of each emotion (emotional “fingerprint”)?.   Feldman Barrett takes a tour of experimental research (critically analyzed) to show that the evidence does not support such an emotional “fingerprint,” that electromyographic data from the face or other bodily indicators have not revealed a clear pattern that differentiates emotions. Among this journey through various investigations, she mentions:

Where emotions and the autonomic nervous system are concerned, four significant meta-analyses have been conducted in the last two decades, the largest of which covered more than 220 physiology studies and nearly 22,000 test subjects. None of these four meta-analyses found consistent and specific emotion fingerprints in the body. Instead, the body’s orchestra of internal organs can play many different symphonies during happiness, fear, and the rest.

The chapter continues with a review of the evidence that refutes the classical concept that emotion (and other states – mental functions) are nested in the activity of a single center or neural network. Clarifying that equipotentiality is not what he alludes to, he does suggest that functional substitution networks intervene in a mental state. Feldman Barrett argues that with his team they decided to solve once and for all the problem of whether brain masses are really “fingerprints.” To that end, her team reviewed all the brain imaging studies focusing on anger, disgust, joy, fear, and sadness. Of these, those that were useful for statistical analysis were chosen: 100 studies, approx. 1300 subjects, including twenty years of research. It was found that the amygdala participates in fear, more than chance, but not in a distinguishable way from its participation in other emotions, such as anger, disgust, sadness and joy, nor in a differential way with respect to the perception of pain, to learning something new, when meeting someone or making decisions.

In short, the team did not find any brain region directly involved with any fingerprint of a given emotion . The author is emphatic: neither neural networks, nor direct stimulation of individual neurons, nor in animals: emotions arise from neuronal activation, but there are no neurons dedicated exclusively to emotions. It is argued that the scientific attitude to approach these data is to understand that variation is the norm : for example, «anger» does not point to a specific pattern, but to a group of highly variable cases that are related to specific situations. The author states: «what we colloquially call emotions, such as anger, fear, and happiness, are better thought of as emotion categories, because each is a collection of
diverse instances»

Chapter 2 is titled Emotions Are Constructed. It begins by briefly graphing how people’s past experiences give meaning to current sensations and how people cannot consciously access this construction process. The author focuses on a phenomenon, simulation (those experiential examples that allow us to highlight the constructive character in the configuration of perceptions), to suggest that

…scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it. Forward-looking thinkers speculate that simulation is a common mechanism not only for perception but also for understanding language, feeling empathy, remembering, imagining, dreaming, and many other psychological phenomena.

In addition, he raises the central importance of concepts as organizers of meaning, defining what he calls ” Theory of Constructed Emotion “:

In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion

Emotions are not reactions to the world – raises Feldman Barrett -, we are not passive recipients of stimuli, but active builders of our emotions.

At this point in the chapter, the author makes a relationship with the theory of constructed emotion and three other classes of constructive approaches: social constructionism, “psychological construction” (which seems to point to the more general notion of cognitive constructivism), and neuroconstruction (how experiences modify brain structure). It must be recognized that on this point the author presents a more debatable exercise, but it is fair to point out that the objective of the book and of her research is not a comparison of her approach with other constructionist or constructivist theories. It is also possible to recognize that, despite the emphasis on the sociocultural roles and keys necessary in the construction of emotion, the general approach is clearly much closer to constructivism than to social constructionism.

Continuing with her argument, Feldman Barrett includes the importance of notions such as variation is the norm (to point to the unrepeatable characteristic of the emotional scene, on a continuum, emphasizing emotions as functional categories with heterogeneous elements), degeneracy (the ability in biological systems to one component can perform similar functions to another, given certain conditions, and different functions if those conditions change), holism (various systems work as global entities, not just a sum of parts), and emergent properties (when a system shows properties that its parts do not have by themselves) to argue how his theory distances itself from the classical model of the emotion “fingerprints”.

