EMOTIONAL RESCUE
The classical view of how emotions work is straightforward: we’re born with a set of circuits in our brain, one for anger, one for sadness, one for fear and so on. When we see a threat, our fear circuit triggers, we make a scared face, our heart speeds up and we run away. Right? Completely wrong, says Lisa Feldman Barrett. The professor of psychology at Northeastern University in Boston and Harvard Medical School psychiatry lecturer talks about how viewing emotions as constructed by our brain may help us better deal with anxiety and depression, how the modern world seems set up to disrupt the human nervous system, and why for the sake of justice we need to jettison the idea of universal emotional expressions.
The subtitle of your book How Emotions Are Made is “The Secret Life of the Brain”. Can you explain constructed emotions?
There’s not a lot of evidence for the classical view of emotions. The actual evidence suggests something more complex. Imagine your brain is running a budget for your body, budgeting glucose and salt and water and all of the nutrients your body needs to stay alive and well. Your brain
