Lynne Malcolm: How do you feel at that moment when you've just finished your favourite indulgence, perhaps it's a piece of chocolate torte, or a packet of crunchy potato chips? Do you have a word that describes that feeling?

Lisa Feldman Barrett: So your brain has the capacity to make new emotions all the time, to take bits and pieces of past experience and create a new concept, a new emotion. In my house we came up with a new creation that we called chiplessness. There are many things I love in life, but potato chips are just really at the top. And so chiplessness in our house, we use this as a concept to mean this combination of just having done something pleasurable that you sort of regret but not too much and you're kind of regretful that it's over but you're also feeling guilty that you did it but you're also sort of relieved that it's over because you know it was something you probably shouldn't have done.

Lynne Malcolm: Lisa Feldman Barrett, professor of psychology at Northeastern University. She's highly respected for her ground-breaking new research showing that emotion, contrary to popular belief, is not hard wired in your brain. It's constructed by your brain and your body as you move through life.

I'm Lynne Malcolm. And in today's All in the Mind you'll hear about a paradigm shift in the way we look at emotions.

Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, for many centuries now people have defined emotions according to a very common-sense view. The idea is that there are emotion circuits buried somewhere deep inside our brains, that they come prewired, that we share these circuits with everyone else in the world and with many other animals as well, and that when something in the world happens it triggers these circuits and we have an obligatory facial expression that is characteristic and everyone in the world makes it and can read it. We have a characteristic physical reaction and a characteristic action that we take. That's the classical view of emotion. And as I describe in my book, there are decades and decades of scientific evidence from many different fields to show us that this view, although it's very deeply held, it's not really accurate.

The evidence that we see from studying the way that people express emotion, the way that bodily changes happen during emotion, when we examine patterns of brain activity during emotion, the first thing we realise is that an emotion like fear doesn't have a single signature. In fact, variety is the norm. Sometimes people tremble in fear, they jump in fear, they might scream in fear, they might hide in fear, attack in fear, even laugh in the face of fear. So when it comes to any emotion, variety is the norm.

We also see that there isn't one particular set of expressions that are associated with a specific emotion. So you might smile when you're sad, you might cry when you're angry, you might even scream when you're happy. So there's a lot of variety. And the point is that the data show pretty clearly that your brain isn't reacting to the world when you have an emotion, your brain is actually making emotions as they are needed from a set of basic ingredients, basically. So just in the same way that your kitchen has flour and water and salt and you can make many different recipes from these ingredients, similarly your brain has a set of networks and it uses these networks in different recipes to make different emotional states.

Lynne Malcolm: Lisa Feldman Barrett has written up her research in the recent book How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.

Lisa Feldman Barrett: I think in some of our most dramatic research…for example, we've sent expeditions to Africa, to rural communities in Africa to study emotion perception in people who have very little familiarity and access to American cultural norms and values. And so the assumption has been in the past, for example, that different emotional expressions are universal, that everybody scowls when they're angry, everybody pouts when they're sad and so on. The typical way to study this is to go to different cultures and see whether people recognise scowls as anger expressions and pouts as sadness and so on. And so we've sent expeditions to rural Namibia near the Angola border.

We also recently sent several expeditions to Tanzania to test emotion perception in the Hadza, who are a hunter-gatherer community of people who've been hunting and gathering since the Pleistocene. And so they actually live in conditions under which many theorists believe that emotions evolved. So we show them posed facial configurations, scowls, smiles, pouts and so on. We also play them sounds that are stereotypes of emotion in the West. And what we find is that they don't in any way perceive emotion in the ways that Western participants do. Even their definition of emotion is different. They have some different categories than we have. There's a lot more cultural variation in the emotions that people make and perceive than was originally realised, for example.

Lynne Malcolm: So you're saying that we actually create emotions depending on what happens to us and what our experience is.

Lisa Feldman Barrett: That's right. The way to think about it is something like this. An infant's brain is not a miniature adult brain, an infant's brain lacks much of the wiring that we see in an adult brain. Little brains are awaiting wiring instructions from the world. Their brains wire themselves to the physical and the social characteristics of their environment. So what babies are learning to do is they are learning emotion concepts in just the same way that they learn concepts for animals and concepts for really almost everything, and that's how they learn to make perceptions and experiences of those things. So they come basically with the wiring to feel pleasant or unpleasant, to feel really worked up or really calm. So everybody around the world can feel exuberant pleasure or distress, can feel super jittery and worked up or very calm and quiescent. But using those as ingredients to create emotions is something that has to be learned.