After the body-neural fingerprints, the next basic assumption that Feldman Barrett and his team reject is the evolution of emotions (as the view that we have an “animal” brain, emotions inherited from animals, capped by uniquely human rational thought processes).
The last notion of the classical view that is rejected is that certain emotions are innate and universal, presenting evidence and criticism of the research methodology most typically used for such conclusions.
The chapter ends by clarifying which terms will be avoided in the rest of the book, in light of the arguments and evidence raised: facial expression (because it implies an emotional “fingerprint”), emotion (the author mentions that she will use instead emotional case because it refers more precisely to the single event within a category that brings together heterogeneous events), recognition or detection of emotions (because it supposes that there are fingerprints of emotions that we must “discover” or “recognize”), emotional reaction or “having an emotion” (because they assume that emotions are objective entities), perceiving another person’s emotion accurately (because they forget that it has no basis and that it only refers to wondering if two people agree, to a consensus). The author argues that these precisions in language are necessary to understand the emotional construction.

Chapter 3 is entitled The Myth of Universal Emotions. In this chapter, Feldman Barrett develops the rebuttal to the «universal emotion» research, by improving methodological problems in facial emotion recognition procedures, typically used by the classical approach. She argues that the alternative explanation, the constructed emotion theory, will be explored in detail (along with supporting evidence) in the next four chapters.

The fourth chapter is entitled The origin of feeling . It begins by presenting the importance of intrinsic brain activity, which is defined as a constant neurological activity, independent of stimulation, whose activity networks in such a way that neuronal groups “take turns” to participate in the same activity network. The author highlights the fact that brain activity is primarily predictive.

At the level of brain cells, prediction means that the neurons over here, in this part of your brain, tweak the neurons over there, in that part of your brain, without any need for a stimulus from the outside world. Intrinsic brain activity is millions and millions of nonstop predictions.

Through prediction, your brain constructs the world you experience. It combines bits and pieces of your past and estimates how likely each bit applies in your current situation

If it were a reactive neural organization, it would be too slow and viability inefficient. The neural system then operates in predictive terms, maintaining a constant intrinsic activity, making predictions that, in case of finding novelty, are slightly rectified.

You might think that your perceptions of the world are driven by events in the world, but really, they are anchored in your predictions, which are then tested against those little skipping stones of incoming sensory input

Within these constant intrinsic activities, oriented in predictive terms, dr. Feldman Barrett argued that his team has been able to define an intrinsic interoceptive network, which makes predictions about the body, compares the resulting simulations with sensory input from the body, and updates the brain’s model of the body in the world (p. 67).
This intrinsic interoceptive network is divided into two parts: “body -budgeting regions “, responsible for the energy administration of each movement) and primary interoceptive cortex. Both participate in a prediction loop, if a motor change (muscles, heart, etc.) is predicted, the associated sensations (interoceptive predictions) are also predicted and flow to the interoceptive cortex where they are simulated. The primary interoceptive cortex in turn receives inputs from the muscles, heart, etc. , where its neurons compare the simulation with the inputs, calculate the prediction error, complete the loop, and generate interoceptive sensations.
The “body budget” network is in charge of predicting the energy expenditure involved in actions (for example, if someone we know approaches us head-on or if we imagine that situation), based on previous experiences with similar objects and situations, although the person is not physically active. The author recalls that the interoceptive network is not intended for the creation of emotions, but for the management of energy resources.

Every person you encounter, every prediction you make, every idea you imagine, and every sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell that you fail to anticipate all have budgetary consequences and corresponding interoceptive predictions.

Interoceptive changes (which scientists call affect ) can lead people to confuse them with properties of events or objects. The author calls this «affective realism».
The chapter continues with an interesting critique of the myth of the rational brain and the “layered” evolution of the brain (reptile – mammal – human / rational).

The fifth chapter is titled Concepts, Goals, and Words . The author explains that the neurological system works based on Concepts (demarcations made by the brain):

Categorization constructs every perception, thought, memory, and other mental event that you experience, so of course you construct instances of emotion in the same manner.

Feldman Barrett proposes that an organizer of concepts is goals, functional or feasibility purpose: when the brain needs a concept, it builds one by combining a number of instances of past experience to fit the goal in a specific situation.
The chapter then develops how the organization of concepts is done statistically, and how this statistical learning is related to language in children. In addition, she explains how children’s first notions of inferences regarding the minds of other people are built.
It should be mentioned here that the approach of Feldman Barrett regarding the notion of concepts is similar to the use given by our psychotherapeutic work team (Díaz Olguín, 2022). Although they are different domains, the author’s neuroscientific model is highly consistent with the approaches of our constructivist narrative approach, in a perspective that has Kelly (1952) and Harvey, Hunt and Schroder (1961) as antecedents within psychology. 

