His book, How Emotions Are Created, begins by stating that emotions are not what we usually think they are. could you explain what you mean by that?
sure. The reigning “common sense” belief, which has also been the scientific belief for a long time, is that emotions are reflexes: our brains are born prewired with emotional circuitry. something triggers your fear circuit, say, like seeing a snake, and you react. neurons fire, and then you have a specific change in your body: your heart races, you have a feeling of being scared, you make a facial expression that communicates that feeling like a gaping face with wide eyes, and then you freeze or you run away.
You are reading: Psychology terms for repressed emotions books
The assumption is that everyone in the world makes these expressions and everyone can recognize them. you can look at a gasping face and know that someone else is afraid. a frown tells you they are angry. a smile tells you they are happy. and so on.
So the idea has been, until relatively recently, that there are universal “core” emotions for all people in all cultures.
Correct, the assumption is that the human brain comes pre-wired with circuits for anger, sadness, fear, disgust, happiness, surprise, and sometimes scientists include contempt. then scientists discuss other categories of emotions that might be universal, trying to create a catalog.
correct. but what he has actually discovered through his research is that this is not the case.
There are decades and decades of research showing that we are not born with emotions built into our brains. instead, our brains generate emotions as we need them in a way that is very specific to the situation. with fear, your heart rate may increase or decrease. you could open your eyes and gasp, but you could also smile or frown. you could raise your eyebrows and open your eyes; You can squint to improve the sharpness of your vision. you could run, but you could also attack, in fact you could stand very still, or you could laugh in fear. what we find is that an emotion like fear is not something with a single physical imprint that is the same for everyone in the world. instead, variation is the norm. in fact, even for you, fear has a category of instances that are variable. what fear looks like, how it feels, and how it originates in the brain differs depending on the situation. fear is not universal. no emotion is universal, which means that some cultures have anger, sadness, fear, disgust, happiness, etc., and other cultures do not.
For example, some cultures have a concept of sadness, but it means something different than what it means in English. some cultures have more than one concept for sadness. some cultures have other categories of emotions that we don’t have in English.
This reminds me of the color perception debate. the key question there is: if a culture does not have a name for a color, do they perceive it in the same way? So if we don’t have a name for an emotion, does that affect how we get excited?
absolutely. you’re absolutely right, it’s exactly the same debate.
all human beings (unless they suffer from diseases, of course) we are talking about neurotypical brains come equipped to make their heart rate go up or down, to be able to stay still and freeze or to run. being able to frown, and so on. but physical changes like that, in and of themselves, have no emotional significance. something has to make them significant. the way we make physical changes in the body meaningful is by using the emotional knowledge we learn as babies and toddlers, which is hardwired into our brains as our brains finish developing in infancy. therefore, if you learn a concept for an emotion, such as sadness, because your culture has a word for sadness, then your brain is equipped to easily convert sadness into physical changes in your body.
but it’s not that you can’t create an emotion if you don’t have a word to describe it. our brains create concepts as we need them, using past experiences. your brain can easily make a concept if you have a word to describe it, but it can also make one, on the fly, without a word. it just takes a little more effort. your brain creates concepts, on the fly, as you need them, by using what’s called ‘conceptual blending,’ which means your brain can take bits of other knowledge, other emotional concepts that you know, and assemble a novel instance of something you’ve never felt before. but it’s really hard, it’s hard to do. It takes a lot of attention on your part, but you can do it.
For example, let’s say I mention “yesterday I had pizza for dinner”. if I just say the word ‘pizza’, I’m feeling a lot of things. I’m tasting things, I’m seeing things in my mind, and when I say the word ‘pizza,’ the word evokes some of those characteristics in your mind as well. so that we can communicate easily. I have some features in my mind, I say a word and then your brain evokes some of those features. very efficient. Similarly, we both speak English, so if I say I’m ‘sad’, if I say ‘I was really sad yesterday when a friend of mine told me he was moving’, that word in that context allows your brain to conjure up a lot of characteristics in your mind that could also be in mine. it’s like an assumption. You’re guessing how I feel your guess may not be identical, but if it’s close enough, then we’re communicating.
