THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF EMOTIONS

For many people it is a disturbing fact to realize that emotions are constructed. You construct them! Well, after all, whatever emotion you are experiencing—it is in your body and it was constructed by your mind. All of your emotions are also functions of your learning history and environment as well as a function of today’s environment. That’s because emotions are systemic in nature— as they are product of your mind-body nervous systems.

Nor is this idea new. In spite of what Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) has written, this idea has been around for a long time. While she acknowledges that the construction theory of emotions existed in ancient Greece, she seems to think that she, and she alone, pioneered it in the twenty-first century. Yet ninety (90) years ago, Alfred Korzybski presented “emotions” and “thoughts” as aspects of a singular system and constructed via our many nervous systems (Science and Sanity, 1933). He always put “emotions” in quotes because they do not refer to a self-contained entity, a point in Barrett’s book, How Emotions are Made, except she presents the Construction Theory of Emotions as if it were a new thing that she pretty much invented out of the blue!

I like most of what is in her book, but not her failure to acknowledge others in the field and/or to criticize others in the field in order to build herself up. NLP, built on the foundation of Korzybski as well as the Cognitive Psychology Movement of George Miller and associates has been presenting emotions as a systemic construct since 1975. NLP, in fact, began using a more systemic word for emotions— states. In NLP, a state is a state-of-mind, state-of-body, and a state-of-emotion. You can’t get more systemic than that!

Yet Barrett presents the idea “Emotions are Constructed” (chapter 2) as if it was a brand new revelation. It is not! “Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world” (p. 27). Ah yes, a mental map as Korzybski would say.

“The discovery of simulation in the late 1990s ushered in a new era in psychology and neuroscience” she asserts completely oblivious to NLP. “Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world...”

Duh, yeah! That’s NLP 101! So is this: “Each time your brain stimulates sensory input, it prepares automatic changes in your body that have the potential to change your feeling.” (p. 28)

Yes, a nice way to talk about the mind-body as a system. She then brings in “mental concepts”

disregarding that a concept is a thought because she wants to argue that we construct emotions primarily through our bodies and the “body budget” of energy rather than thoughts. “Concepts give meaning to the chemicals that create tastes and smells.” (p. 29). Wow. That almost sounds like we as thinkers don’t do it, but “concepts” are doing it! Again: “In these cases of disgust, longing, and anxiety, the concept active in your brain is an emotion concept.” (p.35) Question: Do we have a little man, “The Concept” active in the brain that’s doing this instead of you, the thinker? “An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations means, in relation to what is going on around you in the world.” (p. 35) You are not the meaning-maker?

Now there are lots of good things in the Barrett’s book: she emphasizes the role of predictive thinking in the brain, that social reality plays a major role in what and how we learn and pick up understandings about things, that culture is a “superpower” for humans in that we are born into a world of ready-made concepts and she emphasizes the role of concepts: “Social reality is the human superpower; we’re the only animal that can communicate purely mental concepts among ourselves.” (p. 286) “You need an emotion concept to experience or perceive the associated emotion (p. 141). “Your brain works like a scientist. It’s always making a slew of predictions, just as a scientist makes competing hypotheses. ... to estimate how confident you can be that each prediction is true.” (pp. 64-5)

Yet all in all, she works very hard to avoid saying that “thinking causes feelings” or that “cognition create emotions.” In fact, she boldly denies such, and throughout the book she uses various vague phrases to get around thinking. The most common one is “the brain...”

“The human brain is wired to mistake its perceptions for reality.” “Your brain uses concepts to simulate the world.” “Your brain uses past experiences...” “Your brain’s default mode. Your brain does not just predict the future: it can imagine the future at will.” (66) “Your brain is wired to listen to your body budget. Affect is in the driver’s seat and rationality is a passenger.” (80)

Reading this may make sense until you ask, “Does the brain do this apart from a person thinking, concluding, believing, deciding, anticipating, etc.? It is as if she leaves out the person who has a brain which he uses in these ways. With a statement like: “You feel what your brain believes. Affect primarily comes from prediction” (p. 78), it sounds like your brain is doing lots of stuff apart from you! For example, she writes, “Emotions are meaning” (p. 126) thereby leaving out the meaning-maker (you!) as the one giving meaning to things which, in turn, constructs the emotion. The implication is that we are victims of our brains.

Throughout the book there is very, very little said about the higher executive functions of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. When she does, she contradicts the current thinking in the neurosciences. She writes, “Your so-called rational prefrontal cortex is failing to regulate it. ... The prefrontal cortex does not house cognition, and emotion and cognition are whole-brain constructions that cannot regulate each other.” (p. 212). What she leaves out suggests that she either does not like what the neurosciences has discovered about the executive functions where we set intentions, make decisions, create a sense of self, encode our sense of time, etc. or disagrees with most neuroscientists.

“Ironically, each of us has a brain that creates a mind that misunderstands itself.” (287

For her, emotions are made by our “body budget” and the “emotion concepts” of our culture. She discounts thinking by trashing it as part of “the traditional view” which she says is invalid. She relies on “the brain predicting” all the while forgetting or ignoring that predicting is a form of thinking.

“Prediction is a fundamental activity of the human brain...” (59). “Through prediction, your brain constructs the world you experience.” “Prediction errors aren’t problems. They’re a normal part of the operating instructions of your brain as it takes in sensory input. Without prediction error, life would be a yawning bore. Nothing would be surprising or novel and therefore your brain would never learn anything new. Most of the time, at least when you are an adult, your predictions aren’t too far off-base.” (62)

Consequently, for her, “the problem in depression is misbudgeting and prediction” (210), it is not your depressive thoughts! Quoting the central idea in Cognitive Psychology, “Change your thoughts or regulate your emotions better, the logic goes, and depression will lift.” (209), but she denies that. For her thinking rationally is worthless because it is “the traditional approach.”

“Your brain is wired to listen to your body budget. Affect is in the driver’s seat and rationality is a passenger.” (80) “You cannot be a rational actor if your brain runs on interoceptively infused predictions.” (80) “You cannot overcome emotion through rational thinking...” (81)

This book is obviously not an NLP book, not at all! In fact it pretty much contradicts NLP and the Cognitive Psychology. For Lisa Barrett in this book, How Emotions are Made (2017) what you can mostly focus on is your “body budget” of energy. She argues that you need to eat properly, get plenty of sleep, some exercise, etc. But in terms of legal issues, school yard issues, political issues— you are pretty much a victim of your “emotion concepts” that your culture has developed and that your brain uses. Accordingly, her chapters on the law and politics presents a WOKE philosophy of victimhood (women are victims, 226; African Americans are victims, 227, even Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber is a victim 230, etc.).

My recommendation, if you want a good book on Emotional intelligence— get 7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence (1997/2000) by Patrick Merlevede; Denis Bridoux; Rudy Vandemme, Crown House Publications. As a basic NLP Book which focuses on Emotional Intelligence, the authors apply nearly every aspect of the NLP model. As such it is a good introduction to NLP itself even though there are numerous problems in the book and no application of Meta-States.