How emotions are built: Lisa Feldman Barrett

How emotions are built: Lisa Feldman Barrett

 

Contents

. 28

 Introduction

Chapter 1 The search for emotional fingerprints

Chapter 2 Emotions are constructed

Chapter 3 The myth of universal emotions

Chapter 4 The Origin of Feeling

Chapter 5 Concepts goals and words

Chapter 6 How the brain makes emotions

Chapter 7 Emotions as social reality

Chapter 8 a new view of human nature
Chapter 9 Mastering your emotions

Introduction

The classical view of emotions:

1.       Emotions have a distinct fingerprint, neurones, physiology, facial expression

2.       Emotions are hardwired into us and handed down by evolution as they help us survive

a.       Therefore, emotions are universal across and within culture

3.       Emotions are a brute reflex in opposition to rationality

But:

Century of research hasn’t produced any emotional fingerprints.

Physiological response: wire up someone’s face, get them to experience an emotion, result is varied. You can experience anger without a rise in blood pressure, fear without any activity in the amygdala.

Theory of constructed emotions: Brain predicts a situation as emotional and how the body should cope with it.  Some of the behaviours are learnt in its society and from its previous experiences of self and others.

 

Chapter 1 The search for emotional fingerprints

People feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious.

 

The classical view says emotions

1.       Have a distinct facial expression

2.       Have a distinct physiological characteristic

A primary inspiration for this idea is Charles Darwin’s book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,

 

There are 42 muscles in the face.

Eckman did tests: actors produce certain facial expressions that most represent certain emotions.

Then the test subject is given emotional words to pick the one that fits, this then was used to show that emotions have distinct facial expressions. This worked around the world so showed this was universal .

Then they used a face expression reader, FMG: facial electro myography. Then participants were shown a film to provoke an emotion, then you check their facial features. So, if they show a distinct facial pattern and only show that with a certain emotion then you have an emotional fingerprint. However, the tests only show you could distinguish pleasant from unpleasant.

 

Problem with the match emotion to emotional picture of actor portraying stereotypical emotion, plus they are priming the answer by asking which emotion bests fits.

In recognition, it seems context is more important than facial recognition, if you had babies in a context and you grafted their face on from a different context, people always recognised their correct emotion according to the context, not the facial expression.

Situations seems to be like the sky: its varied, moving and unique. So, a situation where you need to tell your partner you are gay before you hear it from someone else, and you have recently been in angry confrontations with your partner  as several emotional hues. Fear (hurting husband) , urgency\Fear(he hears it first from me), expectancy (finally I can be truthful), resentment and anger (from the ongoing angry interchanges.

 

There aren’t singular emotions.

Fear of spiders, a truck running you over, being humiliated, in a horror movie, on a roller coaster all feel different and will have a different expression. Fear isn’t one thing its many different things

Likewise, is it ever the case you could just feel one emotion

You never just feel one emotion :Fear of spiders may have shame with it.

Fear of a truck running you over may have anger with it.

Fear of being humiliated might have loneliness with it.

Fear in a horror movie might have pleasure with it.

Fear on a roller coaster might have excitement with it.

There are stereotypes for each emotion in terms of facial expression, but cartoon expressions are rarely if ever seen.

Facial expressions have meaning for other people and that meaning is constructed out of body language, behaviour, social situation, cultural expectation.

A stereotypical expression is used to teach emotions, and used as a shorthand e.g. emojis, cartoons etc, but this isn’t how emotions are generally expressed they are situational specific and idiosyncratic to a point.

 

We cannot claim, with any reasonable certainty, that each emotion has a diagnostic facial expression.

 

Summary of Eckman’s search for visual expression of emotional essence

Eckman: stereotype expression and primed answers

Facial sensors only differentiate pleasure\no pleasure

The main test to “prove” facial expression relate to emotions was done by actors, imitating a stereotype of an emotions facial expression and people were given emotional words to label them, they then showed a good correlation but If no emotion words were given in the tests then the description agreement weakened, likewise if they used sensors to measure facial responses then all you could measure was pleasure no pleasure not specific emotions, or if you got observers to facial expressions again they couldn’t reliably match emotion to facial expression.

What the original tests showed were emotional stereotypes which we are taught at school but rarely exist in the world, we were pre fed emotional words to choose the best again the answer was biased.

 

 

If facial expressions don’t give a unique footprint, then maybe physiology can?

The same emotion has a range of physiological responses.

Gold standard test: Eckman measured body, skin conductance, muscle tension, ANS provokes emotion, sees correlation between emotion provoked and physiological response. They evoked emotions by getting participants to hold a facial pose from a basic emotion. This then is considered to trigger the same emotion. This is the facial feedback hypothesis. So, what the study showed was that an “emotion” produced this way, changed their physiology, but it didn’t show there was a distinct fingerprint, such that you could read a person’s physiological effects and tell their emotion.

The physical difference that studies could use to distinguish two emotions, weren’t replicated between studies, and one emotion would have a range of different physical responses.

There have been 4 significant Meta analysis all of which show there is no distinct physical footprint.

If you provoke an emotion in people, there will be a great variety of responses.

An emotion is not a thing but a category of instances, and any emotional category has tremendous variety.

An emotion is whatever best prepares your body for action in  that situation. The emotion is a social reality, a family of goal orientated outcomes, where  anger for instance is the family that seeks justice to injustice, dealing with threat with aggression.

An emotion is a preparing you for action in a situation. Situations are complex, made up of familiar components in novel ways

 

There are many classifications of basic emotions e.g. anger, vengeful, irritated, aggravated, outraged

Emotion categories are population concepts. This is to say anger as a concept is a population of instance of different concepts and of different instances of anger. Whilst there are similarities and there can be defined an abstract common denominator or even average there is no reason why any instance can have this

What we have been calling a fingerprint might just be a stereotype.

Amygdala was linked to fear in 1930s by kluver and bucy, as monkeys without one would approach previously feared objects. Also, with SM with amygdala damage, they tried to elicit fear, car horns, scary things but couldn’t, also tried skin conductance test which indicates fear response but couldn’t get it, she also couldn’t identify the emotion in others, from stereotype cards. They tried fear learning, i.e. associate fear with a prompt but nothing. But then they found out how to do it, SM could perceive fear in body movement and postures and hearing fear in voice, and by breathing carbon dioxide rich air, when she panicked.  This has been replicated and people with amygdala damage can feel fear, so amygdala is not sufficient to feel fear.

Again, there was a twin’s study on people with urbach-wiethe (damage to amygdala). Again, one twin was like SM, fear deficit but would respond to embodied fear and carbon dioxide. The other twin had a normal fear response. From the twin study there are multiple ways to create fear in the brain and not just with the amygdala.

Degeneracy means “many to one”: many combinations of neurons can produce the same outcome.

Test in Feldman’s labs: show arousing pictures, have people describe similar examples of arousal and have different parts of the brain light up.

Core systems: a part of the brain will have many usages.

It’s not the case that every part of the brain can do everything. Rather most neurones are multipurpose much like eggs and flour in the kitchen.