Now, if I told you “yesterday I had a very strong feeling of ‘gigil'”, what does that mean to you?
not much.
I wouldn’t, unless you speak Tagalog or have read my book. but let me describe it to you in a way that will allow your brain to make a conceptual combination: “gigil is an emotion where you are faced with something that is so adorable that you have the urge to squeeze it. like the urge to squeeze a baby’s cheeks or hug something tight like a stuffed animal, because it’s so cute.”
Now, look how many words I had to use to make you understand how I feel. I had to list the characteristics of my experience one by one. Since you didn’t have the word to automatically conjure up those features, it took more effort for your brain to create the concept that was needed to perceive and understand my emotion.
It is not impossible to experience an emotion without a word for that emotion concept, but it is much more difficult. this is probably one of the reasons why people from different cultures do not understand each other. words and concepts play an important role in your ability to create emotions. are key ingredients.
Speaking of naming emotions, perhaps that brings us to your first choice of book: the book of human emotions. brings together 154 words from around the world about how we feel, including all kinds of interesting cases. like the Russian ‘toska’, which nabokov defined as “a yearning with nothing to yearn for”. what does this tell us?
this is a fantastic book by tiffany watt smith. Some of these concepts of emotions, and therefore these categories of emotions, exist in modern Western culture today, but they do not mean the same thing as they did in the past. some of the words are for concepts that exist in other cultures, but cannot be translated into English with a single word, so it requires conceptual blending: your brain has to blend the concepts it knows, so that it can understand these concepts in other cultures.
The book is full of fantastic examples showing that emotions are not universal and that they are not even historically static in time. this is important to understand, because the more emotions you have in your vocabulary that you can generate, the more resilient and emotionally intelligent you will be, and the better you will be able to communicate across cultures and even across time, for example. , when reading a nineteenth-century novel. it’s just one great example of variation in emotion categories and concepts that goes against the common sense belief, the classical belief, that we only have a handful of very basic universal emotions.
if having a word or a concept for an emotion makes it easier to discuss and easier to recognize in yourself, does this give us an idea why therapy, the “talking cure”, should work ?
oh, absolutely. Part of what you’re doing when you go to a therapist (I was a therapist a long time ago) is relearning how to make sense of your physical sensations. that could mean learning new emotion concepts, expanding your emotion vocabulary so you can be more resilient, and more. I think it’s important to understand that learning more about emotion concepts and expanding your emotion vocabulary not only improves your ability to communicate. about emotions, it actually improves your ability to generate accurate emotions, and this has direct health benefits.
We have published a number of studies, and recently a review article, showing that knowing more emotional concepts, having a broader emotional vocabulary (what we call emotional granularity) actually has beneficial outcomes for health and mental health, even when you’re being more granular about negative emotion. In fact, there is research coming out of Yale University’s Emotional Intelligence Lab that shows that when you expand a child’s emotional vocabulary, you not only improve their emotional lives, their ability to regulate negative emotions, but they their social regulation, their behavior, is also improved. with their peers, and even in certain cases their academic performance. I describe these findings in my book and explain the neuroscience behind them.
I once spent a happy afternoon looking through a Scottish Gaelic dictionary and found 49 different words expressing some variant of “sadness”. I guess the Highlanders must have been well versed in the art of melancholy.
one of my favorite things in tiffany watt smith’s book is her discussion of how 16th century english self-help books discussed sadness as a way to optimize resilience and health. I find it particularly amusing given what I call the “tyranny of happiness” in Western culture at the moment. People believe that all great things in life are achieved, all meaning in life is achieved through happiness, but at a different time in our history, sadness was thought to be a way to cultivate a meaningful life. , and in a way that impacted his health.
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“My Russian friend said that when she came to the United States she had never smiled so much in her life”
I have a Russian friend who said that when she came to the United States she had never smiled so much in her entire life. She said her cheeks hurt for a year! her Russian grandmother has this view of life which is: no sensible person would be happy all the time, or even try to be happy all the time. I just thought it was fantastic.
