The case against innate emotions and for emotions as creations of culture
The nurture side of the equation, and what it teaches us about living emotionally-healthy lives
Last time, we ran through the key evidence supporting the view that emotions are an innate part of our biological inheritance. We saw from examples like SM and the association between fear and the amygdala that some findings support the idea of innate emotion circuits acting like receptive fields for emotional stimuli.
However, the evidence is more dubious than was previously believed, as research has mostly failed to find reliable signatures of different emotions in the human brain. If emotions aren’t innately recognised by hardwired circuits crafted by evolution, this suggests that emotions aren’t part of objective reality, like light or sound, but are part of social reality, emerging instead from culture.
Just as the idea of innate emotions circuits is intuitive for WEIRD people with MINE emotions, the idea of emotions as part of our cultural inheritance is intuitive for people with OURS emotions in the non-WEIRD world. Today, we’ll discuss evidence which supports the view of emotions as part of social reality.
We’ll cover the main arguments in favour of this idea, and unpack what this appears to teach us about how brains create emotions. As we’ll see, for every point in support of innate emotion circuits, there’s at least one counterpoint which suggests that emotions are cultural constructions.
I’ll refer to two books in this article: How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett, and Between Us by Batja Mesquita. If you like this topic and want to learn more, I strongly recommend their books.
Evidence against innate emotions
In the previous article, we mentioned Paul Ekman’s research and how it helped to establish the idea that there are roughly six basic emotions that are universally recognised and thus presumably innate. At first glance, these findings are impressive, and have dominated thinking in the field of emotions research for decades.
However, further research has shown that Ekman’s results are due to the way he ran his experiments. We mentioned how his tasks involved matching images of emotional facial expressions with the corresponding word. When people are given these match-to-sample tasks, they perform so well that researchers concluded the existence of universal basic emotions.
But if emotions are innate and universally recognised, then people should be able to accurately identify emotional facial expressions without a list of emotion words to guide their decision. However, contrary to the idea of universal basic emotions, when people are asked to label facial expressions without a word list, their accuracy plummets.
People still do better than chance when the emotional expressions are consistent with emotion concepts from their culture, but evidence suggesting the existence of universal basic emotions evaporates. The findings from match-to-sample tasks are still interesting, and tell us something about the cleverness of people, but they don’t provide the evidence of innate emotions that researchers once thought.
Universal basic emotions were the cornerstone of the innate emotions view for decades, but this privileged position has been challenged by a steady build up of contrary evidence. For example, the idea of universal basic emotions presumes that there’s a set of core emotional facial expressions that everyone can recognise.
However, research is increasingly showing what many of us probably know from experience: people actually misread facial expressions fairly often. As a case in point, think of resting bitch face. There’s even an example of this from filmmaking, known as the Kuleshov effect, named after Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov. When asked about it, Alfred Hitchcock explained the Kuleshov effect using some version of the diagram below.
His point was that your interpretation of his facial expression would differ depending on the image you saw immediately prior, even though the facial expression itself is exactly the same.
This highlights the role of context in shaping your perception of a facial expression, and shows that facial expressions don’t have the type of objective meaning that’s assumed by the idea of universal basic emotions. Shakespeare also had a similar point in mind when, in Macbeth, he said “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”
What’s more, in contrast to the idea of distinct bodily states for different emotions, body states are also known to be similarly ambiguous and context dependent, as research shows that the same body state (e.g., high adrenaline) will be interpreted differently depending on the situation. Once again, the assumptions behind the idea of innate emotions seem increasingly doubtful.
There are a number of other reasons to question the concept of innate emotions. As we already saw, most meta-analyses have failed to find any emotion circuits in brain scans when comparing results across studies. If we came with hardwired brain circuits for innate emotions, you’d expect the findings to replicate across studies, but that’s not what the majority of meta-analyses has found.