 

In FMRI tests amygdala only fired with fear pose picture and person looking directly into camera.

The amygdala produces activity during novel situations Feldman in 2008 experiments

So, amygdala isn’t the fear centre of the brain, rather it responds to novelty of which fear is one source of a novel situation as they are rare, and indeed above the amygdala stops firing  when there is habituation.

 

Brain as having areas that produce different emotions

Meta analysis spanning 20 years. 100 studies, divided brain up into small areas, voxels, whilst areas were statistically significant in responding to emotions, they didn’t just respond to one, nor did they respond in all events, so only 40% for the amygdala with fear. Indeed every “emotional” area of the brain, amygdala, limbic system seems involved with non-emotional events like reading.

Emotions arise from firing neurons, but no neurons are exclusively dedicated to emotion.

You can’t stimulate an emotion by stimulating a certain neuron or network of neurons.

Very difficult to measure emotions

1.       Affect subjective

2.       Heart rate influence by a variety of things

3.       Emotional stimulus may stimulate other emotions, and you can’t trigger excessive emotion as its immoral

 

Summary

Facial EMG studies demonstrate that people move their facial muscles in many ways, not one consistent way, when feeling an instance of the same emotion category. Large meta-analyses conclude that a single emotion category involves different bodily responses, not a single, consistent response. Brain circuitry operates by the many-to-one principle of degeneracy: instances of a single emotion category, such as fear, are handled by different brain patterns at different times and in different people. Conversely, the same neurons can participate in creating different mental states (one-to-many).

 

People with damaged amygdala’s do experience fear

Amygdala responds most to novelty

Neurones are multi-purpose

The brain has a degeneracy function, many different neural connections can have the same outcome

Very difficult\impossible to measure emotions

An emotion is not a thing but a category of instances, and any emotion category has tremendous variety.

 

Emotions are categories of diverse instances much like the word cat. You can distinguish an emotion from another emotion, you can define it by the stereotype and the goal of it, but even so it can have a unique fingerprint.

 

Chapter 2 Emotions are constructed

If your brain doesn’t understand something, it can fill in the gaps so that it does. For instance, a partial silhouette of a bee, doesn’t make sense but after you know it’s a bee, your brain fills in the gap and you can’t not see a bee.

 

Brains fill in gaps, the other side of a dice, the sense of motion, the fact we see upside down. Move closer or further away from an object and it seems that we are closer not it is bigger.

No matter how hard you try, you cannot observe yourself or experience yourself constructing the image. We needed a specially designed example to unmask the fact that construction is occurring.

The process of the brain constructing is called simulation, when the brain is missing something,  it needs to make sense of an experience. Simulations happen regularly but not obviously in perception and obviously and regularly in imagination and memory.

Simulations are your brains guess of what’s happening in the world.

Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it.

A simulation brings past similar experience to a current situation, this is what it was like. Likewise, it brings expectation of what I think it will be like, given this context, and how it was before. It also brings a cross sensory response to it. It will bring thoughts and emotions too.

So, simulation prepares your body for the potential change given the experience that is happening.

So, your concept “bee” has all these aspects in it. Bee also connects out with other cognitive networks, countryside, mother etc.

Whilst concepts can blend into to each other, for instance hills and mountains, they still sharply define against other concepts, e.g. hills and lakes.

Your concepts are a primary tool for your brain to guess the meaning of incoming sensory inputs.

So sound waves form music or speech dependent on the culture grown up in . Likewise, chemicals are turned into tastes and smells that are conceptually connected.

You brain also uses concepts to make meaning from concepts inside your body.

So, one input says an aching stomach can be interpreted as hunger, nausea or mistrust dependent on the context, dinner table, flu season or courtroom.

So, you can interpret interoceptive data as being an emotional concept. Of course, your interpretation might be wrong, or not as right as you think. So, you might have a knot in your stomach which you might interpret as disgust, and whilst its true you feel disgusted, you might also notice that you feel hungry and that you are feeling a bit unwell.

Theory of constructed emotions=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. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action.

 

Classical emotion theory says emotional reaction are triggered

Constructed emotion theory says emotions are constructed based on internal and external sensation.

 

The theory of construction of human experience dates to Heraclitus

We share emotions as we share a culture, in different cultures you can get different emotions. Again, we share a common culture in terms of being human so there are some shared emotions cross culturally.

Social construction: social values and interests construct our experience

Psychological construction:  we have base building blocks to construct our experience in the world, which then construct thoughts\emotions

The brain is changed by epigenetics and by plasticity.

The theory of constructed emotion incorporates elements of all three flavours of construction. From social construction, it acknowledges the importance of culture and concepts. From psychological construction, it considers emotions to be constructed by core systems in the brain and body. And from neuro-construction, it adopts the idea that experience wires the brain.

The brain can produce many different instances of a particular emotion. It can also reuse parts from one emotion in another. The parts that are used to construct an emotion create something new in their combination and this can only be understood by engaging with all of it. In the same way that when you bake the interplay of ingredients produces something new by their interaction, e.g. bread and crustiness wasn’t in any of the ingredients.

Emotions as emergent out of the combination of core ingredients. So, what are the core systems?

Core systems as interoceptive system? Emotions affective quality out of emergent properties

Chemical reactions transform both sides into new things, so you can’t take the product and reverse engineer it, think about bread. So, to understand you need to understand the context and  the interactions. This is holistic thinking. The context, the interactions.

Holism, emergent properties, and degeneracy are the very antithesis of fingerprints.

Emotions as crustiness the emergent properties out of adding flour and yeast.

So, when you bake bread, there are the ingredients, the process and the context (humidity, yeast in air, temperature etc)

Neurones as many to one=degeneracy and one to many one neurone can be involved in many different processes.

Emotions have social reality, like the concept’s money, or justice. Likewise, if you interpret your fast beating heart as anxiety enough times then it has an effect, you can reinterpret more easily in that way, you will have feelings and thoughts about anxiety, oh oh, this is going to be hard work.  As you perceive being anxious then this can have effects on the rest of your internal systems, your immune system your digestive system, your blood pressure.

So, as you interpret interoceptive feelings\external events as an emotion then you create an instance of emotion which has a unique experience.

So, there are emotional category words like anxiety, sadness etc. Then there are all the instances that get interpreted as these which are a diverse population.

So, thinking of emotions as social realities sees them interpreted, and constructed.

The antithesis of this, is to talk about an emotion being triggered (it was there waiting to be created), having an emotional reaction (it happened to you without agency).

With a social reality, you can ask if two people agree with the interpretation, if the interpretation is like a social norm, but not to work out objective criteria and if there is a match: big difference.

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.

It is unintuitive though as emotions seem to happen to us, we perceive them in others, there seems no construction.

Summary

The brain simulates, it fills in the blanks to make meaning (motion, Kanizsa square, moving towards or away from an object the object doesn’t increase in size, rather we feel like we are nearer to it)

Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action.

Emotions are simulations that help us make predictions as to how to relate to the world ,based on internal and external events.