Chapter 6, entitled How the Brain Makes Emotions, begins by explaining why the function of building regularities and expressing them economically (through the creation of concepts, which are anticipations) is an optimal strategy for the brain neurological system. Then he develops the notion of concept cascade to explain how the brain performs simulations (predictions), how each emotional case somehow incorporates the construction of the body, how the cascade implies greater specificity in emotional cases and that means increased efficiency, and how the cascade it relates to the “statistical” functioning of the brain in selecting from a large set of possible predictions to build each emotional case.

The Nobel laureate and neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman called your experiences “the remembered present.” Today, thanks to advances in neuroscience, we can see that Edelman was correct. An instance of a concept, as an entire brain state, is an anticipatory guess about how you should act in the present moment and what your sensations mean.

In these multiple predictions, the selection of which prediction is “the winner”, which is selected, and which variation can be considered to correct the prediction, is called the control network. The control network allows to select which concepts (predictions) will be used, which ones are more suitable.

Some scientists refer to the control network as an “emotion regulation” network. They assume that emotion regulation is a cognitive process that exists separately from emotion itself, say, when you’re pissed off at your boss but refrain from punching him. From the brain’s perspective, however, regulation is just categorization. When you have an experience that feels like your so-called rational side is tempering your emotional side—a mythical arrangement that you’ve learned is not respected by brain wiring —you are constructing an instance of the concept “Emotion Regulation”.

The seventh chapter is entitled Emotions as social reality. It takes up the elements of the previous chapters (the interdependent relationship between the knower and the known) to expose the social reality of emotions, how they constitute part of society, how they are factual elements in our development. For the author, an explanatory element of the social reality of emotions is collective intentionality: it implies understanding shared categorization (predictions) as an act of collaboration, an agreement (not necessarily conscious) between people. The second element that Feldman Barrett mentions is symbolic language, which allows sharing abstract predictions, saving coordination articulations, and making mental inferences about others.
Then the author returns to the functions of the emotional cases, but now in the light of social reality: emotional concepts (predictions) create meaning, prescribe actions, and regulate the energy budget – body. In addition, she mentions two other functions: emotional communication and social influence.

I’m not saying that everything is relative. If that were true, civilization would fall apart. I am also not saying that emotions are “just in your head.” That phrase trivializes the power of social reality. Money, reputation, laws, government, friendship, and all of our most fervent beliefs are also “just” in human minds, but people live and die for them. They are real because people agree that they’re real. But they, and emotions, exist only in the presence of human perceivers.

Feldman Barrett states: you need an emotion concept in order to experience or perceive the associated emotion. It’s a requirement.  She then continues the chapter by explaining how in specific societies and cultures, emotional cases are held, or shared, from generation to generation.

In the eighth chapter, A new view of human nature, the author develops a critique of the «classical vision» of emotions, based on essentialism. It argues that the error in the interpretation of reviewers of Darwin and William James (Darwin himself stands on the bench in his “expression of emotions…”, Floyd Allport, John Dewey, among others), an error tinged with essentialism, is has maintained to this day because it is mainly intuitive, and that it is extremely difficult to refute given its illogical nature by proposing an essence that is difficult to find with evidence: “we cannot find the neurons of rage because the brain is too complex and our instruments imperfect”. The author ends this chapter, a case against essentialism, in a more acid and critical way than the rest of the book.

Mastering our emotions is the title of chapter 9. In this section the author explains how the Theory of Constructed Emotion can be used to improve subjective well-being. Profusely in examples, she first addresses the activities of “body budget”, and then ways to re-conceptualize (change the predictions in the situations-case). In addition, she mentions how the co-construction of experiences focuses on the importance of the quality of interpersonal interactions in subjective well-being.

The relationship between the body, in terms of health, and emotional cases, are addressed in chapter 10, entitled Emotion and illness . It exposes how stress and pain can often be understood under the same logic of the Constructed Emotion Theory: an experience that is built, case by case and in a particular way, based on predictions. Depression, anxiety and autism are also addressed (although in a more superficial way, in one of the most speculative chapters of the book, but which constitutes a possible guide for future research on these topics).

