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Where do Emotions come from?

You know, Homer, when I found out about this I went through a wide range of emotions. First I was nervous, then anxious, then wary then apprehensive Emotions are tricky. I don’t think there are many people who are aware of precisely what they are feeling throughout the day, much less the precise causes of each of these feelings.

Of course if you’re Cal Lightman from the TV show “Lie to Me,” then understanding not just your own emotions but other people’s emotions is totally easy. This show is based on the idea that certain facial expressions for emotions like disgust, anger, fear, sadness, happiness, contempt, and surprise are universally expressed by and can be recognized by all humans.

So, whether you’re Paul Rudd or an illiterate Fore tribesmen in Papua New Guinea, you should understand what emotion each of these facial expressions represent. Then, Cal Lightman can tell when you’re lying because these universal emotions will inevitably leak onto your face, if only for a fraction of a second.

The idea that emotions are innate and hardwired into humans goes well with Charles Darwin’s view on emotions. Darwin theorized that emotions were evolved traits universal to the human species.

There have been some very interesting animal studies that support this idea. For example, fear would be a useful emotion to have built in so you know how to not get killed. In Jaak Panksepp’s 1998 book Affective Neuroscience, he explains an experiment that would suggest rats have an innate fear circuit.

Researchers monitored how often rats solicited each other to play. Then, a tuft of cat fur was put in their cage for a day. The rats frequency for play immediately went to zero and stayed low even when the fur was taken out.

By the way, these were rats who had never seen a cat before. Another 2008 study with humans found that young children and adults have an enhanced ability to detect snakes. A fear of snakes is one of the most common phobias, yet most people have never even seen a snake in person.

This could be interpreted as us having preprogrammed stimuli for triggering our innate fear circuits, but, how do emotions arise in the mind? Jaak Panksepp points out that three of the main theories behind emotion formation go something like this: The first is that something happens outside your body- a stimulus, the stimulus is then interpreted, the interpretation causes an emotion which causes your body to respond.

You see a snake or spider, so fear is generated and then your heart rate speeds up and you either freeze, run or attack the thing. The next idea is that a stimulus comes in, is interpreted, and then your body responds at the same time that an emotion is generated. The third idea is less intuitive but very interesting: It says that a stimulus comes in, is interpreted, your body responds, and then you have an emotion.

This is one is the James Lange theory of emotion. Basically it says that for example, we feel afraid when we see a bear because our body has engaged the fight or flight response, we don’t engage the fight or flight response because we feel afraid.

Put another way, let’s say your spouse sends some remark your way that gets on your nerves and really makes you angry. Before the feeling of anger actually arises in your mind, changes in the body like higher heart rate and blood pressure will be interpreted by your brain as indicative of anger, and then you become consciously angry.

Maybe you’ve had the experience of being in a heated argument with someone, and after talking or maybe shouting for a bit, the problem finally reaches a solution - you both come to an agreement, it was all a misunderstanding.

But then, about 3 minutes later, you or the other person suddenly turns around and says “You know what, I still haven’t forgotten that time you taped over our wedding footage with the Simpsons Marathon” So What’s that about? The initial source of anger was diffused yet the person is finding things to be angry about.

The James Lange theory would say that even though cognitively the problem is solved, the person’s physiology- the heart rate, blood pressure, hasn’t calmed down so the brain is still interpreting signals from the body as themselves being in an angered state. This body-mind connection seems to also show up in how certain drugs work.

For example, a benzodiazepine like Valium or Xanax may be prescribed to someone to treat a mental affliction as it reduces anxiety, but it may also be prescribed to an athlete for their physical affliction as it also acts as a muscle relaxant. Now, Panksepp presents a fourth model for emotion that he says would be more realistic.

it “suggests that all levels of information processing in the generation of emotional responses interact with each other.” This is closer to the theory presented in Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book “How emotions are made” published just last year. Dr. Barrett spends a good portion of the book refuting what she calls the “classical view of emotion.”

