Emotions as neurophysiological constructs
Are emotions real? Are they hardwired to our physiology? Are they pre-cognitive and purely affective? Was Darwin right in speculating that facial expressions are human universals that accurately represent a small repertoire of emotional experiences ( The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals )? Or instead are emotions a part of the cognitive output of the brain, influenced by context, experience, expectation, and mental framework? Lisa Feldman Barrett is an accomplished neuroscientist who addresses all of these questions in her recent book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain , based on several decades of research on the emotions. The book is highly interesting, and has important implications for the social sciences more broadly. Barrett's core view is that the received theory of the emotions -- that they are hardwired and correspond to specific if unknown neurological groups, connected to specific physiological and motor responses -- is fundamentally wrong. ...