Lynne Malcolm: So we don't really know, say when I laugh and you laugh or I have fear and you have fear, we don't really know what the difference in the actual feeling is.

Lisa Feldman Barrett: That's correct. So you and I both come from a Western culture, although we've never met before we probably have some shared experiences, we're both women. And so when you use the word 'fear', let's say you're describing a particular situation or let's they were both experiencing that situation together, there are many features of the context that when you say the word 'fear' allow my brain to conjure a representation of what you're feeling. So the point is that you and I have probably had enough…people in the same culture have enough shared experience that when one person says an emotion word or makes a particular face in a particular context, the other person can guess what the first person is feeling. And we guess so quickly and so efficiently that to us it doesn't even feel like we're guessing, to us it just feels like we are reading the face of the other person or we are reading the face or the body posture of the other person. But in fact communication between two people is more like conceptual synchrony. That is, that our brains are doing the same thing at the same time. Not exactly, but close enough.

Lynne Malcolm: So another way you describe it is when you feel emotions your brain is not reacting but predicting.

Lisa Feldman Barrett: Yes, so this is probably one of the most unintuitive but important discoveries in the last decade in neuroscience. I'm not saying that this is a brand-new idea. The idea that brains are predictive has been around for a long time but the evidence from a lot of different scientific domains is really coming together. And what we've learned is that every human brain is not wired in a way to react to the world. So for example, to you and to me and to everybody else it seems as if we see things because there are objects in the world that cause us to see them.

So, for example, if you look around where you are, you can see objects in front of you and it seems to us, our experience is that the objects are causing us to see them, that they emit light and that light enters the retina of the eye and then goes to the brain and then we see. In a similar way it may seem to you as if you're just listening to what I'm saying and reacting to what I'm saying, but in fact your brain is predicting, it's using past experience. You know, you've had years and years of experience with the English language, learning that certain sounds correspond to certain meaning. And so in fact your brain is making predictions, based on what I'm saying now, your brain is predicting every single word that comes out of my…mouth.

Lynne Malcolm: I knew you were going to say that!

Lisa Feldman Barrett: And if I had said a different word, if I had said that your brain is predicting every single word that comes out of my…nose, or some other orifice of my body, you'd be pretty surprised, right? And that's because the way the brain is wired, it's using past experience, the sensory array right now, the sounds and sights and smells and so on, and feelings inside your body right now to make a prediction about what is going to happen in the next moment. And then the sensory inputs from the next moment act like data to either confirm those predictions or to change them. In every waking moment of your life your experience is really your beliefs, your predictions that are constrained by information from the world. The bottom line is that your brain is predicting, it is not reacting. It's constantly guessing what's going to happen next, and many times these guesses become your emotion.

Lynne Malcolm: So what relationship does emotion have to what we think of as rational thought?

Lisa Feldman Barrett: That's a terrific question. So going back as far as Plato, the assumption has been that the human mind is a battleground between rationality, cognition and passions or emotion. So if you look at Plato's tripartite theory of the human psyche, now we would refer to it as the human mind, his idea was that the human mind could be divided up into three parts: appetites like hunger, desire for sex, thirst and so on; emotions or what he called passions; and in Plato's writings he likened both the appetites and the passions to two wild horses which were controlled by rational cognition which he depicted as any human chariot driver.

And this idea that emotions are part of our inner beast that has to be controlled by the more evolved parts of our mind, rationality or cognition, really has been with us ever since. And for many, many years it was an actual model of how scientists understood brain architecture and brain function. But evolutionary biology has shown us very clearly that the brain didn't evolve like sedimentary layers of rock. You don't have a lizard brain for your appetites, you don't have a limbic system for emotions. You know, rational thought is not located in the cerebral cortex which controls the other two, that's a theory of human nature but it's not actually the reality of how your brain is structured or how it works. The same neural networks that work together to produce emotions also work together to produce rational thought as well.

Lynne Malcolm: And there's also a fairly widely held view that women are more emotional than men. How does this theory about emotion relate to that?

Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, we've done a lot of research on this topic, and here's what I'll say. When you ask men and women to describe themselves; how emotional are you in your life? Women describe themselves as much more emotional than men, and men agree. But when you track people's experiences in their day-to-day lives, when you sort of probe them multiple times throughout the day and ask them to tell you how they feel, when you measure their facial movements or measure their physical changes during emotion, you don't see any overall differences between men and women. You see some people who are more emotional than other people, but on average men and women don't differ.

So we have very strongly held beliefs about women being more emotional than men, and when we look at men and women, when we look at their facial movements for example, we make different predictions about how emotional they are. So when a man is scowling, people assume…their perception of the man is that if he's angry it must be because something happened in the world to cause him to be angry, so his expression tells us something about the state of the world. When a woman scowls people see her as just being an emotional person.

So women are caught in this double-blind, you know, we're either overly emotional or when we are not as emotional as expected, when we violate the stereotype, then we are considered to be cold and untrustworthy and unlikeable.

Lynne Malcolm: You're with All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm, and I'm talking with Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett from North Eastern University in the US.

Her research challenges the conventional view that human emotions are hard-wired into your brain. She says that your emotions are not merely what you are born with. Your brain creates your feelings and that forms your emotional life, and you can contribute to the process. This new science of emotion has profound implications for society.

Lisa Feldman Barrett: In our culture we nod when we mean yes and we shake our heads when we mean no. There are some cultures in the world that shake their heads when they mean yes or maybe, and they nod when they mean no. Imagine trying to communicate with someone whose head movements were diametrically opposed to yours. Imagine trying to communicate and maybe negotiate a business deal with that person. I think it becomes clear that you can't assume, no matter how confident you are about your ability to read other people, especially when you are dealing with people across cultures, you can't assume that you know how someone else feels. The mistakes that have been made in social policy, in business, in security, by assuming that there is one universal set of emotional expressions, there are staggering examples of the errors that have been made.

Lynne Malcolm: And I guess in the legal profession as well.

Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, sure. The law is a set of normative rules for conduct, including conduct around emotion. And the law uses this very classical view of the rational actor, the idea that you are very responsible for your actions and the harms that your actions cause when they are executed and controlled by rationality. But when your actions are controlled by emotions, then you are somehow less culpable or less responsible because the classical view is that emotions are part of your inner beast, they are kind of taking you over, you are not really responsible for them to the same extent.

The interesting thing though is that there are some instances of emotion which feel pretty automatic but there are some that feel pretty controlled, where you cultivate the emotion and you can do things to extend it. Similarly with rational thought, there are some thoughts that just pop into your head, they feel pretty automatic, and there are other thoughts that feel pretty deliberate to you where you feel like they required a lot of effort. But we don't see people receiving a lesser sentence for some harm they caused because they caused it in a fit of thinking, even though there are examples of thoughts that are much less controlled than other thoughts.

So the idea of aligning automatic reactions with emotion and deliberate planning with thinking is one example where the theory of the mind or the theory of human nature that the law is using is really out of sync with modern neuroscientific understanding of how a brain creates thoughts and feelings.

Lynne Malcolm: So if we are creating our thoughts and feelings and you suggest that we are an architect of our own experience, what are the implications for that in terms of what we can do for ourselves, for our well-being?

Lisa Feldman Barrett: There are many implications that I think people haven't necessarily thought of. In Western culture we think about thoughts and feelings and bodily symptoms as being very, very distinct things. So you would never mistake a thought for a feeling and you would never mistake a feeling for a physical sensation or a physical symptom in your body. But in fact the most basic feelings that you have—feeling pleasant or unpleasant, feeling worked up or calm—these feelings actually come from the sensations in your body. So just as a large company has a financial office that controls its revenues and expenses for developing budgets for various accounts and so on, your brain sort of acts like the financial office of your body. Your body has a lot of different systems that have to be balanced, systems for water, for salt, for glucose and so on, and your brain has to kind of keep all of these systems in balance. And when it doesn't, when you start to run a deficit, so to speak, in your body's budget, you feel unpleasant.

In our culture, we typically create around that unpleasantness an emotion, so that an ache in your stomach becomes disgust or it becomes longing or loneliness or it becomes anxiety instead of being hunger or fatigue or thirst. So one simple way to control your emotions and enhance your well-being is to keep your body budget solvent; get enough sleep, eat properly, get enough exercise. These really basic things that will affect just your baseline level of feeling pleasure or discomfort, these are major ingredients that become emotions. So that's one example.

