Feelings are a state of emotion. They express anger, happiness, sadness, jealousy, anxiety, etc. However, there has been an age-old misconception attached to its origins. We have continued to believe that individual emotions or feelings—anger, disgust, fear, sadness, joy—arise from specific “blobs of brain circuitry” anchored in discrete regions of the human brain. A recent groundbreaking research by Lisa Feldman Barrett, University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, conducted in the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory, gives evidence to this “blob-ology” model. In a comprehensive analysis of neuroimaging studies over a 15-year span, she and her colleagues showed that, in reality, a set of interacting brain regions are active during a whole slew of emotional states. None of these brain regions is specific to emotion or to any other mental state. Instead, the brain is filled with general-purpose ingredients—or networks—that interact to produce our feelings, thoughts, and actions.
Since the time of Plato, Western philosophy has regarded the human brain to be made up of “faculties,” or separate abilities—to think, to feel, to perceive, and so on. Barrett believes blob-ology persists because of psychological “essentialism”. People tend to believe that instances of a biological or psychological category—say, all instances of the category “cocker spaniel” or all instances of an emotion category such as “anger”—share an “essence” that makes them what they are, even if that essence isn’t known or hasn’t yet been identified.
Different parts of our brains mature at different rates as we move from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. There are networks—circuits of connected neurons—that are intrinsic to everyone’s brain unless you have certain illnesses. Some of these networks are there at birth; some of them develop at different rates as we age. The networks overlap because the brain regions have to talk to one another. These networks interact to perform functions that are important for a whole host of psychological phenomena. Very young infants don’t have emotions and feelings. They can feel pleasant or unpleasant, they can smile with pleasure or cry in discomfort, they can be fussy or calm. This is what scientists call “affect.” College students have even more complex emotion concepts, for example, distinguishing irritation from frustration. Research shows that the more emotion concepts you know, the better off you’ll be—socially and academically—because the more distinctions you can make, the better you can regulate yourself, your feelings and communicate with others.
Every thought, feeling, or perception that you have is context-based even if you don’t realise it. For example, all instances of anger are not the same. Sometimes you’re seething, sometimes you are calm but boiling inside. Sometimes you scowl, sometimes you chuckle, and sometimes you show nothing on your face at all. Your heart, lungs, and other body systems react differently based on your response. The point is that, you have a wide variety of ways of being angry or sad or happy.
A whole set of networks across the brain—for memory, concepts, language, vision, etc.—are cooperating and constructing each experience for you, and the end result is a mental state that you experience as a feeling or a thought or a perception.
Dibyasha Das
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