The Three Big Myths About Emotions, Gender and Brains | Lisa Feldman Barrett

One of the things that science is for is for dispelling myths about how the world works. So, for example, we used to believe that the Sun revolved around the Earth, we used to believe that the Earth was flat -- it turns out that many of our most basic beliefs about emotion also turn out to be myths. And so today we're going to take on three of these myths and and dispel them. The first is that emotions are displayed on the face with expressions that we all recognise. So the idea is that we're supposed to smile when we're happy, we're supposed to scowl when we're angry, we're supposed to frown when we're sad and for many years scientists believed that everyone in the world would express emotion in exactly the same way so we would all scowl when we were angry and we would all recognize a scowl as anger everywhere around the world. So have a look at this face when I ask audiences well how does this person feel they'll say oh she feels sad maybe she feels grieved she might be feeling fatigued, actually this is my daughter Sophia having what I can only describe as a profound experience of pleasure. And this little sweetie is also having a profound experience of pleasure. What this demonstrates to you is what hundreds of experiments have also now shown which is that exactly the same emotion can be expressed with very different sets of facial movements now this face when I ask audiences well how does she feel people say she's she's in terror or she's in pain this is actually a photograph of Serena Williams after she beat her sister Venus in the US Open a couple of years ago the reason why her face looks as if it is displaying terror when we don't have any context is that in fact this face is made in terror so not only is it the case that different express different facial movements express the same emotion it's also the case that the same face expresses different emotions so when it comes to an emotion a face does not speak for itself it seems to us as if we are just reading other people's emotions on the face in the way that we would read words on a page but that's actually not what's happening at all our brains are actually guessing at what facial movements mean in a given context and those guesses are proceeded pretty much the way that a Neil Seth described this morning in his talk which I'll come to again later in this talk as well and even for those of us who feel super confident that we are really good at reading other people our brains are just guessing so is this person surprised afraid angry well yes he could be any of those things depending on the context and so what about these expressions right these presumed universal expressions where did they come from well it turns out that they weren't discovered by scientists by observing how people express emotion in everyday life in fact these expressions were stipulated by a small group of scientists and then adopted as universal they are in fact stereotypes of emotion and for a number of years the science of emotion was really the science of emotion stereotypes now I want you to consider for a minute what this means because everywhere around the world these stereotypes are displayed in classrooms and preschools and children are taught that these are the presumed universal expressions of emotion in international politics and in industry strategies for cross-cultural communication in a globalized world assume universal expressions of emotion and then of course we have you know the emerging emotion economy where companies are spending a tremendous amount of time and money and effort to develop emotion gadgets emotion apps and technology to read emotions in the face of other people right and so they'll tell you that they are really able to read anger in a face when in fact what the reading is a scowl and the scowl may or may not indicate anger in a particular situation so when you consider the fact that all of this effort and money and creativity is being expended it's a bit mind-boggling when you realize that they're being inspired by a misunderstanding of the fundamental nature of emotion I'm not suggesting here that the efforts are useless what I'm suggesting is that they're being targeted to the wrong question and it's a question that you know can't be answered because it's the wrong question here's the second myth women are more emotional than men if you ask women with questionnaires how emotional are you they will tell you that they are more emotional than men and men agree women are more emotional but when you take men and women and then you ask them to report on their experiences in a moment-to-moment way in their daily lives what you find is that men and women on average do not differ in their emotionality that is some people report a lot of emotion other people report less but there are no differences on average by sex so where do these beliefs come from that women are more emotional than men the answer is that they are stereotypes that we learn and they're the stereotypes that actually guide our perception of other people which then reinforce the stereotypes and so I'll give you one example of a study from my lab of which there are many and they go something like this we show people a face like this expressing a very subtle expression of emotion in this case it's anger and we give a reason for that expression so this woman argued with a co-worker and then later in the experiment we just present the face alone and we ask is this an emotional person you know person who has an emotional nature or is this somebody who's just having a bad day are they just reacting to the situation and we do this from male faces and for female faces and as some of you might have realized this is actually the same face we just stuck female or male hair on the face and what we find is that test subjects and I'm talking here about men and women both male and female test subjects tend to see the face with female hair as having a more emotional nature than the men than the face with the male hair so basically she's a bitch he's having a hard day so on average men and women are equally emotional so you know some people kind of float along the river of life in relative tranquility other people you know are navigating a raging river of agony and ecstasy most of us fall somewhere in between but on average there's no difference by sex that being said our beliefs about men's and women's emotionality has a great impact in many many spheres of life for example in the law the law embodies a very gendered view of emotion so for example when a woman is charged with a violent crime if she expresses anger or is seen to express anger she actually receives a more severe sentence if a man is charged with violent crime and he express his anger or his scene to express anger he's actually given a lighter sentence because clearly he's less in control of his behavior because his emotions took him over similarly in business we often see the case that women face a double kind of double-standard if you express emotion you're seen as overly emotional and not really qualified to lead a company if you don't express emotion then you're actually violating your the stereotype of being a woman and so you're