Another really counterintuitive example is to learn new emotion words. New emotion words are linked to the concepts that your brain can make. And so the more words that you learn for ocean, the more flexibility your brain has to make emotional events that match the situation and that are productive for you. So the more options your brain has to create guesses about the future, the more flexible your brain is and the more well-being you will have. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that people who have larger emotion vocabularies and who can make more fine-grained or granular emotional experiences have not only better social functioning but better academic functioning and even better health.

Lynne Malcolm: So what advice would you have for parents about perhaps improving children's emotional intelligence?

Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, I think one important thing is to use a variety of emotional words. The more emotion words that you use, the more frequently you use them, the more your child's brain will bootstrap into itself or wire into itself emotion concepts that can be used for creating and perceiving emotions.

I think another thing that I would suggest to parents though is to realise that one form of emotional intelligence is knowing when not to construct an emotion out of those feelings of pleasantness or unpleasantness. So for example, my daughter who is now 18, since the day she was born, literally since the day she was born, somewhere between 4.30 and 5 o'clock every day would become incredibly cranky, like just inconsolably cranky. And it's very tempting to say, well, she has colic or, gee, she is just a difficult kid, or later on she's anxious, she's depressed, she's this, she's that. But, you know, there's some regularity to her crankiness every day, and it took different forms at different ages, but really was just her nervous system around that time probably needed a break, and maybe need a little bit of food, and a hug didn't hurt either, and then she was on her way. So instead of having daily bouts of negative affect('affect' is the word that scientists use to refer to these unpleasant feelings} she learned that this was just a consequence of the way her body worked, and then she learned not to blow it up into a big negative mess of emotional feeling.

Lynne Malcolm: So what do you think some of the benefits to society would be if we really do embrace this alternative view of emotions?

Lisa Feldman Barrett: Well, I think first of all we may be able to improve communication between people. We may have less conflict and we may have less cross-cultural conflict if we are able to actually communicate more clearly. I think we may be able to reduce some of the distress and stress generally of childhood and adolescence by teaching children to be able to better control their emotions, to be kind of emotion experts in a sense.

I also think though that there are a number of places where the classical view of emotion has caused real problems. So presumably having a better scientific understanding of emotions would be beneficial for these domains. For example, in the United States there was a training procedure that the TSA in the United States used to try to detect terrorists, particularly in airports. And this training procedure was based on…rooted in the classical view of emotion, and $900 million were spent training these agents to detect terrorists by their facial movements and body postures and so on, and it was determined to be a failure. And there were congressional hearings and…so that $1 billion could have been spent on a different way, it could have been spent maybe on science and developing training procedures that were based on a more realistic scientific theory of emotion, for example.

Lynne Malcolm: Lisa Feldman Barrett's new perspective on how emotions are made also has the potential to change the relationship between the mind and the body.

Lisa Feldman Barrett: Your brain isn't the whole story, your brain actually is in a body and your body and your brain are in the context of other brains and bodies. So one very important direction of the future is to try to understand how it is that your brain is controlling the systems of your body at the same time that it's creating your thoughts and feelings and how those two are related. So in my book I talk a lot about how the link between mind and body is not metaphorical actually, it's very, very real. And so understanding this better will allow us to understand, for example, how stress gets under the skin and becomes biologically embedded and makes us sick, for example.

Another example of melting down a boundary is to understand better how it is that the words that we speak and the actions that we take towards infants actually wires their brain. We can see that there are wiring consequences of how we treat children, but we don't understand yet exactly what the mechanistic changes are. And in that direction I would say one of the clearest findings in the last decade or two is that childhood adversity and in particular childhood poverty is very, very bad for a developing brain. So research in the direction of trying to understand exactly how poverty and the maltreatment of children really sets their brains on a particular developmental path that might otherwise have been avoided is probably one of the most important frontiers in modern neuroscience today.

Lynne Malcolm: Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett. Her book is called How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.

Thanks to producer Diane Dean, and sound engineer Isabella Tropiano.

So next time you feel overwhelmed by feelings, especially negative ones, it may just be worth thinking about yourself as the architect of your own emotions.

I'm Lynne Malcolm. Thanks for your company.