Consistent with what we’ve learned about MINE emotions in the WEIRD world, research has even found that the idea of universal basic emotions appears to be less like a theory and more like a WEIRD bias. For example, Iris Berent’s lab has evidence indicating that WEIRD people with MINE emotions believe that emotions are innate because they associate emotion states with the body.
Anything identified with the body is presumed to be innate, even when people are explicitly instructed otherwise. By extension, anything innate is presumed to be universal, resulting in a WEIRD bias for universal basic emotions. As Batja Mesquita discusses in Between Us, it appears that this bias is taught by WEIRD parents during the early years of life.
She cites findings from developmental psychologists, who study the development of mental abilities across early life. It seems that WEIRD children initially focus on behaviour, akin to an OURS approach, and need to be taught the MINE method of associating behaviours with concepts for internal states like happy, angry, scared, etc.
If anything, this suggests that the OURS model may be the default, consistent with its overwhelming prevalence around the world. These results suggest that the concept of innate emotions is founded on much shakier ground than we previously realised.
Even the case of SM turns out to be more complicated than the initial findings suggested. We discussed how SM doesn’t report feeling fear when in spooky houses, watching scary films, or handling snakes/spiders. She has no trouble recognising faces and correctly identifies every basic emotion except fear, which she can’t perceive or even draw. All of this seems pretty convincing, but subsequent investigation found that SM still feels fear under some important conditions.
For one, she fears both the doctor and the dentist, having previously had painful experiences in which she received surgery without enough anaesthetic. The following quotes are taken from a case study of SM published as the opening chapter in a 2016 book called Living Without an Amygdala. Regarding her fear of the doctor:
“[S]he was scared he would perform the same painful procedure again and she did not want to risk having to endure the pain. The situation was eventually resolved when the doctor promised to put her under general anaesthesia. Nevertheless, the day before the procedure, S.M. called us, extremely worried about what would happen if the doctor did not follow through on his promise to use anaesthesia. Her voice was filled with apprehension, and she said that she had been worried all week long, dreading the procedure.”
As for the dentist:
“Apparently, 15–20 years ago, S.M. reported that she had all four of her wisdom teeth removed, but the dentist failed to use a sufficient amount of anaesthesia during the surgery. … The pain was excruciating, and ever since this incident she has been afraid to go back to the dentist. The mere thought of a drill makes her cringe. … S.M. had purposefully avoided going to the dentist for over 15 years. She said that she would rather lose her teeth than see another dentist. True to her word, last year S.M. lost her very last tooth.”
Although SM doesn’t feel fear in some conditions that provoke fear in many people, like handling snakes/spiders, spooky houses and scary movies, she still fears the doctor and the dentist due to painful experiences in the past.
Recent research has found that SM also experiences fear when she inhales air with a high concentration of CO2. This causes a sharp increase in the amount of CO2 in the blood, which triggers feelings of panic/fear, and can induce full-blown panic attacks.
The researchers wondered how people without an amygdala due to Urbach-Wiethe disease, such as SM, would respond to CO2 inhalation. After all, if the brain’s ‘fear’ centre has been destroyed, surely that would counteract the effect of CO2, right?
On the contrary, it turns out that SM and other people with Urbach-Wiethe disease also report feeling fear and panic in response to inhaling CO2, with SM even experiencing sudden flashbacks of times in her past when she was physically attacked. In fact, the people without an amygdala were actually more likely to have a panic attack than control participants without amygdala damage, as 100% of the people with Urbach-Wiethe disease had panic attacks, compared to only 25% of people without the disease.
What does this mean for the amygdala and fear? On the one hand, the amygdala does seem to have some association with the experience of fear — although this is only true of some fears (e.g., snakes, spiders, spooky houses and scary movies), and was observed in WEIRD people with MINE emotions, as the study participants with Urbach-Wiethe disease were all from the US. On the other hand, the fact that SM and other people with Urbach-Wiethe disease still experience fear under a number of conditions shows that the truth clearly isn’t as simple as amygdala = fear and no amygdala = no fear.