I’m very intrigued by your next choice, middlesex, by jeffrey eugenides. This is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a coming-of-age story with an intersex protagonist. what made you choose this book?
a number of reasons. For starters, I love history. and it also illustrates two very good ideas about emotions as they really are and how emotions are actually created. First of all: Jeffrey presents some descriptions of emotional concepts that don’t have a single word associated with them. for example, “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age”. I know that emotion! I experienced that emotion this morning. “the disappointment of sleeping with your own fantasy and that it is not up to your imagination”. “the thrill of getting a room with a minibar” – although I don’t have that particular thrill, instead I do have the thrill of getting a room with chocolate chips.
or a room with a bathtub instead of a shower, yes.
exactly true, a great tub you can really soak in. so he is talking about the variation in emotional life which is the central theme of my book.
I’m also talking about the emotion of ‘chipless’, which in our house is the feeling of regret and desire, and also relief, of getting to the bottom of a bag of chips and realizing there’s no more. I don’t know about you, but I love French fries. When I get to the bottom of a bag of chips, I usually feel relieved, but also sad and a little guilty. I have to explain it to you with several words, so that you understand all the characteristics of my experience. but to my husband or my daughter, I can only say: “I feel without chips”. we use that concept of emotion even in times when we’re not eating fries.
“by having an intersex protagonist, eugenides assumes that the categories cut nature at its joints”
My daughter came up with the concept of the ’emotional flu,’ that nasty feeling you get when you don’t really have a virus and there’s nothing really wrong with your life, but maybe because you just didn’t get enough sleep. enough, or maybe you’re dehydrated, or maybe you just had a stressful exam, you just feel miserable.
interesting. I have read that the Tahitian culture does not have a word for ‘sadness’, but it does have a word that means something like: ‘the tiredness of when you have the flu’. so there is background!
exactly. so in middlesex eugenides does a very good job of illustrating this complexity of emotional life, the variation of emotional life that doesn’t necessarily fall into neat categories, neat parcels of ‘anger’, ‘sadness’, ‘fear’, ‘ disgust’. ,’ and so on, and that’s the first reason I like the book.
The second reason I really like the book is that it makes an assumption that is pervasive in the science of emotion and science in general: certain sciences more than others. By having an intersex protagonist, Eugenides assumes that the categories cut nature at its joints, that nature has joints to cut. this needs a bit of explanation.
a category is basically a group of objects, items, people or events, a group of things that are similar in some way. Many of the things that we put in the same category, we assume that they are similar in a physical way, that the similarities exist in the physical world. For example, if you believe that frowning is an expression of anger, not just the facial movements that people sometimes make when expressing anger, but also when expressing confusion or an unpleasant taste, then you would be assuming that every time someone frowns frown, they’re angry, and every time someone is angry, they should frown, because all cases of anger are similar in their frown, okay? this means that you are assuming that all cases of anger are physically similar in the facial movements that people use to express anger.
“essentialism assumes that the similarities are in the world, not in your head”
There are a number of scientific approaches to emotion that assume one emotion category (all instances of anger) are physically similar in some way. in fact, tech companies are spending millions of dollars right now to develop emotion-reading technologies based on this belief. this assumption is what philosophers call essentialism, the belief that a group of things that you treat as similar for some purpose are actually physically similar. essentialism assumes that the similarities are in the world, rather than in your head. For example, if we were to say, “Well, maybe there’s one set of neurons that creates anger and another set of neurons that creates fear,” that would be an example of essentialism. If we believe that people frown when they are angry and only when they are angry, but never when they are upset, and we assume that people crinkle their noses in disgust and only in disgust, but never when they are angry, then we would be essentializing. if we said: “there must be a set of chemicals that allow us to feel anger and only anger, or a set of genes that allow us to feel anger and only anger…”. these are other examples of essentialism. There’s a fantastic book by Richard Lewontin called The Triple Helix where he addresses this misunderstanding of genetics as essential causes.