When we have a fast-beating heart, we can interpret it as anxiety, and then have anxious thoughts and this can trigger other anxious physical symptoms that we have\or believe we have with anxiety.

The emotion is an emergent property like the crustiness of bread, that comes from the interpretation of internal and external events.

 

Chapter 3 The myth of universal emotions

You need context to understand a facial configuration , someone screaming, in pain, in jubilation? You must understand a concept, and the context to be able to apply it.

The Eckman tests

1.       Actor pretends to feel an emotion and displays a caricature of it

2.       Emotional words are given as a choice

3.       Cross countries people pick the same answers

Forced choice is multiple choice, we are already telling the answerer this is an emotion, you pick which one. You are therefore priming the answer as the answerer looks to interpret the facial configuration emotionally.

The Eckman tests proves that we emotions are universal, but actor is showing prototype, not actuality, (they don’t feel it)

The answers mean that people can best select an emotional word, not that they recognise emotion, you shouldn’t need any emotional words as a cue.

 

Challenges

1.       Take out multiple choice and say put in the emotional word to the picture

a.       Agreement weakens 58%

2.       Take out the emotional word, and say describe what this person is feeling

a.       Agreement weakens still further

3.       Do these two people share an emotion

a.       42%

4.       Get participant to repeat the word anger over and over, to reduce their ability to use the concept=> two angry faces

a.       36%

5.       Semantic dementia, can’t access concepts, sort faces into similar emotions

a.       They could only differentiate valence, i.e. pleasure and unpleasurable, attract\repel

 

Young children do the same, they can differentiate by valence but not by emotional category up until 4ish, when they start to develop emotional concepts.

Himba tribe Namibia should have sorted pictures into 6 piles, but they sorted them into different piles with different characteristics.

 

Smiling was only related to happiness post the 18^th century.

 

If you remove the emotional concepts from the Eckman tests then it makes a difference, which if emotions are accessible without our concepts, because they have a fingerprint or experience, shouldn’t make a difference. So, get the participant to repeat an emotional word before the test, or take out the emotional words’ multiple choice, which is really a forced choice, as it is saying there is an emotion here, which emotion out of this choice is it.

Chapter 4 The Origin of Feeling

Pleasure and displeasure: valence and how activated you feel calm or agitated: arousal.

Simple pleasant\unpleasant feelings come from interoception, which is the affective representations of your internal systems , which include your homeostatic ones, your immune, endocrine, your organs, your nociceptive system.

Interoception is one of the core ingredients of emotion.

Neurones in your muscles lay dormant until stimulated.

The brain is different, neurones are always stimulating each other: intrinsic brain activity. This activity is structured, there are collections of neurons that consistently fire together: intrinsic networks, they operate degeneratively in that, there is the overall function that the network aims at , and different neurones can enable this.

Intrinsic activity accounts for your internal systems, the physical ones breathing, digestion etc, then the cognitive ones daydreaming, chattering mind, and simulations so predicting what will happen in the world.

intrinsic activity is accomplishing, besides keeping your heart beating, your lungs breathing, and your other internal functions working smoothly. In fact, intrinsic brain activity is the origin of dreams, daydreams, imagination, mind wandering, and reveries, which we collectively called simulation in chapter 2. It also ultimately produces every sensation you experience, including your interoceptive sensations, which are the origins of your most basic pleasant, unpleasant, calm, and jittery feelings.

 

Simulations are made on the basis of stimulus, past experience, future desires, the past experience and future desires shape the current context, so if a person is hungry, they will have a perceptual bias towards food and will treat cues with a bias towards food.

The brain makes predictions of what will happen, then it gets internal systems ready for this.

So, it might predict being hungry, then might start gastric juices readying for digestion.

The purpose of the predictions is to keep you alive and well and work  at a microscopic level. Through predicting the brain constructs your perceptual world, what is figure and what is ground.

So, as you think of an apple, then your brain will simulate an apple in a variety of ways, its colour, taste, etc. Which then can lead to the variety of ways you might want to interact with it.

When you are in a supermarket you see what looks like an apple, which allows you to predict the pleasure of eating it, and you engage the chain of behaviour towards this, buy it, transport it etc.

Based on prediction of experience then the brain initiates internal and external action, what speed heart, and whether to move the arms.

If your brain were merely reactive it would be too inefficient to keep you alive. If you had to check everything out rather than predict and assume what things are, that would be information overload

So, based on low input there might be high prediction, then you get an event happening that might refine the prediction.

So generally, there is intrinsic predictive activity that we aren’t aware of, then there are events in the world that refine a part of those predictions.

There is prediction and correction of your mental model of the world.

You have a visual cortex in your brain that contains a mental map of your visual field. However, only a small amount of the input for that area come from the eye.

Predict=>Simulate=>Compare=>Resolve error

 

If there’s is a prediction error, then either the prediction can be altered, or sensory input can be filtered to maintain the prediction.

To get external movement of your body, you must change internal systems. So as your brain predicts you need to move, then muscles and systems will get activated. In doing this this change your interoceptive experience.

As there is an interoceptive change then there is a mental prediction: I’m just about to run, or I’m running alternatively there can be an emotional prediction, I’m anxious.

Interoceptive network uses the whole brain, but to simplify it has two general parts with distinct roles.  One part of it controls the internal environment, so speed up heart which are the body budgeting regions. The second part is the primary interoceptive cortex which relate to the affect.

So, one part of the interoceptive network predicts the needs of a change in internal systems (body budget) and then there is the prediction of what it will feel like.

So, there’s a prediction of what will happen in the world, and a simulation, this in turn leads to a prediction of what needs to happen internally (e.g. fight or flight) and a prediction of how that will feel, so anxious, low valence, high arousal.  Then I guess in turn a prediction of how the body will respond to feeling anxiety!

 

So, there is one part of interception which is affective, this is a combination of what is happening internally and what is expected to happen. Then there is the prediction of what will happen, e.g. internal motor change.

 

What are my bodily needs (control +resource)=what’s currently happening + what I think is going to happen.

What do I feel like =interoceptively, what’s currently happening + what I think is going to happen.

 

The budgeting sense of interoception, is to work out what your needs are and to adjust the controls accordingly.

The affective sense of interception is how are we doing in terms of control, well then this feels like pleasure. The arousal aspect is how much effort do we need to put into adjusting control or managing resources.  The valence would seem to indicate that we are not making predictive error, and we are budgeting well,  and that the internal homeostatic systems are in balance, sleep, digestion etc.

 

All the previously thought emotional areas of the brain are sensual and cognitive prediction centres , which predict to regulate your body budget.

When you predict that you are going to need sudden energy then your kidneys release the hormone cortisol, or you may change how you are breathing. Change in internal events change your interoceptive affect, although you don’t perceive this precisely.

 

So, your interoceptive network controls your body budgets your energy resources, and represents your internal sensations, all at the same time.

 

Your predictions for action, can involve you not moving, so if you think you are going to be verbally challenged by someone this can be understood as threatening and therefore there is a release of cortisol to support extra energy.