Emotions as cultural constructions
Given that fear and the amygdala are the premier candidates for a brain correlate of emotion, this casts further doubt on the idea that the brain comes hardwired with emotion circuits. Overall, the case against innate emotions currently looks fairly persuasive, at least in my opinion. If that’s the case, how do our brains create emotions? Lisa Feldman Barrett offers an answer to this question in her book How Emotions Are Made.
Her theory, known as the theory of constructed emotion, embraces the cultural diversity we see in emotion concepts and describes the experience of emotion as a type of perception. In her theory, emotions are still real, we experience them every day, but they have social reality, rather than objective reality.
This is analogous to the way ‘race’ was thought to be a biologically valid concept, an idea that formed the basis for the grisly eugenics of the 20th century. However, as described by Graves and Goodman in their book Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions, research has shown that ‘race’ has no basis in biology. As it turns out, race (and racism) are created by culture, and are not rooted in innate biological differences.
For example, it’s been known for decades that there’s more genetic variation within so-called racial groups than between them. Contrary to the idea of ‘races’ whose differences are rooted in genetics, this means that you may be more genetically similar to a person from a different ‘race’ than one from the same ‘race’ as yourself.
Despite centuries of belief in the biological basis of racial differences, studies have shown that race has a social reality, not an objective reality. Race is merely a concept invented by people.
In a similar way, emotions aren’t hardwired into our brains, but are constructed by them, guided by the emotion concepts gained as part of our cultural inheritance, and shaped by each individual’s personal experiences.
That’s why emotions vary from culture to culture, and between individuals within a culture. In this thinking, an emotion is a category of examples that you use to represent that concept in your mind, with different aspects emphasised by MINE and OURS emotions in the WEIRD and non-WEIRD worlds.
Lisa’s theory makes a lot of sense, and is consistent with more evidence than any other theory in the field of emotions research, at least in my view. Batja Mesquita doesn’t advocate her own theory, but her work and ideas are consistent with the theory of constructed emotion.
If you want to learn more, I thoroughly recommend their books, and they also have many interesting talks and interviews online. They address topics that I’ve avoided because they aren’t my area of expertise.
For example, what does this mean for conditions that we think of as emotional disorders, such as phobias, anxiety disorders, PTSD, and many other conditions thought to involve disordered emotions? Do we need to understand and treat them differently? Do they occur less, or at least differently, in OURS cultures than in MINE cultures?
I don’t have the answers to these questions, and I’m not sure Lisa or Batja would say they do either, but they’ve certainly got information that can point you in a helpful direction.
Final thoughts
This is my take on the current state of emotions science. I’ve left a lot out, but this covers the major developments as I personally see them. I think a convincing picture is emerging, with people like Lisa Feldman Barrett and Batja Mesquita leading the way. But much remains to be learned about the biology and psychology of emotions, and the story isn’t over.
There are still researchers who believe in the idea of innate emotions based on the claims of Darwin, and who continue to promote this view in their research and books. The most recent example is David Anderson, who published The Nature of the Beast in 2022, in which he argues for the idea of innate emotion circuits and appeals to the authority of Darwin’s intuitions.
Obviously, I disagree with his arguments. I would suggest that he’s overly committed to the MINE model of emotions, being a citizen of the US and hence WEIRD. That’s not to say he’s necessarily wrong, but he fails to reckon with the wide variety of emotion concepts found around the world, and redefines emotion concepts to suit a MINE model.
I mention his book for the sake of completeness, but I honestly don’t recommend it, because I feel like he muddies the waters in order to advocate for his WEIRD bias. But that’s just my opinion, and nothing is a foregone conclusion just yet.
Much hinges on the existence of innate emotion circuits. Most of the evidence suggests that they don’t exist, consistent with the theory of constructed emotion. However, if hardwired emotion circuits were to be discovered, this would strongly suggest that emotions are innate, at least to some extent, and corroborate the ideas of people like Darwin and David Anderson.
That possibility seems quite remote at present, but who knows? Only time will tell. This is the end of the series. Thanks for reading!
