Toward Emotional Granularity: Barrett’s Constructionism about Emotions (part 2)

 

In the previous post, I discussed Lisa Feldman Barrett’s critique of the “classical theory of emotions.” I covered reasons to reject the idea that there is a simple set of crisply delimited, universal, basic emotions or the idea that such emotions have universal modes of facial expression or invariant physiological or neural “fingerprints.” In this post, I would like to sketch Barrett’s positive account—of how the brain, in interaction with human culture and the environment, constructs emotions.

 

A word is needed first, though, about the metaphor of “construction.” It is a complex metaphor. It’s a metaphor that can pull us in many different directions. It tugs at other none-too-crisp distinctions we are familiar with, such as the distinction between finding something and making something, or the distinction between simple parts versus complexes of many different parts. It reminds of how we tend to think of some things as natural and others as manufactured—or artificial, or somehow “cultural” as opposed to just natural. And the metaphor implies purposive, i.e., goal-directed activity that, like all such activity, can go awry. This reservoir of vague oppositions can be mobilized in all sorts of combinations. In The Social Construction of What?, Ian Hacking distinguishes at least six different levels of “commitment” involved in claims that something is socially constructed (pp. 19-21). But of course social constructionism is not the only kind of constructionism. Kant used the metaphor of construction with respect to the relation between our cognitive capacities and the world. He was not a social constructionist. Barret herself says she is drawing on social constructionism but also psychological and neural constructionism (see my previous post).

 

Here is more or less what I take to be Barrett’s view: emotions are built out of simpler elements, affects (construction as complexes), which can be organized differently. They can remain as simple affects for us, or be organized as physical symptoms or perceptions. To organize affects as emotions, we need concepts, categorizations drawn from past experience (construction as manufacturing). Concepts are largely, although not exclusively, acquired through language and socialization (construction as culture); at very least, language greatly enlarges and speeds up the acquisition of emotion concepts. In turn, concepts are purposive. We impose categories on our affects for the sake of purposes or goals, in much the same way that we use categorization to further our goals in other areas of life (construction as purposive). (Illustration from a few hours before writing this: I explain to my child that sticks are an “outdoor toy,” thereby deploying and thus teaching my child a new concept for the sake of preventing my child from bringing certain objects indoors.) To be clear, this process is rarely straightforward or voluntary in any simple sense—although Barrett is also at pains, in her chapter “Emotions and the Law,” to criticize the view that our emotions simply take us over and rob us our agency. Constructing a certain affective experience as sadness or guilt is rarely something we can just consciously, deliberately choose to do.

 

To be clear, then, this is not an unmasking project, as one might find in some but not all sorts of social constructionism (again, see Hacking’s taxonomy of levels of commitment). Barrett is not denying the existence of emotions.

 

Barrett’s constructionism depends on two underlying theses. First, the brain basically functions in a predictive rather than reactive manner. Experience is largely a simulation, not a representation, of the world around us and ourselves. What we experience is a prediction of how things stand, a prediction that is corrected after the fact. When I see objects around me or experience pain in my shoulder, I am not receiving or registering an external reality; I am predicting what it will be like. We evolved to have predictive rather than receptive brains because the predictive model is much more metabolically efficient (pp. 59-65). To be clear, experience is not just our simulations. There is a mechanism for feedback from the environment (internal or external). Experience can be understood as cycling through a “prediction loop” of prediction, simulation, comparison, error resolution, and further prediction. At various times of day or in various mental states, we may be all prediction and no comparison or error resolution, or we may be totally locked in prediction error without much ability to get back into prediction (p. 65). Different forms of illness, such as psychotic disorders, depression, chronic pain, or neurodevelopmental difficulties may all perhaps arise from imbalances in this prediction loop.

 

The second thesis is that emotion is intimately connected to interoception, or process of representing one’s own internal states, such as organs, tissues, hormones, and the immune system. From the predictive perspective, emotion emerges in relation to interoceptive predictions, which can be thought of as a kind of “budgeting”—predicting how much energy various systems in the body will need. For example, if the brain predicts a sudden, urgent need for energy, the adrenal gland will be prompted to release cortisol. There is an “interoceptive network” in the brain (p. 67), which “controls your body, budgets your energy resources, and representations your internal sensations, all at the same time” (p. 70). These interoceptive processes generate affects. As with external experience, so too with interoception: our experiences—our perceptions and affects—are simulations, with some process of post-hoc checking on actual bodily needs.

 

Affect is the basic building block, so to speak, of emotion. Affect has two dimensions, valence (pleasant or unpleasant) and arousal level (calm or agitated). Barrett draws on psychologist James Russell’s notion of an “affective circumplex” to represent different possible affective states. I believe this is Russell’s original affective circumplex, which I lifted from here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotion/. However, Barrett’s version (p. 74, figure 4-5) is a bit different since she eschews the more strictly emotion words:

Emotions are produced out of affect through concepts. Although the metaphors Barrett uses draw on the “construction” register, I myself might favor metaphors of interpretation. (Perhaps this is because Nietzsche is a lurking philosophical influence for me; I am thinking of the famous passages about meaning in the Second Treatise of the Genealogy of Morality.) Barrett’s concepts are rapid, largely-automatic bundles of categorization and prediction that are purposively organized, i.e., deployed for the sake of some goal. Out of past experience, the brain, in tandem with one’s cultural inheritance and what one has learned from one’s caregivers, generates similarities on the basis of momentary goals.