So, the body’s control system changes depending on what it thinks you are going to do, fight, flight etc

Relationships with caring other people also regulates your body budget as you think they will look after you in difficult times, so it becomes easier for you to face painful situations.

 

So, you have interoceptive affect, which might be low pleasure high arousal which I guess is a sign to look for a way to address the low pleasure and quickly. So,  I may be tired, so sleep, or hungry so eat.

The prediction of what will change your body budget comes from   experiences from the past that have done this, they are known as the affective niche .

 

The brain represents wavelengths reflected off objects as vision, changes in air pressure as sound, from interception you get valence and arousal.

Valence and arousal let you know how your body budget is, debit or credit and how urgently do you need to respond.

Your affective niche is the objects and events that will impact on your body budget in the current moment, these can be memories, words, people in similar situations. Felt senses?

When you experience affect without knowing the cause, you are more likely to treat affect as information about the world, rather than your experience of the world.

Affective realism: if I feel something, then it means something about the world outside me.

 

A photo of a kitten isn’t pleasant nor a photo of a rotting corpse unpleasant, these objects do not have these properties.

 

The argument is that pleasure\displeasure is an outcome of your interoception.

Interoception, controls your internal system, based on budgeting what it thinks can happen and what currently is. It produces affect which is a combination of valence and arousal. Am in credit\debit and how urgently do I need to act.

When I see  a picture of a kitten, I imagine being with a kitten and the pleasure that it could give me, so I feel good, what makes me feel good is my imagining which is triggered by the picture.

 

It’s quite a jump to say all feelings of pleasure are in the interoceptive body budget.

Isn’t pleasure or displeasure saying you’re doing\not doing what you need. Wouldn’t this be both your interoceptive budget and your meaningful budget.

So, interception makes predictions of what will happen, in the world, and how this will affect your body budget and what this will feel like in terms of affect. When it finds its prediction is wrong it takes some time to change the interoceptive systems.

 

Whenever you make a big deposit or withdrawal from your body budget — eating, exercising, injuring yourself — you might have to wait for your brain to catch up.

 

Your interoceptive sensations don’t always reflect the state of your body they reflect your simulations of what you think is happening.

 

Helen S. Mayberg stimulates predictive part of the brain (??) and brings immediate relief from chronic depression.

Whilst affect can be generated from your meaningful engagement with the world, so ego pleasure if you like, a large chunk of it comes from your internal systems.

 

The argument is that affect is in the driving seat rationality a passenger (proof?).

So, the twist is that whilst I make predictions that affect my body budget, also my current body budget affects my current affect which I then believe represents the world, it is a good\bad thing to do means I have pleasure\displeasure from my body budget.

 

You cannot be a rational actor if your brain runs on interoceptive infused predictions, which would challenge the rational actor of economics, of the judge in the law courts.

So, predictions are both made in so far as it affects us interoceptively and are made based on our interoceptive affect.

 

Triune brain

Popularised by Carl Sagan in the dragons of Eden

Used by Daniel Goleman in Emotional intelligence.

The triune brain supports the view that there is rational choice PFC and then there is emotional choice, limbic system, brain stem, reptilian or mammalian brain.

However, humans don’t have an animal brain gift wrapped in cognition.

Barbara Finlay editor of behaviour and brain sciences, says all brain divisions are present in all vertebrates, there is degeneracy and multi-use, brains evolve ,they reorganise as they expand to keep themselves efficient.

So interoceptive network looks to predict what will happen this time, so it predicts what happens when my body was in this state, in this situation

 

So, Feldman argues that interoceptive prediction is  an important part of prediction and that affect is the outcome of a prediction (well actual plus prediction). So, on one hand the interoceptive “system” has a draw towards the pleasure and depending on your style high or low arousal and this will influence how you predict.

However, there is also the process, the meaning making where what is predicted is that which will carry forward things that are important to you, conscious meaning, or carry forward your experience(implicit meaning).

Feldman argues that we construct a world to meet our body’s metabolic demands, but this misses out meaning and value that we put on the world.

Surely then our predictions are two-fold on the basis of what will happen in the world, what will happen internally,  and the connection between the two is the meaning we have of external events, and our internal events, i.e. hopes\dreams\fears etc.

Interception says we always feel affect and that this contains a predictive element drawn from past experience.  There is also motivation to move this system to a better state, unpleasant to pleasant, or agitated to calm, which will lead you to search out things to enable this in your perception, leading to your bias.

 

Chapter 5 Concepts goals and words

Rainbows don’t have bands, we use concepts of colour and draw together the similar and ignore dissimilar, what there actually is, is a continuous spectrum of light that don’t form bands.

Likewise with speech, there is a stream of sounds, but we hear discrete words, you categorise similarities in sounds to recognise words. 50% of words can’t be understood apart from in context.

As you turn your head, on a physics level what happens is millions of pixels on your  screen have just changed, i.e. the light waves bouncing of all the points, so you should see a blurry image as you move your head, but you don’t you just see a different object. You see in terms of objects not in terms of light waves. We use the concept of object to see.

So, perception involves continuous sensory signals that are highly variable and ambiguous your brain fills in the missing details, finds regularities, makes predictions, smooths things out.

Classical view of concepts is that they have necessary and sufficient conditions. This leads to essentialism.

However, there are wide variants in instances of concepts which then lead to a concept being represented by the prototype of the concept.

In emotion terms everyone knows the prototype, it turns up in Elkhart studies, but it exists very rarely in real life.

Lawrence W. Barsalou argues concepts are goal focussed population categories, i.e. have many various instances.

Goal based concepts are contextual, in that they relate to the situation in which you find yourself. If you say in a fish and chip shop, have you any fish, the guy would be unlikely to bring you a goldfish.

 

Concepts change dependent on the situation, to achieve their goal

Objects can be part of different concepts dependent on their function

Your concepts derive from your purpose therefore you cannot observe the world and find concepts

So, concepts are created on the fly from a population of instance from the past to best fit your goals in a particular situation, ok but often you just reuse a concept fish in a chippy or a pet shop. I’m going to buy a pet, get some lunch and I use the word fish that I have used before to do this.

Emotions are goal-based concepts.

So, you use concepts to achieve goals, but how did the first goals or concepts come, surely both presuppose concepts.

Emotions can have a variety of behaviours and experience to be classified as a certain emotion what they share is the same goal in diverse situations.

So, your emotion being happiness then the goal would be getting pleasure out of your life goals, being accepted, achieving ambition, finding meaning in life.

A newborn brain can learn patterns, a process called statistical learning.

You are born with an ability to learn from regularities and probabilities.

Babies distinguish what words go together and where the gaps are.

Symbols that co-occur are interpreted to be part of the same thing , then there’s a probability formed between one things occurrence and the other. Again, how do things co-occur, doesn’t this presuppose the object.

Empathy

Young children assume other people share their preferences. Age 16 months their ability to understand other people think differently to them develops.

Expectation of others is trying to get their goals and methods.

To learn a mental concepts, you need words. How are words different from concepts??