People make the mistake of essentialism when they misunderstand Darwin’s ideas about natural selection, or make mistakes about understanding evolution or genetics in general. This is discussed in an excellent book by Ernst Mayr called What Makes Biology Unique? if you assume that a single set of genes are like little essences that cause the same characteristic in everyone, like brown hair, and that everyone with brown hair has the same set of genes, that’s essentialism. and it is not true that most characteristics (not all, but most) are created by combinations of different genes, so more than one set of characteristics can create a characteristic. This was Darwin’s great insight: a biological category is highly variable in its characteristics. natural selection works only because this variation exists within a category. a biological category like sex works the same way. People assume that there is only one set of characteristics that makes them male or female, and that the boundary between male and female is firm in nature: that all men are similar in some physical way, and that men are never similar to women. women in those ways.
But here’s the good news: There isn’t a single set of characteristics that all women share with all other women and that some men don’t share. there may not be a firm boundary between male and female, it’s more like a gradual blurry boundary, and there are a number of people who have some characteristics of being male and some of being female, or some characteristics that are halfway between which we conventionally understand as masculine and feminine. Depending on what characteristics you focus on, between 0.05% and 1.7% of the world’s population is intersex.
“between 0.05% and 1.7% of the world population are intersex”
Actually, there are a lot of people who don’t fit neatly into one category or another. But our culture believes so much in the essential nature of being male and female that doctors surgically physically alter intersex babies to fit into one category or another. causes tremendous health and mental health challenges later in life, so there is a great deal of suffering that accompanies us forcing people into categories of masculine and feminine with firm boundaries, as the middle sex illustrates in narrative form. there is a book by alice dreger, the middle finger of galileo, where he takes other examples of essentialism, as well as his book on hermaphrodites.
This has parallels to the science of emotion, because many scientists hold the common sense view that emotion categories have essential characteristics with firm boundaries in nature. they believe in the existence of a handful of categories that are endowed by genetics, such that the human brain contains a single circuit for anger, fear, sadness, etc., which all humans have (and maybe even some other animals have them too) and that anger, sadness or fear, when triggered, looks and feels the same in all people, and even in some non-human animals. that’s a very essential view of emotion, and there’s decades of scientific evidence showing that it’s wrong. I cover some of this evidence in my book.
Your third book of choice is William James’ Principles of Psychology. Was he a proponent of the classical view of emotion?
william james wrote a wonderful summary of what was known and the questions that were raised at the dawn of psychology as a science in the nineteenth century. James is widely cited and misunderstood as someone who espoused a classical, commonsense view of emotion. the irony is that he advocated just the opposite.
In the 19th century, psychology as a science was born when people began to use the methods of neurology and physiology to search for the physical basis of the mental categories that came from mental philosophy. William James is sometimes considered the father of American psychology, primarily because he wrote so well and captured ideas that were in the zeitgeist at the time. he was just a very thoughtful and interesting thinker.
james wrote that emotions occur when people perceive and make sense of physical changes in their bodies. he wrote that each emotion has its own physical change. When James referred to “an emotion,” he was talking about an instance of an emotion: an instance of fear has a different physical basis than another instance of fear. He was referring to Darwin’s notion of variation within a category. But for more than a century, when people have read James, they have misunderstood him and assumed that James meant “an emotion” as a category of emotion. so he has been quoted over and over saying something that is the exact opposite of what he actually said. I talk about this in my book.
“no royal family has 3.13 people last time I checked”
basically, james was saying that a category of emotion does not have a physical essence. that there is variation in different categories of emotions, such as “the fear of getting wet is not the same as the fear of a bear”, or “surely there is no affectation of anger in the entitative sense”, that is, in the essential sense. James said that we should find that our descriptions of an emotion like anger have no “absolute truth”, that they “apply only to the average man”. what he means by this is also what darwin said: we have a stereotype for a category: a perfect example of anger where a person frowns and the heart rate increases and aggressive action is taken and so on, but this stereotype is an abstraction. the average American middle-class family has 3.13 people, but no real family has 3.13 people last time I checked. From James: “[E]ach of us, almost, has some personal idiosyncrasy of expression, laughing or sobbing differently from his neighbor, or turning red or pale where others do not.”
here james beautifully captures the importance of variation. it also foreshadows many other ideas that science has now shown to be true, such as: There is no special brain region or center for emotion. emotions are created based on the polyvalent mechanisms that already exist in our brain. it also approaches essentialism as a problem in psychology, in a way that is very, very interesting.
