How Emotions Are Made: 7: Emotions are Social Reality

Here are my notes on the 7th chapter of “How Emotions Are Made” by Lisa Feldman Barrett.

• There are perceiver independent categories and perceive dependent categories of events.
• If I’m focusing on myself I experience emotions as if they are inside me. If I’m focusing on the outside world I experience emotions in faces, bodies and voices.
• Muscle movement, bodily changes become functional as emotions only when I categorize them that way
• Social Reality- An emotion is real to a group of people who agree that certain changes in the body, on the face are meaningful emotion.
• Words invite a concept formation. They group physically dissimilar items. They are efficient shorthand to communicate concepts shared by a group. They allow us to place ideas directly into another’s mind.
• There are 5 functions of emotions. Make meaning, prescribe action, regulate body budget. These three only need 1 individual. The other two: emotional communication and social influence require others.
• Without agreement of an emotional concept it can be perceived as meaningless noise.
• If there is a physical action there can be a constructed emotional concept experienced by the doer, and additional observers. There is no objective criterion to compute accuracy in which what the emotion actually is. This is a clue that it is a social reality.
• You need an emotion concept in order to experience or perceive the associated emotion. Your brain must be able to make a concept and predict with it. Without it what you “feel” is only a pattern of sensory signals.
• Emotions are constructed by prediction and you can predict only with the concepts you possess.
• Emotions I feel effortlessly which feel built-in are most likely the emotions that were also known in my parents generation.
• Emotion concepts are cultural tools. They have rich rules all in the service of regulating your body budget and influencing someone else’s.
• Some emotional concepts and associated situations and goals are not important in my culture.
• There are different emotional concepts in different cultures.
• Some cultures don’t have sadness
• Some don’t agree what an emotion is. Some think it is interpersonal.
• Americans prefer high arousal high pleasant states. We like to be happy and celebrate how great we are.
• People that come to the U.S. sometimes have to have emotional acculturation. They have to learn our concepts in order to predict.

Here is a great summary of how emotions are made.

Picture of summary from the “How Emotions Are Made” by Lisa Feldman Barrett