Mental similarities: goals, intentions, preferences

Physical similarities: size, shape

Auditory similarities

Olfactory similarities:

Concept\word difference: Maybe concepts are multi modal, and words aren’t? Or concepts relate to the experience of a something.

So, concept of dog, is the image\experience you get when you think of a dog which is different to the words to describe a dog.

Mental similarity can be made from wildly different object air, see Fei Xu, who got infants to make mental similarity with wildly different things but expected some similarity. So, words mean similarity to other instances dissimilarity to things that aren’t an instance.

So, humans can be shown objects that differ across the five senses but have psychological similarity

 

Anger:

Someone\thing has blocked my access to something I am entitled to entitlement

Someone is threatening something that is important to me: threatening

Someone is not doing something they should be doing: acting unfairly

 

Young children show affect related concepts pleasant\unpleasant up to 3-4 months, they don’t develop adult like concepts e.g. anger, sadness until 3, younger children use emotional words interchangeably to mean bad.

 

Some of the evidence comes from careful testing of children in the lab, which suggests that they don’t develop adult-like emotion concepts like “Anger,” “Sadness,” and “Fear” until around age three. Younger children in Western cultures use words like “sad,” “scared,” and “mad” interchangeably to mean “bad”; they exhibit low emotional granularity, just like my graduate school test subjects for whom “depressed” and “anxious” meant nothing more than “unpleasant.”

Emotional concepts develop over time

An emotion has a beginning, a middle and an end.

The beginning is a trigger, so mummy walked into the room,

Then there is the middle the emotion which contains the goal, I am happy to see mummy and has affect.

Then there’s the consequence of meeting the goal. I smile and mummy gives me a hug

There are different emotional words in different cultures, reflecting different concepts and different constructs.  For instance, Russians have 2 forms of anger one at a person, one at a society\culture. Greece has 2 forms of guilt one a lesser form, one a greater form. Japan has amae which means to want to be looked after by an authority figure mum. There is no equivalent in English

So now knowing the concept, knowing the beginning, middle and end event of an emotion, then when you have a triggering situation, with a certain goal, then you might expect the middle events to come too.

To create new concepts then concepts are added=>metaphor!!! But still how do we pattern to get the first concepts?? So, we might have the experience of schadenfreude, but until the concept comes, you might have a passing experience without noticing it, you might have it without emphasising it, so you don’t notice it.  A concept then provides a filter to engage with experience in a certain way, then as you have the concept you can pay attention to the world in a certain way, and it lights up!!

Some emotional concepts e.g. Gezellig, describe a situation not an internal state. So Gezelling means a way of experiencing oneself in the world as cosy togetherness with another.

Alexithymia: don’t experience emotions rather experience bodily affects instead.

 

Everything you do and perceive is linked to your body budget. Therefore, concepts must be linked to your body budget.

This is a big statement. So concepts might have an interoceptive affect but also may have a psychological pay off, so if you think about doing things that are important to you, say being friendly, then that might make you feel good and that you can look\after be looked after, which can affect your interoceptive system, but you might feel good about doing what is important to you, and being efficacious, i.e. how you see yourself, behave to yourself etc changes because of this mental achievement.

Your memory and concepts are built around not only the thing, e.g. dog, but also how will dog make me feel, how will it affect my interoceptive budget, when should I use dog, much the same as with food.

Concepts allow you to predict, concepts are populations of instances, so in a situation a prediction is made based on the stimulus of what will happen, and concepts are used to describe this.  The predictions come from previous experienced events be they actual or virtual and the best prediction wins. The prediction can be on both what physically will happen, psychologically will happen, emotionally will happen

Emotions are goal-based concepts that are predictions of the current stimulus plus past experience

When I see a snake in the forest, I feel fear and run.

Construction says, I’m walking through the forests, one prediction is this is scary, I see something that looks like a snake, I think this is going to be a fearful situation that is going to need me to run, my interoceptive system starts scanning for danger, preparing to run, quickening the breathing.

So how did I learn to run when afraid? Being demonstrated by other people, focusing would argue that we know how to live, a plant follows the sun, it is part of its process. Similarly with ducks they know to follow the mother, and puppies know to crawl and suckle. How do these get constructed?

Well Feldman would say we don’t have emotional concepts until 3 or 4. We do know about pain\pleasure, so I guess there would be more like an animal.  Something frightens, causes displeasure, want to reduce the displeasure and can do that by moving away, or finding someone strong. We have attachment behaviour before we are four which is non conceptual, and non-constructed in its earlier instances.

So, when the adult constructs fear, they can predict a scary situation, see what looks like a snake, sees that this is going to cause displeasure and a need to escape (this is part of the hedonic system) feels a beating heart, then this is fear.

One way to work with constructed emotions, is that emotion is not completely constructed. We have some base responses, approach pleasure, avoid displeasure, seek care when hurt etc. However, as adults we firstly do have a diverse population of instances that makes an emotion, and we learn these in our culture. Then when we perceive an external context and an internal context, from our interoceptive response then we classify it as an emotion, this we are doing in a predictive sense as to what we are going to need to do and how this is going to affect our body budget. We then start interpreting the situation on our best guess, that we are having a certain emotion.  

The prediction of an emotional concept also includes the goal, so I feel angry, and I want to stop the person doing the unfair action.

Chapter 6 How the brain makes emotions

I guess the prediction of emotion is more interested in the motoric side if it is interested in the interoceptive response, although past experience is also going to be experienced so there is an amplification effect of previous affect.

Your brain categorises a situation, making a prediction, based on past experience, to get the best fit to what is happening to achieve your valued goals.

Adults have a spotlight of attention, babies have a lantern of attention, bright but diffuse.

A baby learns statistically things that go together are more likely to go together in the future. So associative and operand conditioning.

The brain needs to be efficient, the solution to this challenge is that the cortex represents concepts so that similarities are separated from differences.

So, there’s a sense that you get brain storing class information, straight lines and angles, then applies the two when it sees a rectangle , the brain separates statistical similarities from sensory differences.

Thing is this make the brain like a computer, so it has a list of classes with their attributes, and then perception are objects. This seems suspect as through history the metaphor for the brain has always been our highest achievement, hydraulics of Freud.

The other thing that’s weak with this is the hidden observer, the argument is that light waves bounce off objects and the frequencies that are reflected come into the eye, optical nerve and then brain and are seen as colour. Who sees? Who experiences colour, do you not need a person in the brain who sees.

Likewise, these break experience down from objects to parts, but how do they reconnect?

Concepts aren’t stored in the brain, rather you get a set of predictions in a certain situation based on past experience.  But what is it that connects past experiences to the current one, what is it that enables the similarity of statistical learning, surely that is a concept and must “live” somewhere, in the same what that you hold the basic summary concepts like line and angle.

 

Concepts are the same as predictions, so if you predict that shaggy thing in the distance is a dog, your concept is that you predict a certain family of dog interactions. Yeah, she seems to assume objects to get this working.

A prediction is the application of a concept, so  you derive a concept from past experience and its similarity to the present and its predictive value.

