Name: How Emotions Are Made: The Theory of Constructed Emotion
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T18:22:28.000Z
Duration: 9 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The superlative

Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of Simon's Book Club, where I talk about some of the biggest ideas in the best books on neuroscience, consciousness, communication, mindfulness, relationships, and all that good shi-

Past simple

Now, the last two books I did weren't very rooted in science.

To-infinitive

Bell Hooks' All About Love was a really beautiful book that asks us to question how we love, where we learned about it, and how the patterns we've learned aren't really serving us, which led to the next book I covered, which was Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, who teaches us a pattern that does serve us, a way to communicate that keeps us connected and empathetic, that could really get us to the kind of love that Bell

Now, the basic idea of nonviolent communication is that instead of talking about what's wrong with others by moralizing and judging and criticizing and comparing and blaming and shaming, we can instead stay connected and compassionate by talking about what's alive in us, by expressing our feelings and our needs.

You might already know a basic idea of this from a long time ago, where we might have been taught in school to use I statements instead of you statements.

Now, the closer we can get to those feelings in ourselves, and the further away we get from judgments of others, the more we can stay compassionate and connected and loving.

And so I think it really makes sense to take a deep dive into these feelings, to understand them deeply and to know how to use them.

It's healthy for us to eat a lot of vegetables, and it'd be really useful for us if we knew how to cook them instead of just ordering them on Uber Eats, right?

So this book we're getting into now will really help us in understanding how to express our feelings as it will really boil down what it actually means to feel something.

What do emotions mean to bodies and how do our bodies make and process these emotions?

I think that the more that we understand this process, the easier it will be for us to connect with nonviolence and compassion.

Now, the first two books I mentioned weren't very scientifically rigorous.

All About Love is more of a social commentary, and it's a very beautiful one at that.

And Nonviolent Communication hasn't really been that huge in academia yet.

But this book here, though, by Lisa Feldman Barrett is about as academic as it gets.

LFB, as I'm going to call it from now on, is among the top 1% of sighted scientists in the world.

She's a scientist that other scientists want to be when they grow up.

If she had a jersey, I'd buy it and I'd ask her to sign it.

And look, I know that I don't hold a PhD in neuroscience.

All that I know about the brain and consciousness is from me standing on the shoulders of giants and trying to apply their research and their books to my life.

So I can't get into a lab and conduct research and experiments by myself.

And so I want to get my information from the books and the papers of the scientists who are doing that groundbreaking work, who are changing the way that we understand the world and who are the most distinguished and celebrated minds in their fields.

I remember being blown away by a passage in the book where LFB and her crew were trying to answer a question about how the brain creates emotions.

So my lab set out to settle the question of whether brain blobs are really emotion fingerprints once and for all.

We examined every published neuroimaging study on anger, disgust, happiness, fear, and sadness and combined those that were usable statistically in a meta-analysis.

Altogether this comprised nearly 100 published studies involving nearly 1,300 test subjects across almost 20 years.

Now you can't hear the emphasis in the audio like it is in the text.

They examined every published study on it.

Have you ever tried reading these studies?

And LFB not only read all of these studies, then they did a huge study on all of those studies.

I'm kind of reminded of those, oh you love X, name every Y memes.

Name every single band whose name starts with a B.

Well Lisa Feldman Barrett lives that meme when it comes to the science of emotions.

If you listen to her talk on podcasts, she'll constantly bring up other scientists' papers, where those papers were published, and even the dates that they were published.

If you're into sports, it's like her knowing the advanced stat line of every player on the team.

Okay, enough fanboying for Lisa Feldman Barrett.

Now that I've gushed about her credentials, let me talk about some of the major, major ideas in this book.

Now let's all take a deep breath here first, because I'm going to challenge a lot of the ideas that people hold dear.

You cannot read the emotions on someone's face alone, and you can never truly know what someone is thinking or feeling.

Any kind of emotion scanning software is over-promising junk science, as are a lot of tech startups, to be honest.

There's a lot of quantum bullshit out there, too.

Point is, stop watching Sherlock and feeding yourself with this idea that mind reading is possible.

When it comes to guessing what people are thinking or feeling, you are not as smart as you think you are.

There is no part of your brain which is responsible for happy or sad or angry or jealous, etc.

There is no emotional part of your brain.

This old idea of us having a reptile brain and then a mammal brain with our human prefrontal cortex, well, that's junk science now as well.

And any images you've seen of brain scans with brain blobs that light up when you feel a specific emotion, that's also junk science.

Emotions are taught to us from our families of origins and our culture.

There is no essence of happiness that everyone feels.

There's no essence of anger that everyone feels.

What happy means to you, it doesn't mean to me.

And that's the same for sad, angry, disgusted, etc.

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder and emotions are in the bodies of the beholders.

We don't feel the emotions that we haven't been taught to feel.

Emotions are made up and they have different values in different cultures the way money is made up.

Now, these are just three of the myths in the book and there are many more that we could get into, but I don't want to spend this video talking about all the misconceptions that the book so thoroughly dismantles.

The big argument here is one of essentialism versus construction.

In the old essentialist view, emotions have distinct essences of their own that are hard wired into our brains that all humans feel.

There is a part of your brain that fires for happiness and a part of your brain that fires for fear.

This was the argument for emotional essentialism which was held for a long time.

Emotional essentialism is still being taught in intro to psychology books based on some very famous but very flawed experiments that are now only being recognized as flawed.

Now, here's the constructionist view of emotion.

Instead of emotions being essential to us, they are constructed by us in many different ways, in many different parts of the body, in many different situations and contexts.

They are taught to us in many different situations, in many different cultures, and we don't always feel these emotions the same way.

Sadness for me one day looks different than sadness for me on another day.

Now if that's hard to understand, an easy way to think of this is the nature versus nurture argument.

What's natural to us is the ability to feel emotions, but what's nurtured in us is what those emotions are.

It's natural to us to eat, for example, but what's nurtured is the kind of food we eat which varies across culture.

Some people eat eggs and toast for breakfast.

Some people eat rice and eggs for breakfast.

I remember when I moved to South Korea how difficult it was for me to understand Korean breakfast and how much resistance I felt for the idea.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How Emotions Are Made: The Theory of Constructed Emotion

process

essential

insane

cortex