How Emotions Are Made

Consider what this means: events in the world, such as a snake slithering at your feet, merely tune your predictions, roughly the way that your breathing is tuned by exercise. Right now, as you read these words and understand what they mean, each word barely perturbs your massive intrinsic activity, like a small stone skipping on a rolling ocean wa

Overall, we found that no brain region contained the fingerprint for any single emotion. Fingerprints are also absent if you consider multiple connected regions at once (a brain network), or stimulate individual neurons with electricity. The same results hold in experiments with other animals that allegedly have emotion circuits, such as monkeys an

And consider this fun fact: the historical record implies that ancient Greeks and Romans did not smile spontaneously when they were happy. The word “smile” doesn’t even exist in Latin or Ancient Greek. Smiling was an invention of the Middle Ages, and broad, toothy-mouthed smiles (with crinkling at the eyes, named the Duchenne smile by Ekman) became

These findings undermine the idea that the amygdala contains the circuit for fear. They point instead to the idea that the brain must have multiple ways of creating fear, and therefore the emotion category “Fear” cannot be necessarily localized to a specific region. Scientists have studied other emotion categories in lesion patients besides fear, a

Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it.

facial movements have so much variation within an emotion category like “Fear,” you might wonder why we find it so natural to believe that a wide-eyed face is the universal fear expression. The answer is that it’s a stereotype, a symbol that fits a well-known theme for “Fear” within our culture. Preschools teach these stereotypes to children: “Peop

Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious.

More significantly, the classical view of emotion is embedded in our social institutions. The American legal system assumes that emotions are part of an inherent animal nature and cause us to perform foolish and even violent acts unless we control them with our rational thoughts.

A single core system can play a role in thinking, remembering, decision-making, seeing, hearing, and experiencing and perceiving diverse emotions. A core system is “one to many”: a single brain area or network contributes to many different mental states. The classical view of emotion, in contrast, considers particular brain areas to have dedicated