So, you make a prediction, and you get sensory input. The sensory input is understood based on class and instance, where you unpack the detail against the class, it’s a straight line at a 90degree angle.

 

So, based on sensory input from external or internal a variety of predictions (concepts) are made.  Originally sensory input was made into multi-sensory summary so that there is efficient compression, so we store generic summaries and notice the difference e.g. lines and angle. These summaries are still predictions but very generic ones. They are then used to understand incoming sensation which is combined with what is generally the same, i.e. base concepts plus differences.

Predictions then are made based on similarities with the current situation from past situations, this creates neural networks and again is using the base concepts plus historic concepts to predict the current situation. The sense of concepts here is a predictive what may happen.  This can be confirmed against actual input and a correction made if the prediction is wrong

However, there is also what I want to happen (psychological wants: values, desires,  physical wants: interoception, ) So I may be looking for food as I’m hungry so as much as there is a filter of prediction of what is happening, there is an interactive sense of me wanting something.  The prediction then must work two ways, what externally is going to happen, what internally I need to happen, so I am predicting hunger as I feel my stomach-ache. But also, can I say I predict my value-based needs?

So that’s one thing about Feldman, she makes humans passive, controlled by interception, controlled by the sensory input they receive (even though they construct them into concepts), she has taken out the active sense of carrying forward, desire, values etc.

Due to the predictive nature of the brain, how it simulates and corrects what “is” happening, this gives the sense of why emotions feel like they happen to you (but why wouldn’t when we think have a sense of it happening to us, well it does sometimes just not all the time).

So, our desires are prediction, I predict I am hungry, I predict wanting to fix the boiler.

So, Feldman says I predict what will happen in the world, and then use this to predict what changes will need to happen interoceptively and therefore what I’m going to need to do (speed up heart, I’m going to need to run) so the interoceptive network will be running based on other predictions. She also seems to be saying that how things will be for me based on prediction will be the outcome of my current interoceptive state against this new state. So, I am currently cold and predicting snow, then I will be even colder.

 

Also, there are many predictions, which get refined, the more precise your concept the more efficient.

Your brain must decide what is noise and what is significant, so we have attention, in the same way that babies have lanterns of we have spotlights. Your attention helps you to say what you pay attention to and how, so look at the letters and read them left to right. I guess it’s the control network, our attention that might include looking for what we want, we are paying attention on purpose to achieve certain ends.

Major brain hubs are the control network (PFC?) and the interoceptive network.

To make meaning is to go beyond the information given, given all the sensation what is noise what should be paid attention to, then how should we pay attention to it, what sense should we make of it.

 

Chapter 7 Emotions as social reality

There is no sound without perception, no vision, no smell

Sound we interpret from changes in air pressure

Light we interpret from the wavelengths that bounce off objects

As we hear a sound we interpret air pressure changes, then we think that it’s a certain type of sound, this activates related networks to the object, about what this means.

Naive realism says our experience is in the world, affective realism says our affect is in the world, if it feels scary there is something to be scared about.

Social reality needs a collective intentionality, i.e. a group of people who agree on the concept and how it functions. We need to be able to symbolise and therefore use language, so you can abstract a non-perceiver independent quality to make similarity

Communication by words, by objects (wedding ring), by gestures, by action.

Mental inference: what are the beliefs, intentions and goals of another.

Concept is the knowledge that you can have without words, e.g. baby navigates opaque box, therefore has the concept of this. This is strange this is propositional knowledge, but a baby has procedural knowledge.

Emotion concepts:

·         Make meaning

·         Prescribe action

·         Regulates your body budget

·         Communicate to others

·         Social influence: If I’m angry then you need to stop

 

The consequence is that you can’t measure emotions, all you can look to do is get consensus on it, the person who is having the experience is well placed, but they can be wrong.  The consequence of this is huge for RCTs that want to measure emotions.

Emotions are passed down through generation by socialisation, brain development, language development.

Each generation helps the brain wiring of the next.

Culture wires your brain, makes connections based on social reality.

Russian rainbows have 7 colours as they have 2 versions of blue.

 

Cultural relativity in emotions

Denmark: hygge

Papa new guinea Liget

Russian Tocke (spiritual anguish)

Portugal Saudade spiritual longing

 

Utka Inuit’s have no concept of anger

 

Tahitians have no concept of sadness

 

Western cultures see emotions as within people, however other cultures see them as being between people. Mainly around south sea islands.

 

The English language is not an objective tool with which other things can be investigated rather it is heavily theory laden, what being is, what emotion is etc.

 

Classical view:

“Emotional Reaction” and “Facial Expression” and “Emotion Circuit in the Brain.”

 

Social construction:

 “Interception,” “Prediction,” “Body Budget,” and “Social Reality.”

 

 

Chapter 8 A new view of human nature

You predict, construct and act ( but there is also experience in here that Feldman loses)

 

Feldman believes there is an objective physical world, and that there is a socially constructed world that are either pure mental constructs, e.g. emotions, money, or conceptual constructs like flower, weeds etc which base themselves on the physical world i.e. plants.

There is then due to the brain’s predictions and social reality a connection between the idea,  say an emotion and the world due to the brain wiring. Also, social realities have physical affects, e.g. lower social class are reacted to differently. So social realities can either have a physical basis or physical effects.

Responsibility and emotions, so as an adult you are responsible for the emotional learning and experiences that you have, so spending time with angry people, watching angry demonstrations on movies…etc.

The constructed aspect of say anger

I see myself in a situation associated with feeling angry

I determine the severity of it by comparison to past events

From this intensity of anger, I receive several memories from the past about what will happen (predictions)

I prepare my body to do some of these things, I’m going to shout, bang things etc

I pay attention to the world in a certain way

Certain beliefs get activated, it is wrong to do x, I must stop y etc

 

You aren’t responsible for having your concepts, you are responsible for continuing to act on them.

 

I then do them, it’s almost as I’m predicting and paying attention in a certain way then the action comes out.

 

So, one way to keep concepts going is to repeat them, focus on them, argue based on them, act on them.

So, we need not carry all our biological information with us, how to create rockets, language etc, rather it gets created socially\culturally, it is stored in our culture and passed on via it.

The human brain evolved to create different kinds of human minds, adapted to different environments. We don’t need one universal brain creating one universal mind to claim that we are all one species.

 

How come we have an essentialist view of emotions?

Darwin wrote that we have emotions passed down from generation to generation as they are wired in specific parts of our nervous system and therefore every emotion has an essence or indeed has a cause. He wrote this in the expression of emotions in man and animal.

 

Emotional essentialists: Pinker, Eckman. Emotions have an essence, a fingerprint, a subcortical region.

Essentialists can also believe the brain appraises, then triggers the appropriate emotion.

Essentialism argues that perception can reveal distinct boundaries in nature, for socially constructed realities.

