How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

"Why don’t we go to How Emotions are Made. I think there is a clear thread from Gergen to McAdams to Lisa Feldman Barrett , which is that we are continually constructing ourselves. We’re constructing ourselves, in part, by how we engage with others and how we represent ourselves using our technologies. I appreciate Lisa Feldman Barrett’s argument that we can become “the architects of our experiences.” She pushes against the idea that events trigger emotions in a predetermined way and suggests we find the most specific language possible to describe our experiences and feelings. This specificity may propel us to move forward from challenges in a constructive way. So it has parallels to McAdams’s The Stories We Live By . We are not just this objective summary of what has happened to us. We are our interpretations of things, and how we articulate them. Feldman Barrett and McAdams both focus a lot on language. I think you can probably also extend that to the images people use to make sense of their experiences and describe them to others. Yes, you’ve got a broader audience and you’re also telling people who might have something in common with you. With social media, you have the possibilities for finding people who’ll connect with what you are saying, whereas if you are telling a small group of friends, they may not have had similar experiences. That’s one difference. Another reason Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work is relevant in technology is that in affective computing—where technology and emotion meet—a lot of the work has been done on trying to classify emotion. It could be analysis of your facial expression, your heart rate variability or the language you use. Her work suggests that perhaps what’s going to really help a person is actually not technology that tells them how they’re feeling, but something that helps them articulate how they’re feeling. That’s a very powerful message for people who want to develop emotionally helpful technologies. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I actually created a ‘mood phone’ with some of the assumptions that I just critiqued. To detect stress, it used a heart rate variability sensor and different ways for people to indicate their moods and situations. Then it offered in-the-moment therapies—from breathing exercises to cognitive therapy. The idea of that closed loop between sensing and feedback did appeal to people. But then we tested it in longer field trials—minus the sensors that weren’t that robust at that time—we found that the self-reflection and mobile therapies alone had value. I talk about one man’s experience with it in Left to Our Own Devices . He said the reason he signed up for a trial of the mood phone was because he thought it was going to tell him how he was feeling. But in fact, what it did was make him more confident about how he was feeling and about expressing that. For him, it was largely about expressing himself to his spouse. There were a lot of tensions around—childcare responsibilities, and so on—and he felt they had hit a wall and it was hard to have discussions. But as he became more confident about his own feelings he felt he was better able to come up with words that helped him describe them, and also became more curious about how his wife was feeling. I think that system, in part maybe because it didn’t have the sensor that said ‘you’re stressed’, was relying more on self-report. It perhaps did allow him to exercise what Lisa Feldman Barrett calls ‘emotional granularity,’ this ability to express emotions with more specificity and detail. A sensor would probably tell you, ‘Guess what! Your arousal is high.’ That’s probably not going to be that helpful in a discussion with a partner compared with, ‘I’m feeling a little resentful that I work all day and still have to . . .’ So that’s one way in which Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work is super relevant to technologies. In one class exercise this year, I asked my students for ideas for technologies to help people express themselves in more specific and richer ways on social media. They came up with interesting ways to help people express differences of opinion—things that could dial down hostility on social media. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work also has this really strong theme of defining one’s own reactions and experience. It gets at the varied ways people respond to challenges."