How to Understand Emotions | Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D., a Distinguished Professor of Psychology, explains the neuroscience of emotions, how the brain constructs emotional states, and the link between language and emotional processing. She provides tools to regulate uncertainty and better understand others' emotions.
Deep Dive Analysis
14 Topic Outline
Defining Emotion: Core Components and Scientific Debate
Facial Movements vs. Expressions and Their Interpretation
Challenging Universal Facial Expressions of Emotion
Impact of Emotion Myths in the Legal System
Language, Emotional Labels, and Cultural Differences
Brain as a Guessing Machine: Reducing Uncertainty
Brain's Compression and Summarization of Sensory Information
Emotional Granularity and Category Construction
Movement as the Final Common Pathway for Brain Action
Navigating Discomfort: Feeling vs. Shifting Emotions
Understanding Affect as a Body Budget Barometer
Depression as a Bankrupt Body Budget
Strategies for Positively Shifting Affect
Social Relationships as Body Budget Savings or Taxes
7 Key Concepts
Emotion
Emotions are not distinct, diagnostic patterns of physiological, brain, and facial changes, but rather a process where the brain constructs a category of possible futures and motor plans based on past experience and current signals. They are not distinct from other experiences, as their 'building blocks' are common to all moments of life.
Facial Expression
A facial expression is an interpretation of the meaning of a facial movement, not merely the movement itself. Research indicates there is no universal one-to-one correspondence between specific facial configurations (like a scowl) and particular emotional states (like anger), as movements are highly variable and context-dependent.
Multimodal Summaries
As sensory information is processed in the brain, it undergoes dimensionality reduction, moving from high-detail, low-level features (like lines and edges) to coarser, more abstract representations. These 'summaries of summaries' integrate sights, sounds, smells, and other inputs into low-dimensional features like 'threat' or 'reward', which are then used to predict and plan actions.
Emotional Granularity
This refers to how fine-grained or precise the categories the brain constructs are. A higher emotional granularity means the brain can create more specific categories beyond broad bins like 'bad' or 'threat', allowing for more nuanced understanding and adaptive responses to internal and external signals.
Affect
Affect is a low-dimensional summary or general barometer of the body's internal state, experienced as pleasant/unpleasant, worked up/calm, or comfortable/uncomfortable. It's a continuous feature of consciousness, always present, and reflects the brain's predictive regulation of the body's resources, known as allostasis or the 'body budget'.
Body Budget
A metaphor for the brain's continuous regulation of the body's internal systems, balancing resources like glucose, salt, oxygen, and water. Affect serves as a quick summary of this budget, with 'deposits' (e.g., sleep, eating) and 'withdrawals' (e.g., burning glucose, stress), influencing overall well-being and emotional states.
Emotional Flu
A concept describing a 'bad body budgeting day' where one feels depleted, fatigued, or distressed due to factors like lack of sleep or unmanaged stress. It suggests that sometimes negative affect doesn't signify a problem with the world, but rather a need to address one's physical state.
7 Questions Answered
From a scientific perspective, there's no single agreed-upon definition, but emotions are understood as coordinated responses involving changes in physical state, brain activity, and motor movements. However, these components are not exclusive to emotion and are present in all moments of life.
While there is feedback from the face to the brain, it's not a simplistic, direct causation. The brain interprets facial movements within a larger ensemble of signals and context, and emotional states are not triggered by isolated facial poses but emerge from complex, dynamic processes involving predictions and past experiences.
No, extensive research indicates no evidence for universal facial expressions of emotion. Facial movements are highly variable, and the correspondence between a specific facial configuration (e.g., a scowl) and an emotional state (e.g., anger) is low, even within Western cultures, and varies significantly across different cultures.
No, language is not sufficient on its own. Emotional labels are multimodal summaries of many instances, and the 'bin size' of what a word refers to can change. While words are useful for pointing to sets of similar features, they are crude descriptors of the brain's complex, dynamic process of constructing categories of possible futures and actions.
Flexibility is key; there's no single right answer. Sometimes it's useful to use words or engage in activities like running to shift affect, but other times, it's wise to 'live in the emotion' and feel the discomfort, as it can be instructive. The goal is to understand when discomfort is useful for learning versus when it's a signal to change one's physical state.
Affect is a low-dimensional, general barometer of the body's internal state (pleasant/unpleasant, worked up/calm), always present as a feature of consciousness. Emotions are the stories the brain tells about what caused those affective feelings and what actions need to be taken in response, making them a much larger event than just the affective feelings themselves.
Shifting affect often involves changing the physical state of the body. Strategies include getting sufficient sleep, eating healthfully (real food, especially protein), engaging in physical exercise (like going for a run or walk), and shifting attention to the outside world to diminish internally derived features of experience.
20 Actionable Insights
1. Prioritize Foundational Well-being
Consistently get good sleep, eat healthfully (real food), exercise regularly, get daily sunlight, and cultivate strong social connections. These five pillars are the most impactful foundation for managing your affect and emotions.
2. Understand Your Body Budget
Recognize “affect” as your brain’s continuous barometer of your body’s metabolic state (e.g., pleasant/unpleasant, calm/worked up). A deficit in this “body budget” can lead to fatigue or distress, influencing your mood.
3. Regulate Affect to Regulate Emotion
To control emotions, focus on changing your underlying “affect” by altering your physical state (e.g., sleep, exercise, nutrition) or your brain’s interoceptive model of it, rather than just trying to change the meaning of the feeling.
