Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett has written a landmark book, How Emotions Are Made. The major premise of the book is that “your emotions are not built-in but made from more basic parts. They are not universal but vary from culture to culture. They are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in and your culture and upbringing, which provide that environment”.
It is highly recommend that you read this life-changing book. A summary of the book by Dr. Barrett follows:
The theory of constructed emotion explains how you experience and perceive emotion in the absence of any consistent, biological footprints in the face, body or brain. Your brain continually predicts and simulates all the sensory inputs from inside and outside your body, so it understands what they mean and what to do about them. These predictions travel through your cortex, cascading from the body-budgeting circuitry in your interoceptive network to your primary sensory cortices, to create distributed, brain-wide simulations, each of which is an instance of a concept. The simulation that’s closest to your actual situation is the winner that becomes your experience, and if it’s an instance of an emotional concept, then you experience emotion. This whole process occurs, with the help of your control network, in the service of regulating your body budget to keep you alive and healthy. In the process, you impact the body budgets of of those around you, to help you survive to propagate your genes into the next generation. This is how brains and bodies create social reality. This is also how emotions become real”.
Dr. Barrett continues by writing:
“In the theory of constructed emotion, however, the dividing line between brain and world is permeable, perhaps nonexistent. Your brain’s core systems combine in various ways to construct your perceptions, memories, thoughts, feelings and other mental states. Your brain models the world through simulation. Your brain issues a storm of predictions, simulates their consequences as if they were present, and checks and corrects those predictions against actual sensory input. Along the way, your interoceptive predictions produce your feelings of affect, influence every action you perform and determine which parts of the world you care about in the moment (your affective niche). Without interoception, you wouldn’t notice or care about your physical surroundings or anything else, and you’d be unlikely to survive for long. Interoception enables your brain to construct the environment in which you live”.
How Emotions Are Made makes the point that you have to be skeptical about your own thoughts and curious enough to want to explore other points of view. In actuality, your brain controls you – often resulting in maladaptive behaviors in all facets of your life. Reading this excellent book will give you the knowledge to take control of your brain.