How Emotions Are Made
2017-08-14 17:05:32.912258+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Along with the excellent "Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain", this weekend I also finished Lisa Feldman Barrett's "How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain". Barrett's hypthesis is that emotions aren't innate, but rather are social constructs, ways that we explain and interpret our own physiology.
There is a lot to like about this theory. It helps explain why reactions under stress and threat are so different. It helps explain why there isn't cross-cultural agreement on what expressions mean (despite numerous (flawed) studies which purport to show this). It helps explain why some of us view drama and acting with a detachment of "that's not emoting, that's echoing a cultural cue that we've been taught to interpret as emoting".
(Which is, to a large extent, why I only see a few movies a year.)
Unfortunately, I think Barrett doesn't explain some of her postulates as well as I'd like, and gets drawn off into various examples and implications in ways that don't necessarily follow.
A lot of good stuff in here, some great takedowns of some of the theories put forward by people like Paul Ekman, but... I really hope to read the book of someone who helps better organize the argument.