 

These concepts are neither classical essences, categories organized on the basis of necessary and sufficient conditions (BACHELOR = unmarried man), nor prototypes, categories organized around some central paradigmatic instance of a member of that category (BIRD = things that look like robins). Rather, we construct concepts as needed, tailored-to-the-moment, as “populations of diverse instances” organized around prototypical images generated just for that moment. Concepts are extremely efficient ways of transmitting information and organizing predictions. Barrett compares them to dehydrated vegetables that our brain, so to speak, rehydrates as needed. Once a concept begins to be deployed, it initiates a conceptual “cascade” of other predictions, which in turn, especially with emotion concepts, are related to the interoceptive network and thus trigger changes in movement, behavior, metabolism, immune functioning and so on. We all have multiple predictions humming along at the same time, and a kind of natural selection of concepts at any given moment occurs such that some concepts hold sway over others (pp. 112-127).

 

Emotions, then, are but one way of categorizing—bundling together for the sake of goals—affects and interoceptive experiences. Affects can also become conceptualized as physical pain or other physical symptoms, perceptions, or simply left as affects (84). As for the emotions, people can end up with different levels of “emotional granularity” based on how many emotion concepts they acquire. Moreover, different cultures make different emotion concepts available. There are probably no universal emotions, and there are many emotions in other cultures that have no equivalent in English (Chapter 7). “You need an emotion concept in order to experience or perceive the associated emotion” (p. 141). Even in the West, there has historically been massive variation in the concepts used to characterize emotions—just think of the older vocabulary of “sentiments” or “passions” that anyone trained in the history of philosophy will know (pp. 148-149).

 

In the remainder of the book, Barrett lays out a “new view of human nature” opposed to the old Platonic model of reason at war with the passions (Chapter 8); discusses control of emotions, where, among other things, she recommends learning new emotion concepts or making up your own and considers the link between low emotional granularity and various mental disorders (Chapter 9); explores the link between emotion and stress, chronic illness, pain, and mental illness, stressing that experiences of pain are also constructed on the basis of a predictive process in the brain (Chapter 10); points out the many misconceptions about emotion embedded in the U.S. legal system, and the racist and sexist implications of these misconceptions (Chapter 11); and argues, in effect, that dogs and apes have affect but probably do not have emotion concepts and thus do not have emotions—even if, paradoxically, it may be appropriate for us, on the basis of our own emotion concepts, to perceive them as having emotions (Chapter 12).

 

There’s obviously a lot one could object to in Barrett’s account of emotions. The claim that animals experience affect but not emotion is likely to ruffle at least a few feathers…. But it does seem to follow ineluctably from the position that concept use and intergenerational transmission thereof are necessary features of emotions. I could see someone objecting that the whole thing is too intellectualistic, even though Barrett’s “concepts” are hardly the voluntary, deliberately-produced mental products of philosophical tradition. I could see someone objecting that the book is too dismissive of animal studies, such as the sort of evidence marshalled by Jaak Panksepp. I can also see more nuanced and sympathetic objections that take issue with the finer points of the account, such as the distinction between affect and emotion (is there really such a bright line? In speaking of affects as basics, isn’t Barrett holding onto a sort of residual belief in primary non-conceptual mental stuff? Etc.). To be fair, I have seen interviews on YouTube in which Barrett stresses that much of the book is a popularization and thus drastic simplification of what she actually believes.

 

I would like to conclude by extracting a few implications for the practice of psychotherapy. If Barrett is correct, then, to put things simply, acquiring emotional granularity is the goal, and acquiring emotional granularity is a lot like learning a new language (Barrett’s metaphor) or spending a lot of time engaged with art (my preferred metaphor).

 

Therapists, mental health professionals more generally, and educators, should foreswear speaking about emotion “recognition.” Pretty much all evidence-based psychotherapies since CBT came on the scene involve a psychoeducation component about emotions. If Barrett is right, such psychoeducation is actually a matter of helping people acquire emotional “granularity,” or finer-grained ways of making concepts around which to organize and interpret their experiences. It is not a matter of recognizing some underlying reality. Learning to “identify” or “recognize” one’s emotions is more like studying cinematic technique, literary criticism, or art history than it is like studying botany. Categories like “long take,” “Spike Lee double dolly shot,” “femme fatale,” “Black best friend,” etc. are constructs that allow us to perceive things differently. You don’t need them to watch a movie, but being able to talk about the role of the Black best friend character in 1990s teen movies, for example, allows you to do a lot of new things, categorize a bunch of moments you might not have been able to categorize in a certain way before, and do it all for the sake of new kinds of goals (e.g., social criticism).

 

By analogy, then, learning to construct instances of different emotion concepts, and to construct fine-grained ones, is more akin to enlarging one’s experiences, acquiring new perspectives and horizons. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, then came the emotion concepts and burst the prison walls asunder:

 

“By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.”

 

As I learn how to speak not just of anger, but frustration, vexation, irritation, aggravation, indignation, righteous fury, and so on, and to apply these concepts to myself and others, I am not recognizing some thing that is just there, waiting to be discovered. I am acquiring the ability to see my own and others’ experiences in a new way—and regulate my “body budget” and set my goals in new ways.