Here’s a quote I particularly like:
the cardinal passions of our life, anger, love, fear, hate, hope, and the widest divisions of our intellectual activity, remembering, hoping, thinking, knowing, dreaming, with the widest genres of the aesthetic feeling, joy, sadness, pleasure, pain, are the only facts of a subjective order that this vocabulary deigns to point out with special words.
what he means by that is: we assign words to certain categories of experience, and then we essentialize those categories, and that leads us to ignore variation within the category. It leads us to believe that there is something indelible and biologically unalterable in those categories, that there is some limit in nature that the word reflects, and that is not entirely true.
the fact that william james said this over 100 years ago is truly extraordinary.
william james is often quoted in our interviews on the mind and the brain, especially in this book and its varieties of religious experience. It is fascinating to see how his influence is passed down through the centuries.
yes. however, she would say that when she was a graduate student she used to feel that william james was some kind of projective test. meaning: people read james what he wants. This is what historian Kurt Danziger, in his book Naming the Mind, calls “presentism,” the idea that you look at the past through the lens of the present and see what you’re looking for. I stumbled across James’s passages on emotion buried in the Principles of Psychology, and they led me to make a systematic study of exactly what James did and did not say about emotion. about the nature of psychological categories, mental categories, etc. James himself was pretty consistent, it’s just that people have often misunderstood him in interesting ways that reflect his own assumptions.
Let’s move on to your fourth book. you have selected emotional success: the power of gratitude, compassion and pride by david desteno. the idea is that these ‘pro-social emotions’, as he calls them, contribute to our ability to persevere, to use willpower and therefore success.
I should disclose that dave desteno is a colleague of mine at northeastern university. I only moved to northeastern university about seven years ago, but dave desteno has been doing this work on positive emotions (gratitude, compassion, etc.) for a number of years.
Maybe it’s just my personal experience, but I’ve always been very skeptical of the positive psychology movement, even though it includes some of my closest friends and colleagues. maybe I’m just an old curmudgeon at heart. so I’ve been really captivated by the persistent findings in research about the ways in which emotions like gratitude and compassion, and I would add awe, are really beneficial. I love scientific findings that make me question my own beliefs and values.
“if you select your experiences, eventually your brain will automatically create those emotions with ease”
one of the arguments i make in my book, based on my neuroscience understanding of how the brain works to generate emotions, is that it is very beneficial for you to cultivate experiences right now, in the present, to seed your brain to that in the future it produces more easily beneficial emotions, emotions that will help you in your life. some of them will be pleasant and some will be unpleasant; but the argument I make, based on neuroscience, is that if you cultivate unfamiliar experiences, heal your experiences by putting in a little bit of effort, eventually your brain will automatically generate those emotions easily when you need them. how to drive.
dave’s basic argument is that if your brain learns to generate gratitude and compassion, and you start doing it automatically, then you won’t have to expend effort, attention, or what he would call “cognitive strategies” to do it. the right thing and get along in life. you’re wiring your brain to automatically make better decisions, with little effort, if you learn to show gratitude, compassion, etc.
the concept of “positive psychology” that I usually associate with the type of magazines I pick up in doctors’ offices. ten ways to think that oneself is healthy, that kind of thing. so it’s fascinating to hear about the evidence and the theory behind it. I knew from anecdotal evidence, the thousands of people who trust gratitude journals.
yes. the reason those journals work is that you’re basically training your brain to automatically generate that emotion. I explain the practical aspects of this in my book. gratitude is a very powerful game changer. so is wonder, the emotion of wonder. Buddhist philosophy also really emphasizes compassion. there is scientific evidence that these emotions really are useful.
