Feeling All Our Feelings With Dr. Yewande Pearse
Dr. Yewande Pearse (she/her) is a neuroscientist who hangs in the intersection of science and culture. What brings her joy is making science — especially matters of the brain — accessible for everyone. She uses music, art, and writing to share what she knows in an inclusive way.
Dr. Yewande can be found on Instagram at @nyewro
We’ve all seen this cat-scale meme, and there are many more like it, each with a different equally hilarious scale. The popularity of these comes down to the fact that having feelings is a universal human experience and we want to understand them.
The first thing to understand about feelings is that they aren't the same as emotions. People — including scientists — tend to use the two terms interchangeably, but feelings are actually a component of emotion.
Professor Klaus Scherer, a specialist in the psychology of emotion, proposed that there are in fact five (1) different components to an emotion, including how we appraise our experiences and make meaning of them, how we respond through our facial and bodily expressions and actions, and the physical changes that happen in our bodies as a symptom of our emotions. The feeling component is particularly special in the emotion process, because your feelings are with you every single second of your life, monitoring what's going on inside your body like a barometer in the central nervous system.
Our feelings do the very important job of integrating and regulating the constantly changing information from all the other components. Although feelings are a huge part of our conscious experience, some feelings don’t even enter our awareness, and those that do rely on our ability to verbalize them. Our conscious feelings are part of a much bigger story that scientists are still trying to understand.
Although how we feel is important, emotions themselves are what truly color our life. The study of emotion started in the 19th century when the field of psychology began to emerge as a true scientific discipline. For over a century, scientists thought that emotions were caused by their own dedicated neural pathways. However, once scientists started constructing experiments specifically designed to isolate the neural basis of different emotions and distinguish them from each other, they found little proof of emotional circuits in the brain.
Now, the fields of psychology and neuroscience are more interested in the idea that emotions are constructed — meaning that emotions aren’t fixed to individual neurons, brain regions, or neural networks.
One of the most interesting demonstrations of this comes from clinical observations of a patient called S.M. who had a rare genetic condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease, which damaged her amygdala. The amygdala, an almond-shaped structure buried deep within each brain hemisphere is linked to emotion, especially fear. To try to understand the link between fear and the amygdala, scientists exposed S.M. to snakes and spiders, and even took her to a haunted house to try to provoke fear. Surprisingly, S.M remained unphased, never exhibiting overt fear. However, in observing S.M’s everyday life, it turned out that she was still capable of “fear learning” under certain circumstances, such as fear of going to the doctor or dentist because of previous painful experiences.
At the forefront of this more modern theory of constructed emotion is neuroscientist, psychologist, and author Professor Lisa Fieldman Barett. Research from her lab suggests that while our feelings are the result of some prewiring in the brain, our emotions are the result of our brain making interoceptive predictions, constructed in the moment with billions of neurons working together. These predictions allow us to make meaning of our feelings, by constructing emotions.
So much of what we feel and the emotions we experience are the result of physical sensations that the brain wants to make sense of. Let's take a physical component of emotion, like butterflies in your stomach. If you’re about to give a presentation and you get butterflies, your brain might predict that these sensations mean you are experiencing dread or worry but if you get butterflies in the company of your biggest crush, your brain might predict that these sensations mean excitement or even love. Despite having the same physical sensation of butterflies, your brain creates two different emotional experiences.
The previously held idea that emotion circuits are buried deep inside an ancient part of your brain relates to a theory that neuroscientists have been debunking for decades — the triune brain model. This concept, created by physician Paul D. MacLean, M.D., proposed that emotions were assigned to live in the primitive parts of the brain referred to as the “limbic system,” whereas cognitions were assigned to the cortex, a newer part of the brain thought to be the product of evolution. In MacLean’s triune brain, primitive emotions overruled conscious thoughts. In reality, while we do have a limbic system, and it does play an important role in regulating emotion, it’s far more complicated and we have more control of our emotions than the triune theory gives us credit for, and we are not completely at its mercy.
According to Barett, author of ‘How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of The Brain’, we can’t change our emotions just by deciding to, but neurons in the brain are connected in such a way that we may be able to change our emotional life over time.
The brain's ability to modify, change, and adapt both structure and function throughout life and in response to experience is called neuroplasticity. Thanks to this special ability, we can influence the appraisal component of emotion by teaching our brain to make different predictions. Take performance anxiety, for example. People with performance anxiety often experience a fast heartbeat and sweaty hands. In response to this physical component of emotion, their brain predicts the emotion of anxiety. By challenging the lessons the brain might have learnt about these physical symptoms, it's possible to teach the brain that a fast heartbeat and sweaty hands just means it’s ready to go out there and perform. Instead of predicting anxiety, the brain predicts a different emotion, like determination. If this lesson is repeated, the brain starts to rewire itself to continue to make this new prediction.
I think it’s important to point out that we shouldn’t try to avoid processing certain emotions, especially difficult ones. We experience emotion for a reason, and it’s important to adaptively relate and process them to avoid developing serious problems like anxiety and depression further down the line. It’s also important to stress the fact that depression or any other serious affective disorder isn’t something we can just think our way out of. In those cases, we may need outside help. However, as someone with a background in neuroscience, I do find the science to support the idea of constructed emotion encouraging — it means we can take some ownership over our emotions based on real data. Science is showing that there is a way for us to get a handle on some of the emotions we feel every day, and that’s definitely something to feel happy about.
(1) Cognitive component, neurophysiological component, motivational component, motor expression component, subjective feeling component.
References
Scherer, K. (2004). Feelings Integrate the Central Representation of Appraisal-driven Response Organization in Emotion. In A. Manstead, N. Frijda, & A. Fischer (Eds.), Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction, pp. 136-157). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511806582.009
Tracy JL, Randles D. Four Models of Basic Emotions: A Review of Ekman and Cordaro, Izard, Levenson, and Panksepp and Watt. Emotion Review. 2011;3(4):397-405. doi:10.1177/1754073911410747
Barrett, L. F., Mesquita, B., Ochsner, K. N., & Gross, J. J. (2007). The experience of emotion. Annu Rev Psychol, 58, 373-403.
Feinstein JS, Adolphs R, Damasio A, Tranel D. The human amygdala and the induction and experience of fear. Curr Biol. 2011;21(1):34-38. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2010.11.042
Barrett LF, Satpute AB. Historical pitfalls and new directions in the neuroscience of emotion. Neurosci Lett. 2019 Feb 6;693:9-18. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2017.07.045. Epub 2017 Jul 26. PMID: 28756189; PMCID: PMC5785564.
Feinstein, J.S., Adolphs, R., Damasio, A., & Tranel, D. (2011). The human amygdala and the induction and experience of fear. Current Biology, 21, 1-5.
Feinstein, J.S., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D. (2016). A tale of survival from the world of Patient S.M. In: Amaral, D.G. Adolphs, R., editors. Living without an Amygdala, pp. 1–38. New York: Guilford.
Barrett LF, Simmons WK. Interoceptive predictions in the brain. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2015;16(7):419-429. doi:10.1038/nrn3950
