A New Way to look at emotions

Lisa Feldman Barret's theory of how we perceive emotion comes through as highly-thought provoking, and to an extent, is implying a potential paradigm shift in how we understand what emotions are in their very essence. One of the first points presented is the idea that physiological stimuli can be used interchangeably to tell our body different emotions. However, the way those same stimuli are used to distinguish emotions rely on the context itself. What this puts into question is the true reliability of our emotions. If it comes to a point where the body is trying to express a feeling but the context does not lend itself to the interpretation what the body wants to achieve, this can lead to flawed decision-making. This puts into perspective how it is crucial to comprehend the possible unreliability of emotions– if the wrong context happens to coincide with the wrong physiological stimuli, the decision-making that is born from that union can have dangerous ramifications. This example of context is brought up in the party Feldman organized for her daughter. The mix of the context of the food along with previous emotional knowledge triggered by physiological stimuli led the guests rejecting the food based on an erroneous assumption.

The importance of context and the weight it has on the emotion it triggers also puts into question whether there will be emotions we will never experience because we will never be in the prime situation for us to feel it. Emotions, to simplify them, are labelled with overarching words like ‘happy’, ‘angry’ and ‘sad”. However, emotions are much more complex than that– everyone will feel a different variation of those overarching words due to factors like context, language and culture. The idea that there may be emotions we will never feel is present in how different languages have words for emotions that don’t technically exist in English. The lack of cultural understanding or comprehension in that sense implies English-speakers will never feel that emotion that is expressed by that word. In a real life situation, this is what may hinder emotional empathy. Our inability to understand how someone is feeling is impaired by our own perspective– we can’t understand them because we haven’t lived through that context and even if we had, our culture, language and bias may have led to a completely different emotional response to that context. 

Another idea that stands out personally in the article is the power history and its development can have on how we interpret emotions.  This was brought up in how around the 18th century smiles illustrated happiness because dentistry was more accessible and thus, people had the incentive to show their teeth. This technological change had a paradigm shift in how happiness was interpreted. Nevertheless, what this is suggesting is also how culture and context lead to the different interpretation of emotion by a population as a whole. Westerners faced that dentistry advance whilst other countries did not. This may be the reason why other cultures don’t see smiles necessarily as expressive of happiness. Because smiles are associated with happiness this suggests that happiness is interpreted based on that gesture. What this could be entailing for other cultures is that although their respective gestures reflect happiness, it may be a different primary happiness to that of Westerners. Again, this is one of the boundaries that lack of cultural exposure represents when it comes to emotional empathy. 

The conclusion that I personally draw from the article is that emotions are highly complex due to the cultural, contextual and previous emotional exposure we have had, but that physiologically, our body is more limited in expressing emotions. We rely heavily on the former concepts to interpret how we feel. A last thought would be the idea that in the face of expanding multiculturalism and our exposure to different cultures (and hybrid cultures), our emotions may become even more complex. Thus, emotions are constantly evolving.