4. Differentiate Affect from Emotion
Distinguish between “affect” (the continuous, low-dimensional barometer of your body’s state) and “emotion” (the story your brain tells about what caused that affect). Changing your physical state directly shifts affect, which then influences the emotions you construct.
5. Resist “Emotional Flu” Fallacy
When experiencing negative affect (e.g., from poor sleep or stress), consider it an “emotional flu” or a “bad body budgeting day” rather than immediately interpreting it as an emotion caused by external events. Address your physical state first.
6. Cultivate Emotional Granularity
Learn to construct more fine-grained and precise categories for your emotional experiences, as broader categories like “threat” lead to less useful options for action. Expanding your emotional vocabulary, even with words from other cultures, can help achieve this.
7. Shift Attention for Richer Experience
Practice deliberately shifting your attention to the specific, high-dimensional sensory details of your body (e.g., heart rate, breathing, muscle tension) to change the dimensionality and richness of your emotional experience. This is akin to a realist painter focusing on light rather than the object itself.
8. Reframe Physiological Arousal
When experiencing physiological arousal (e.g., “butterflies”), reframe it as a source of energy or determination (“get your butterflies flying in formation”) rather than fear. This changes its meaning and allows you to deploy it productively.
9. Embrace Flexibility with Feelings
Approach difficult feelings with flexibility; sometimes it’s beneficial to “feel your feelings” and tolerate discomfort for learning, while other times it’s better to use words or engage in physical activity to shift your state, depending on your goal.
10. Build Social “Body Budget” Savings
Actively seek and cultivate social connections with people who provide a “body budget savings” (i.e., make you feel good and supported). Positive social interactions reduce metabolic cost and help regulate each other’s nervous systems.
11. Practice Kindness for Personal Benefit
Engage in acts of kindness, both random and general, as this provides a “body budgeting benefit” (a positive internal feeling and metabolic savings) for yourself, in addition to benefiting others.
12. Foster Trust in Teams
Cultivate high levels of trust within your team and with managers, as this is the best predictor of job performance and innovation. Trust allows resources to be spent on challenging tasks rather than managing uncertainty.
13. Understand Brain as Predictor
Recognize that your brain constructs your experience by making predictions and motor plans first, with sensory signals primarily serving to confirm or update these predictions. Your subjective reality is a “controlled hallucination.”
14. Expand Emotional Vocabulary
Learn and utilize emotion concepts and labels from other cultures to expand your understanding and description of internal states, as different languages capture configurations of experience not marked in your own.
15. Interpret Others’ Emotions Contextually
When interpreting others’ emotional states, consider the full context of sensory signals (sounds, smells, body language, internal state) rather than relying solely on facial expressions. Facial movements are interpreted within an ensemble of signals.
16. Challenge Facial Expression Myth
Recognize that facial expressions for emotions are not universal or fixed; for example, a scowl only occurs in about 35% of anger instances. Facial movements are highly variable and context-dependent.
17. Avoid Simplistic Facial Feedback
Do not assume that simply posing a facial expression (e.g., smiling) will directly change your emotional state. The relationship between facial movements and internal emotional states is not a simplistic, mechanistic, one-way causation.
18. Drink Electrolytes for Hydration
Dissolve one packet of Element in 16-32 ounces of water first thing in the morning and during physical exercise. This ensures proper hydration and adequate electrolytes for optimal brain and body function.
19. Use Meditation/NSDR Apps
Utilize meditation apps like Waking Up to explore different meditation types and durations, including Yoga Nidra or Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR). Even short 10-minute sessions can restore cognitive and physical energy.
20. Recognize Personalized “Tells”
Understand that close acquaintances can make accurate inferences about your internal state based on your unique, learned patterns of facial movements and actions over time, not universal expressions.
9 Key Quotes
A movement is a movement. An expression is an interpretation of the meaning of a movement. Not all movements of the face are expressions.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Brains are always interpreting faces in context. They're making guesses.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Your brain is not running a model or or making inferences about the world. All the brain knows is our signals from the sensory surfaces of its body.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
The brain is a continuous category constructor. It's constructing a category of possible futures, possible outcomes, possible motor plans.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Words are just stand in for, they're just low these like low dimensional features, these these kind of gross features that stand in for many many many many little detailed features.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
What you feel is linked to what you do, and what you do is linked to what you feel, but not in this simple mechanistic way.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Sometimes when something feels bad, it doesn't mean something is wrong. It just might mean that you're doing something hard.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
The best thing for a human nervous system is another human, and the worst thing for a human nervous system is also another human.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Kindness is very very underrated and should be, you know, like when I'm when my when I feel like shit, I bake bread for my neighbor who's in his 70s him and his wife.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
2 Protocols
Navigating Feelings of Uncertainty
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett- Recognize that a high level of arousal and unpleasantness may be due to uncertainty, not necessarily anxiety or fear.
- Understand that the brain's response to uncertainty is to forage for information.
- Tolerate the discomfort associated with uncertainty and use it as a cue to seek more information rather than immediately acting or freezing.
Shifting Affect Positively (Emotional Flu Protocol)
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett- Address fundamental physical needs first: get sufficient sleep, eat healthfully (real food, especially protein), and get regular exercise.
- Recognize that negative affect (e.g., fatigue, distress) might be an 'emotional flu' – a sign of a depleted 'body budget' – rather than a problem with the world.
- Shift attention to external activities or physical sensations (e.g., focus on heart rate, breathing, muscle tension) to change the dimensionality of your experience.
- Engage in acts of kindness, as this can provide a 'body budgeting benefit' and improve mood.