not trusted and you're you're seen as more dishonest if you are very serious as a woman and you're in charge you're often seen as aggressive and I have to tell you I mean I've never met a woman who is accepted as a leader who doesn't go through the stage of being seen as a bitch first it's kind of like a necessary evil here's the third myth we're gonna take on today this is the idea that there are dedicated circuits in the brain for emotion so a lot of the time we feel emotion it kind of feels like it's hot there happening to us you know like they kind of take us over causing us to do and say things that we would rather not and so this makes it seem to us as if we must have buried deep inside some inner beast a set of pre-wired emotion circuits that our rationality has to control but our brain is a master of deception it creates experiences for us at the same time as misleading us as to how those experiences are created and I'll give you just one example so this what I'm displaying here in the red is a outline of a brain region called the amygdala so if I were to split my brain do a cross-section of my skull kind of pop open the front this is what you'd be looking at when all the blood is cleared away the red is the amygdala the amygdala is kind of like the rock star of brain regions it is in the media all the time people write articles about it and typically writing articles about the amygdalas importance in fear so fear the fear circuit is supposed to live in this brain region and the question is does it right so in my lab we fat we collected all hundreds of studies brain imaging studies of people when they were experiencing I'm and other emotions and we summarized them and so sure enough when you look at the number of experiments where people experience fear you see that about 30% of the experiments show an increase in the migdal activity so that's better than chance but it's not what you would expect if the amygdala actually was the home of fear you'd expect something much greater and in fact you see a migdal a-- activity increase in every emotion that's ever been studied and in fact in many studies that have nothing to do with emotion at all and this finding is basically what you find for any brain region or network or pattern of activity that has been claimed to be the home of emotion so emotions are complex constructions they are not simple circuits in fact emotions are not built into your brain they're built by your brain as you need them and they are not reactions to the world they are your constructions of the world or more specifically they're your constructions of what bodily sensations what an eel I'm told this earlier called interceptions what those sensations mean in the context that you're in right now so the most intimate part of you you're the internal parts of your body are are kind of a mystery to you most of the time your brain is actually wired that way and so your brain has to guess at what these internal sensations mean in the context that you're in right now and so an emotion is your brain's explanation of your internal sensations in the given context that you're in and when your brain is creating these explanations creating these emotions it's not creating one meaning one story so anger for example is not one reaction it's actually a population of instances that vary from one another in a way that's very strongly tied to the situation so sometimes in anger you will scowl but sometimes in anger you'll laugh sometimes in anger you'll sit quietly in sive plotting the demise of your enemy and in each instance your brain and your body's doing something different so very quickly in your brain you carry around a model of the world so we heard markets talk about this we heard Anil talk about this your brain uses this model of the world to anticipate what is going to happen next both in your body and in your brain so the brains internal model kind of works like a scientist it makes a prediction about what's going to happen in the world and in the body and then it compares its prediction to incoming sensory inputs from the world and from the body and if it's correct that prediction becomes your experience this is akin to what people refer to as system 1 system 2 is when your prediction isn't quite right and so your brain has the opportunity to change its prediction tweak its internal model we have a special word for this and in science we call it learning and this is also what is referred to as system 2 in the sense that this is a much more effortful thing to do system 1 and system 2 are not literal networks in your brain there are different modes of brain processing so what does this mean for you in everyday life particularly if you want to change your emotions and control your emotions well what it means is that the the horizon of control that you have is much greater than you might imagine so I'm not telling you here that you can snap your fingers and change how you feel if that were the case we'd probably all be happier and scientists like some of those you've heard today we'd all be out of a job there'd be no mystery that's actually not how it works right but it is important to realize that the brain is using three sources of information three sources of three ingredients if you will to make emotions and if you change any of these ingredients you have more control over what you feel so one set of ingredients is information from the body right so you can change the state of your body really easily you can get up you can move around you can eat something you can take drugs in fact the opiate crisis and the United States you know is one consequence of this actually another thing you can do is change your surroundings literally by moving from one context to another or by figuratively changing your surroundings by attending to different things this is what happens when you learn how to be mindful but you can also change your internal model that is if it's the case that the brain is using past experience in order to make predictions about the immediate future which then becomes your present experience then you can cultivate new experiences with a little bit of effort and seed your brain to make predictions differently in the future so first this is something that takes effort you know and then it becomes automatic kind of like driving what is first automatic eventually I mean when his first effortful eventually becomes automatic and this is the way that you have much more control and much more responsibility in in creating experience because in fact you actually are the architect of your own experience and the ideas that I just described today and many others are actually available in the book that that I just published and thank you for your attention you

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Keywords: wired video, wired magazine, wired uk, wired, pop culture, science, politics, conde nast, health, technology, new technology, emotions, psychology, lisa feldman barrett, myths, gender, lisa, feldman, emotion, neuroscience, how emotions are made, northeastern university, brain, affective science, philosophy, research, culture, wiredlive, wired live

Id: 9WFPBey02b0

Length: 17min 33sec (1053 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2018