How emotions are made

Francesca Zanardi
Aug 24, 2021
6 min read

Updated: Oct 26, 2024

Emotions seem automatic, uncontrollable and natural therefore built into us from birth. But How emotions are really made? Are truly universal? And Can we take some control over emotions? 
Thourgh the work of the neuroscientist Lisa Barret I will explore and answer this questions. So, if you are interested, keep reading and explore the new era of cognitive neuroscience.

In my first positive psychology lecture, my professor explained emotions by saying: "Imagine you are in the jungle, a place that is not your usual environment. Suddenly you see a snake, and instantly you feel afraid. The first thing that you think is RUN!". ...Well, that will be not a good reaction, but the point is that the classical view would explain that a circuit in our brain, the amygdala, triggers our body reaction: our heart starts racing, blood pressure is raised, and our face will form an expression of fear.

Many university's books still explain the 6 Basic emotions as primitive forms from which all other emotional experiences are derived, with their unique facial expression. People from different cultures display similar facial responses to similar emotional stimuli, leading to the argument that there is an evolutionary basis for their existence, and those emotions are cross-culturally recognised from facial expressions (Davey, 2006).

But, Are emotions universal?

The main problem with the classical view is that we regroup emotion in a bunch of universal fingerprints, but no emotion has a single fingerprint in the body, and different cultures have different emotions. For instance, the smile/laugh, which is generally associated with the communication of positive emotional expression, in western culture, of happiness, is, on the other hand, perceived by Himba people as simply laughter, not as a mental term. In other words, some cultures do not have such a unified concept of emotion for events that western cultures perceive as emotional experiences.

In this experiment, the Himba people were asked to sort faces by emotions in different piles. If emotions were universal they should have divided emotions into 6 different piles (anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise) but instead, they divided it into lots more. When the researcher asked to label the different facial expressions they identified smiling faces not as "Happy" but "laughing". And the eyes wide open picture as "looking" not "fearful". In this case, the Himba people interpret facial expressions as behaviour, not feelings (Barret, 2017).

Interesting fact, Happiness has not been always associated with smiling, the word smile does not exist in Latin, but it was an invention of the Middle age as dentistry became more accessible, and what is more, Romans did not smile spontaneously when they were happy. As Mary Beard (2012) clarifies, this does not imply that the Romans never curled their lips in a way that we would recognize as a "smile," but rather that the concept of a "smile" did not have such cultural and social significance, and "smiling" was not part of the Roman language in the same way that it has been in Europe, in various forms, for centuries.

Then, How are emotions made?

The main job of our body is to keep us alive, and for doing so, while walking in the jungle, our senses are constantly on alert, trying to predict what could happen in an instant based on past experiences, and therefore, we can infer that evolution played a role in the development of such feelings. Lisa Barrett (2017) describes emotions as unconsciously constructed from three ingredients: "Body budget, current situation and predictions from past experiences".

By saying that emotions are constructed Barret (2017) means that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are simulations of the world, not reactions to it. Simulations are guesses about what is going on around us, which our brain combines with previous experiences to form a prediction about what might happen. For instance, look at the image here to your left. If you have never seen these blobs, your brain is working hard to make sense of the image, experiencing "experiential blindeness". Look at the image at the bottom of the page, then come back to this one. You will most likely see a familiar object now, and you will continue to see the same object in a year.

Past experiences play a crucial role because they allow you to access the mental concept of a "bee" in your brain. Concepts do not reveal information about the particular object itself but also about related ones, such as flowers, honey etc. All these pieces of information are integrated within your bee concept, guiding your simulation of the bee in this particular situation. "Bee" therefore, is a collection of neuron patterns in your brain representing your past experiences, and your brain combines these constructed concepts to simulate the world around us and guide your actions in new situations.

Then, what if our brain uses the same mechanism to make sense of the sensation inside our body? This might be how emotions are made. Emotions, in other words, are the result of your bodily sensations means concerning your surroundings. "In every waking moment, your brain uses past experiences, organised as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion".

But what if there are no threats?

Well, you will experience a prediction error. Predictions occur before you have any conscious awareness of moving your body, for instance, if it ever happens to you to have mistaken strangers for someone you know, your brain computes prediction errors and adjusted to the new sensory input in a blink of an eye. Those predictions are essential for our adaption to the environment, if our brain computes a wrong prediction is also adjusting itself for future simulation of a similar environment.

In short, in a new environment, your brain will grab any useful information from the surroundings to prepare the body for possible threats, so your heart is already bouncing, and you are breathing deeper. Therefore, our brain is in a constant representation of body motion about external sensory input, some of those sensations are interoceptive sensations (inner) resulting in an instance of emotion.

Then, if emotions are constructed, can we take control over our emotions?

As mentioned before, your emotions are constructed by three main ingredients: Body budget, past experience and your current situation. Therefore there is a possibility to take some control over your emotions by changing one of the three ingredients. The most straightforward but still not easy one is to change your body budget. If you eat healthily, do regular exercise and get enough sleep your brain won't have to struggle for maintaining your body budget in balance, therefore will have less opportunity to create bad feelings. Another way for taking over your emotions Is by changing your current situation. For example by paying attention to other things, or changing completely environment, such as changing room allowing your brain to create a new instance of emotion. Finally, even though is impossible to change your past, you can always modify your future reactions. For instance, sometimes it happens to feel low without any particular reason and usually, our reactions seem useless. Therefore, when you start to feel that way, think of it just as a body reaction, so stand up and start to do exercise (or anything that you think might help). Those feelings do not disappear but the interpretations of it will change and whereas before standing up was really hard, it will become an automatic response. I'm not saying that you could cure serious illness, but thinking about emotions as body reactions could open a new era of understanding on illness that we believe only associated with our mind such as depression. The boundary between physical and mental are blurred and understanding this could lead us to new treatments.

I could have not possibly explained a vast concept as is emotions in just an article. It is not just it, but a tiny insight into how emotions are made. But if you want to know more about it I highly recommend the book by Barret "How emotions are made" (The secret life of the brain). Seriously mind-blowing.