This refers to the widely accepted idea that we have emotion circuits in our brain from birth, and these circuits, when triggered, will bring about an emotion.

Unfortunately for aspiring Cal Lightmans and emotion recognition software developers, Dr. Barret says “when scientists set aside the classical view and just look at the data, a radically different explanation for emotion comes to light.” What Dr. Barrett presents instead is the theory of constructed emotion.

To explain this, first take a look at this picture: Unless you’ve seen this before, this probably looks like nothing other than black and white splotches. Dr. Barrett says that this experience of not being able to affix any meaning to what you’re seeing is “experiential blindness.” Now, allow me to cure your blindness.

Then if I go back to the splotches, it looks like a bee. and you cannot unsee the bee. What this shows is that your past experiences, from direct encounters, photos, books, movies, youtube videos, give meaning to the data that makes up your present sensations. Light coming into your eyes can mean a bicycle, certain vibrations in the ear drum can mean a human sneezing, and inputs to your finger can let you know if a fabric is silk or polyester.

You can make meaning of this sensory input because you have formed concepts for bicycle, sneeze and silk in the past. So just like having seen the bee picture in the past fills in these white and black blobs with meaning, developing concepts for different things, adds meaning to the world you experience day to day.

Let’s say you grew up in the great rift valley hunting and gathering every day for food, with a bow being your most advanced technology. Then you suddenly came across a parking lot filled with cars in the middle of a field. Since you have no concepts for car, road or even tires, the sight would be incredibly perplexing.

And Your brain would be scanning its data bank of experiences trying to say “what concepts in my past experience are these things most like?” Its guess might be that it’s a group of square shaped animals with stubby round limbs. But since the you watching this video have concepts for each of these things, the different components of visual input to your eyes - rectangular prisms with reflective and opaque surfaces attached to circles atop a black flat surface, are instantly recognized as cars in a parking lot.

In short, what Dr. Lisa Barrett is proposing is that emotions are formed in a similar way. Similar to how instantaneously taking different shapes in your visual field and matching them to concepts of car, tree, telephone pole, building and so on, your brain is rapidly matching the different pieces of data to emotional concepts. For example, your brain takes data from what’s going on inside your body - high heart rate, churning in the stomach and compares it with what’s going on in the outside world - hurtling through the sky at an alarming speed.

Then, it matches that with your emotion concept that most fits the situation: fear. Except, it’s also matching that with the data bank of all other concepts in your head, whether they be cultural, social, linguistic, technology related and so on.

So if you’re hurtling through the air at an alarming speed with elevated heart rate, but you have concepts for theme park, roller coaster and so on, the experience may match with the emotional concept of exhilaration instead.

Or maybe a sudden shout coming from the darkness results in the same physiological response, but the emotion you’re left with isn’t fear but surprise and happiness because your spouse has gathered your friends for a surprise party, rather than strangers gathering for a burglary party. But you had to make these concepts, just like you had to make the concept of a bitcoin.

Basic emotion concepts like fear, happiness or anger would very early on be established in your mind because you would have had several experiences that provided the patterns of sensory input that matches the concepts for those emotions. Then, later on you develop more complex emotion concepts. I’m not happy, I’m feeling schadenfreude. I’m not feeling sleepy, I’m feeling “food coma-y.” Emotions aren’t things that are triggered, but concepts that need to be made.

Dr. Barrett says that: “Emotions are not reactions to the world, you are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. … If you didn’t have concepts that represent your past experience, all your sensory inputs would just be noise.

… With concepts, your brain makes meaning of sensation, and sometimes that meaning is an emotion.” So emotions, are the result of your brain interpreting information of what is going on in and outside your body and weighing it against your past experiences. Now, you might be thinking: so what? Don’t worry.

I’ll be putting out another video about the implications of all this and how you can make use this information to your advantage to have a better understanding of, and more control over your emotions, so stick around.