Darwin started emotional essentialism, but it runs in the face of his evolutionary theory which challenged the essentialism of the time, into population thinking and variety.  Prior to this species had essential forms given by God, or forms and variety from that was deviant\defective.  Deviations from the ideal were by error, accident or malice.  Variety can provide functional advantages and a testing of, and  a development of the species. Variety is experiment.

Darwin’s theory of evolution is survival of the fittest, variety is finding out who that is, so there are no species essences.

 

Population thinking is based on variation, whereas essentialism is based on sameness.

 

William James, father of psychology was used to promote emotional essentialism although this is a misinterpretation. He argued each instance of emotion has a distinct fingerprint in the body, but he is cited as saying each emotional category has a distinct fingerprint.

 

John Dewey helped sew this confusion, he wrote a theory of emotions on James’s work, he joined Darwin’s essentialism with James’s anti essentialism.

 

Essentialism is difficult to overturn as it is intuitive, and it relates to our conceptual structure, how are you I am x, that is a ball, hitting a ball causes it to move. We speak essentially. Essentialism fits with Newton, people like simplicity. It’s hard to disprove essentialism, you can always argue you didn’t look hard enough, or our tools aren’t strong enough. So, its logically impossible to prove as false.

Scientists can then devote themselves to a search for essences.                 

The catch is  a word allows you to notice sameness between diverse instances but then says the sameness is within the object rather than your act of categorisation.

 

So, for Darwin evolution spawns’ variety and an instance of different variants of species within a population where only the fittest survive, but then has fixed parts of ancestry in our brain (reptile, mammal) that our rationality controls.  The strange thing is that our behaviour isn’t evolutionary, our emotions evolved, and they are fixed and carried forward which is inconsistent with his

 

So emotional essentialism derives from Darwinism who was an anti-essentialist.

The classical view says we inherit our emotional systems from previous evolutionary incarnations, and these can get triggered under certain circumstance to produces certain responses, but we have rationality to manage this.  This also relates to duality of mind and body with the world outside you and emotions inside you.

The Darwin argument is evolution is survival of the fittest and there is population variety and that parts of the history of our evolution are kept with us, so for instance our tail bone.

You could argue that parts of our emotional system are like this vestige of a previous version of us, but Feldman argues that Darwin moves biological essentialism to population thinking, so from design by religion to variety of the chance of evolutionary development, but he leaves the emotional system as an essential system, but then he also leaves the pulmonary system.

 

The Expression book embodied essentialism:

1.       Humans and animals share the essence of emotions

2.       Emotions seek expression in our face and body and are outside of our control

3.       They are triggered by the outside world.

 

However, Darwin argued that emotional expression was in some part only understandable from its evolutionary origin, e.g. baring teeth or hair bristling.

 

So, Darwin thought our emotional system served functions for previous species, but he is used to argue they currently serve evolution functions.

 

Allport modified Darwin’s views to say emotions weren’t functional ancestrally and a current vestige but rather we have them as children as vestigial but then we develop their evolutionary functional nature.

 

Darwinian background , with the adaption of Allport and Dewey, let the brain to be seen as an evolutionary outcome that has current evolutionary purpose and distinct functions can be found in distinct place, e.g. Broca “found” the area for speech, amygdala for fear,  the triune brain theory.

 

He saw the limbic system as having a distinct function although wider than the seat of emotions that it is now used for.  The limbic system was said to be the interface between the brain stem with the reptilian natures, and the higher functions of human rationality. It was said to house the emotions, which are a halfway house between reptile and human. In short, the stem\limbic\PFC hierarchy shows Darwinian evolution in action.

No single brain area is dedicated to emotion       

 

Plato divided the brain up into

Rationality

Passions

Appetites

 

Heraclitus said we construct perception in the moment.

 

Plato’s view still around but we call the perception, emotion, cognition. Freud called them id, ego and superego. Triune brain names them , reptilian, limbic system and neocortex.

 

Our brains are  developed mostly by nurture, there is a bootstrapping mechanism, to combine ideas, to statistically learn, to engage\respond with pleasure and pain, but then on top of that there is epigenetics that turns on genes via the environment, there is behaviour that rewires the brain, what fires together wires together.

 

Essentialists say first God created the brain with its specific parts, then evolution.

Constructionists first say the environment developed the brain then culture.

We are neither biologically nor culturally determined. We are neither biologically nor culturally determined.

Behaviourism is the outcome of not being able to measure emotions, so they measure the before and the after of an experience, and emotions get relegated to the 4 fs.

The cognitive revolution sees the mind as working like a computer, and therefore the brain as having its distinct modules.  There were two theories of emotion the basic emotion theory, and the appraisal theory of emotions.

 

So, the summary is:

There have been no emotional essences found, i.e. facial expression, physical reaction. The Eckhart studies are discredited because he primes the persons response with an emotional word and gets actors to fake prototype emotions.  If you take out the emotional words from the study, they are very weak.  The electro facial studies again are very weak.

When physical reactions are studied then whilst the body responds emotionally but large meta-analysis of 22000 don’t show any physiological agreement.

 

Other theory of emotions is this

There is great variety in how we describe instance of certain emotions, that go with different behaviour, physiology and purpose. These are culturally constructed, and this is why we have different emotions between countries Liget for instance. The fact we have similar ones is because we face similar problems.

The argument goes that we have some basic bootstrapping abilities as babies, know pain\pleasure and have varying levels of arousal, and have interoceptive awareness. Then on top of these we are taught emotions which are goal-based concepts, e.g. escape, seek retribution etc, and will contain interoceptive information.

Our brains are predictive creatures, we can see it in action with incomplete pictures, see our vision isn’t pixilated and that we see motion but all we have is static pictures from two cameras and our brain. Likewise, the upside-down glasses. They need to be predictive as we wouldn’t have time to see what’s happening and then react, we would be dead long before we realised it was a lion.

We are taught emotional concepts (without which we don’t experience the emotion). We then in a situation predict what is happening based on the input, internal and external. One of these predictions might be an emotion. We predict based on the input, past experience, current needs.  We correct our prediction when we compare it with what’s happening. Although our prediction, alters what’s happening as it changes how we are paying attention, and when you pay attention to the world it lights up in different ways.

There is no neural, facial of physiological fingerprint of emotion.

Neural: amygdala discredited for fear as it only lit up in novel fear situations, i.e. when the person was looking to camera. Meta studies again don’t show any agreement for which brain area relates to what emotion

Facial: Eckman’s study floored, take away the seeding and it doesn’t work

Physiological: Meta studies for 20000 don’t give agreement.

 

Rather the brain has 1 to many and many to 1 functions, degeneracy and multi-use. So, it has some core systems which can get reused for different activities. Likewise, the same function, emotion, cognition etc, can be produced neurally in many ways.  There aren’t specific areas for brain function, rather neural pathways are created in relation to experience (fires together, wires together)

 

Chapter 9 Mastering your emotions

Doing things, which affect your interoceptive systems can be pleasant\unpleasant. Feldman argues every time you do a physical act for your body budget then this will be pleasant\unpleasant.

Your interoceptive network needs to be calibrated to your body’s needs or you won’t feel so good.