When I pick up a popular book on positive psychology, my first instinct is to roll my eyes. but with dave’s book, my reaction was that my eyes widened, i leaned over and read the book very quickly with great interest. I could criticize some of his metaphors, such as a very popular notion in our culture: that the mind is a battlefield between cognition and emotion, or rationality and feeling. that’s just a fiction, it’s just a myth. brains aren’t structured that way, they don’t work that way, even though scientists keep using it. but to me that is a minor point in a tapestry of far more interesting and important findings. Dave’s book is full of real science-backed advice that people can use.
Your Final Choice is another example of using scientific findings to improve our lives, and another common choice in five books: Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.
dan gilbert’s book is one of the first books on happiness to appear, more than 10 years ago. It’s received a lot of praise, as it should: it’s a fantastic read. it’s an easy read, so it’s misleading in the sense that you might start to think, ‘oh, this is fluff,’ but it’s not. It tackles some pretty important scientific and philosophical topics that are usually presented in a complex and difficult way. Dan’s book is one of the best books on popular psychology that I think has been written in the last decade or so.
dan writes about scientific evidence in a very accessible way. and he is totally hysterical. He’s a very, very funny guy, if you’ve ever seen an interview with him, and that voice is in his book. At the same time, he manages to communicate these incredibly powerful and important ideas in a simple and understandable way.
“jury decisions are largely based on whether or not defendants express remorse in an American manner”
One of the ideas in this book is that minds are predictive, not reactive. It seems to us that we are simply reacting to things that happen to us, but in fact our brains are constantly guessing what will happen in the next moment. dan’s book was one of the first books that really took on this idea of prediction, which is, i would say, one of the great innovations in the last decade or two of neuroscience research. the book describes prediction in very blunt terms, and he’s not talking about neuroscience here, he’s really just talking about psychology, just about the mind. there are two other books, The Predictive Mind and The Uncertainty of Surfing, that address some of these ideas in a bit more detail.
dan’s book did this with regards to happiness, and one of his main points is that we think we understand what makes us happy and that we make predictions about what will make us happy. we tend to follow those beliefs and often we are wrong. he points this out in a very funny, moving and, in my opinion, profound and important way.
What are the benefits of understanding how we build emotions? How can we apply this knowledge in a way that improves our lives?
There really is no aspect of your life in which it is not relevant. it is relevant in classrooms, in courtrooms, in boardrooms, in bedrooms, in every aspect of your life. you experience emotions, you perceive emotions, this is the currency of a human life.
say that you think faces show emotion, and you can read emotion in someone’s facial movements; we call them expressions, right? as if something were expressed the way you would read the words on a page. Well, it turns out you don’t actually, nobody does. however, if that is what you believe, then it can wreak havoc on your life and cost people their lives.
In the book and in my ted talk, I gave this example: To get a fair trial, a jury and judge must know the heart and mind of a defendant. How do you know the heart and mind of a defendant? well, people think it’s through their facial movements. in the united states (the united states still has the death penalty in some states) juries are sometimes asked to make a decision between sentencing someone to life in prison or death. their decision is largely based on whether or not the defendant expresses remorse in an American way, because people believe that remorse is universally expressed. so someone can feel remorse but not show it in the right way and be sentenced to death. someone might feel no remorse but put on a good show and be sentenced to life in prison. that’s just one example of why we need a better, more scientific understanding of how emotions are created. there are many, many, many examples that I describe in my book.
Another example is that anxiety has a particular expression that is distinct and unique. The consequence of this belief is that women are more likely to die of a heart attack after the age of 65 compared to men, because when they go to the hospital, the doctors -and themselves- believe that they are experiencing anxiety, so they are sent home rather than undergo testing for an impending cardiac event. then they have a heart attack and die. in fact, this happened to my publicist’s mother in the uk.
wow. that’s terrible.
There are many examples of how using the wrong theory of emotion can actually be harmful to your life, and there are many, many examples of how using the correct theory as a tool can help you live a more meaningful life. and a healthier life, and improve the lives of your children, and your co-workers, your colleagues and friends.
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