Emotion and Law , Chapter 11, is geared towards discussing the role of emotions in criminal law. Topics such as emotional stereotypes, the role of aggressiveness and remorse in trials, etc. are addressed. He also mentions the low reliability of eyewitnesses, given the constructive nature of memory. The author raises, regarding the rational-emotional dichotomy that judicial considerations acquire regarding emotions:

Emotions are not temporary deviations from rationality. They are not alien forces that invade you without your consent. They are not tsunamis that leave destruction in their wake. They are not even your reactions to the world. They are your constructions of the world. Instances of emotion are no more out of control than thoughts or perceptions or beliefs or memories. The fact is, you construct many perceptions and experiences and you perform many actions, some that you control a lot and some that you don’t.

The author states that the legal system requires at least 5 lessons regarding emotions:
1. Emotions are not expressed, manifested or revealed in the face, body or voice in an objective way
2. Our sight, our hearing and other senses are always influenced by our feelings. Even the most objective-seeming test will be influenced by affective realism.
3. Events that seem automatic are not necessarily totally out of our control and are not necessarily emotional.
4. Juries and judges should view with skepticism any claim that certain regions of the brain directly cause bad behavior.
5. Juries and judges should know that all cultures are filled with social categories such as gender, race, ethnicity, and religion, which should not be confused with physical or biological categories that have deep dividing lines in nature. Also, emotional stereotyping has no place in court. Women should not be punished for feeling anger instead of fear towards their abusers, and men should not be punished for feeling helpless and vulnerable instead of courageous and aggressive.

The chapter ends with two reflections. One is the questioning, in light of the data, of the use of juries in trials. The other is the revision of the concept of responsibility, emphasizing that despite the person being guilty, the history of predictions (anchored in social interaction) should be reviewed: review the history of interpersonal-social anchors of that person and attend to possible shortcomings. .

The penultimate chapter, 12, is entitled Is a Growling Dog Angry? focuses on developing the notion of mental inference fallacy, to criticize the thesis (and the research methodology involved) of fear learning in animals. For this, the author revisits the central concepts of the Theory of Constructed Emotion.

The last chapter, titled From Brain to Mind, The New Frontier , focuses on the predictive brain and the notions developed in the previous chapters to analyze three distinctive aspects of the mind: affective realism, concepts (single case predictions) – categories and social reality.

From these three inevitabilities of the mind, the construction teaches us to be skeptical. Our experiences are not a window to reality. Rather, the brain is wired to model our world as driven by what is relevant to our bodily budget, and we then experience that model as reality. Our moment-to-moment experience may seem like one discrete mental state followed by another, like beads on a string, but as we have discussed in this book, our brain activity is continuous in a series of basic intrinsic networks. It might seem that our experiences are caused by the world outside the skull, but they are formed in a storm of predictions and corrections. Ironically,

In short, the Constructed Emotion Theory explains how we experience and perceive emotions in the absence of any constant biological fingerprints on the face, body, or brain. The brain works to continuously construct meaning, in specific situations, by predicting and simulating the experience inside and outside the body. These predictions travel through the cerebral cortex, cascading from the body’s budgeting circuits of the interoceptive network to the primary sensory cortices to create distributed simulations throughout the brain, each of which is a “particular case of a concept – prediction”. The simulation closest to our situation, most appropriate to our goal, is the winner and becomes our experience, and if it is a case of an emotional concept we experience the emotion. All this process occurs with the help of our control network, at the service of regulating our body budget to keep us alive and healthy. In doing so, we influence the bodily budgets of those around us to help us survive and to propagate our genes to the next generation: this is how social reality is created, how emotions are made.
The Constructed Emotion Theory is not just a modern explanation of how emotions are formed. She is also the representative of a radically different vision of what it means to be knowledgeable humans and builders of reality. In a perspective consistent with the latest research in neuroscience, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett argues for a theory that gives us more control than the classical view and has profound implications for the way we live our lives: we are not reactive animals, wired to react to events. world events. Instead, we predict, build and act: we are architects of our experience.