Chronically mismanaged budgets, i.e. the prediction between what you need and how your system is running, will lead you to feeling miserable.

So calm is a matched body budget, and interoceptive systems. Pleasure is the adaption to the current interoceptive need.

Body budgets are affected by not ruminating, gratitude, touch, no inflammation!! WTF how ??

Improve emotional granularity ,improves emotional prediction and gets greater accuracy between prediction and body budgets needs

Learn new words:

Words seed your concepts, concepts drive your predictions, predictions regulate your body budget,

The problem with rumination and worry is that these are part of a prediction of what will happen, so you experience them, so it affects your body budget, you prepare for\experience pain.

Likewise, the more you ruminate\worry the more this becomes part of your repertoire, of how you see the world.

Gratitude and appreciation can also be helpful as it primes you to see more of them in the world.

 

Discomfort as problems with your body budget. Suffering as its personal, there’s a failure with yourself or the world that’s causing your suffering.

 

So, things that can help:

1.       Increase emotional granularity

2.       Improve your general well-being, which impacts on your body budget

3.       Engage less with rumination\worry and more with gratitude\appreciation

4.       Move your body, if you have more glucose than you need, then burn it off

5.       Change your scenery, it will change your context and therefore predictions.

6.       Recategorize

a.       your physical sensations into a more granular description

b.       your emotions into helpful, scared, to excited

7.       Understand that you as an essential self is a fiction, this will reduce suffering

a.       Use awe

b.       Use perspective to gain insignificance.

 

You can suffer if you have sleights to your ideal self, its virtue, wisdom, achievements etc. But if you see the self as transient, reconstructed based on current goals, then you could reduce these essentialist aspects of yourself  and therefore the pain, when they are challenged

When you suffer, is this because there is a threat to your social reality of yourself?

Success or failure are just aspects of constructing your fictional social reality of self.

In a constructionist mindset you need to be a good communicator for other people to understand how you are feeling, in an essentialist mindset the onus is on the person who has the emotion

 

 

Summary

Takedown

LFB argues against the classical view of emotions. This is broadly that emotions are distinct “things” that live inside us, which have essences.

The standard argument is that they have physical essences,  facial expression essences  and they come from certain areas in the brain.  The other argument is that emotions are universal, found in all countries in the world by default of being an innate part of humans.

First, to argue against the essentialism of emotions in facial expressions she debunks Eckman’s research which is a cornerstone of this argument. She shows that his research primes his participants with emotional words and uses stereotypical expressions which don’t exist in the real world. Research that uses a person experiencing an emotion (rather than an actor) with a question that says something neutral such as what is this person experiencing, shows very little ability to identify emotions.

Likewise with bodily responses the best that can be done is to identify pleasure\aversion.

The brain that has distinct areas that are responsible for emotions amygdala for fear for instance, and the limbic system for emotions more generally. However recent research shows that you can feel fear without an amygdala. Secondly the idea of the limbic system being the centre of emotions seems to trade on the theory of the triune brain theory. This theory was created by the visual commonality between human, reptile and mammalian brains. Now that there are more scientific tests, they can see that parts of the brain that look similar, can have very different functions and things that look dissimilar can have similar functions. So, a visual similarity\dissimilarity  tells you nothing.

Put up

LFB argues that firstly the brain functionality is degenerate, i.e. one part of the brain can produce many different effects. So, our experience of fear can be produced by many different parts of the brain.

She also argues that emotions are best understood as population concepts. Like a population concept such as “dog”, there are many different types of dogs. So, for any emotions e.g. anger, there are many different varieties of it, how it feels, how you act, your facial expression. On one level you can see population instances at work by all the different ways people would describe their anger, in feeling, cognitive, somatic and behavioural ways. Secondly as the relationship between human and situation is what creates the anger, e.g. driver cuts in front of me in the car, or politician does stupid thing etc etc, then the diversity of the situations that can provoke anger, leads to the diversity of angry feelings.

One central aspect of LFBs thinking is that the brain is a predictive animal. Her argument is that predicting reduces energy to do things, and indeed if we had to react, rather than predict the world, then sports that involved a ball wouldn’t exist as you need to predict to be able to respond in time. Indeed, using that principle many human activities, walking, and driving by example would likewise be impossible.

Another central tenet she has is that within the prediction lies simulation. In other words, we predict what is going to happen and we simulate all the parts that we don’t experience, so for instance we think a bus is a 3-dimensional object, so we simulate the back of it that we don’t see. Likewise, if we see what looks like a snake moving in a bush, we will simulate our vision of that even if it turns out just to be the wind. We simulate so often, filling in the blanks of our expected story that it has become second nature, such that we don’t realise we are doing it. We see movement but we are seeing still pictures in each eye. We see depth but again we just have two pictures from the eye and extrapolation.  We see an angry person, but they are thinking hard and frowning whilst they do it.

So just to take stock, we have emotions that don’t have instances but are population concepts, created by many parts of the brain. We have a brain that predicts and simulates.

The connection of the two then leads to the question of where emotions come from, and what their purpose is. Tehe purpose of emotions and the concepts that underpin them is to predict well. The aim of the prediction of a concept is to make sense of the situation and what needs to happen, and to prepare the body for that before it enters the situation. The same is true for emotions although generally they require quicker response than for emotions. So, the concept “cake” might lead the body to prepare to eat, or the concepts “scary big brown bear” which lead to the emotion fear, might prepare the body for escape.

So where then to the population concepts of concept and emotion come from. Well, that will be us, humans, they are social realities.

A social reality is something we humans agree on, and then has some reality, for instance money. The only reason money has value as because we all agree on it, it is a social reality.

There are many other social realities, countries, languages, art, concepts to name but a few.

So together we come up with ideas to make our lives easier, or richer, and once everyone agrees on it, it becomes a social reality and has substance.

With emotions then we interpret an external situation, and our internal situation, our interoception of our affect, and out of the two we create a population instance of an emotion e.g. being angry at your boss but not being able to show it, which you aim is the most helpful response to the current situation.

Consequences

LFB take the essentialist classical view of emotions, and indeed concepts and makes them into a social reality.

The effects of this in the treatment of mental health would be widespread if these ideas were taken on by the public and by the profession.

We would have to get rid of the current questionnaires, e.g. how many times in the last week have you felt nervous, anxious or on edge.  This seems to see anxiety as a thing, rather than a population instance.

Secondly with therapy clients, if they took this on, then the conversation might move from I have\suffer from anxiety, to I am creating this instance of anxiety to best help with this situation. This could open the door to engaging and understanding the feeling they have, and the situation they are in, that it’s a response to.  This would seem to give them more power then over their emotions, not things that happen to them, but things that they construct, even though it might be via a social reality, but as such they then have some power to change it.

I guess also there would be work therapeutically in terms of noticing incorrect predictions, how they are handled, I got it wrong and ignored it, made it seem like it was a different outcome etc.

Likewise, medication SSRI’s anxiolytics and the like would seem to be redundant as all they do is mask the symptoms of emotions and doesn’t deal with the causes.