How Emotions Are Made summary

Think about it: Do you always make a “sad” face when you’re upset? Or an “angry” face when you’re raging? Of course not. Each emotion can be expressed in many different ways.

These varied responses to emotional stimuli undermine the classical view of emotion.

It might seem counterintuitive to imagine emotions as responses that are not natural, innate, or involuntarily triggered, but that’s what the author advocates. She has no truck with the classical view and much prefers what’s been called the theory of constructed emotion.

This theory states that emotions are created spontaneously and concurrently in several areas in the brain.

You know how it is when you're driving a car. If you’ve driven a lot, your brain will make your body shift gears and engage the clutch without much thought.

But what is it that allows you to act with such muscle memory?

Several parts of the brain operate in tandem to implement interoception. The author calls these areas the interoceptive network, and it contains two specific components.

Firstly, there's the body-budgeting region. This uses past experiences to gauge what the body requires, and then sends pre-emptive instructions through the body to control its internal environment. It might, for instance, tell your heart and respiratory system to speed up or issue instructions to metabolize more glucose because you’re about to break your jogging record.

How would you describe sadness? Curiously, in Tahitian there’s no way to describe this emotion. Instead, Tahitians use a word meaning something like “the kind of fatigue associated with the flu.”

What does this indicate? It shows that our reality is organized by the concepts we use for understanding our environment. In turn, these concepts depend on culture.

Sad, happy, angry, disappointed, depressed: these aren’t universal emotions. They are, the author claims, concepts that we start learning from the moment we’re born, from our parents and from society.

That’s not to say babies don’t have feelings ­– those are tied to the concept of affects, as we’ve already seen.