What Am I “Really” Feeling?

I hear some variation of this question often in sessions with clients. Sometimes it comes up in the context of an individual: “What was I feeling?”, “I don’t know what I really felt”, “Am I just sad or am I actually depressed?” 

Other times it comes up in the context of relationships: “They said they weren’t upset but I knew that they really were angry. They just wouldn’t admit it.”, “I could tell that they were actually bothered by it. I’m really good at reading others’ emotions.”

There’s an assumption in the background of these questions that neuroscientist and psychologist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett calls into question in her book How Emotions Are Made. It’s the assumption that emotions are things out there, objective and separate from us as human observers. As it turns out, this may not be the case at all.

In other words, emotions are indeed real, but maybe not in the way we tend to think.

Categorizing Reality

Consider for a moment some of philosophy’s most difficult (and delicious) questions: 

-Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?

-Is a hot dog a kind of sandwich?

-What kinds of foods count as “breakfast”?

Or how about this one: What is the difference between a cupcake and a muffin? If we look to physical reality, we may run into some issues when trying to answer this question. First, we can find examples of both cupcakes and muffins that contain the same ingredients. In other words, same physical reality, different categories.

Another issue is that different cupcakes have different ingredients from each other. What makes them all cupcakes? Same goes for muffins. Different muffins have different ingredients, so what makes them all muffins? In other words, same category, different physical realities.

As it turns out, we run into the same two issues when it comes to researching emotions. Two instances of the same (or at least very similar) physical reality are categorized differently. For example, two instances of the same facial expression, or the same physiological state, or the same activated parts of the brain, can be part of different emotional categories. A frown can be part of anger or sadness. An elevated heart rate can be part of fear or joy.

And two instances of the same category have different physical realities. One person reporting anger can show a frown, elevated heart rate, and certain brain parts activated, while another person also reporting anger can show a different physical reality.

Whether we’re talking about bakery snacks or emotions, how do we know what to call something if we can’t look to the physical reality of the situation to identify what it is?

Physical Reality and Social Reality

We may need to look to another kind of reality than physical reality for answers. Dr. Barrett looks to the work of philosopher John Searle and the idea of “social reality” to understand what’s going on.

Social reality is the reality created by consensus. Someone creates a concept by categorizing some aspect of experience and then giving it a name, and if enough people give this concept value, it becomes part of social reality.

This might sound like some sort of strange magic, but it’s happening all the time.

Think of money, for example. What makes a certain piece of paper valuable? Or a certain kind of metal in a certain shape with a certain person’s face on it? Or a particular kind of data on a computer?

Or think of the law. What makes a certain law or regulation real? What gives a political position power?

These are just a few of many, many examples of parts of our reality that don’t have to do with physical characteristics, but instead are about the value or function they carry within a group of people.

As Dr. Barrett argues, emotions are part of social reality.

Emotions are ways of categorizing reality, concepts with a social function that we’ve given labels for the sake of short-hand.

So just like you can’t look to the physical ingredients to determine if something is a cupcake or muffin, you can’t look to physical reality to determine what emotion is “really” happening. You can’t do a blood test to see if someone is “really” sad or angry or happy. That’s just the wrong question, because emotions are part of social reality rather than physical reality. It’d be like doing chemical tests on a dollar bill to see what its value is.

What, So Emotions Aren’t Actually Real?

Let’s be totally clear. Social reality is no small thing. It has major impact. Wars are fought over socially real concepts like “justice” or “democracy”. There are real consequences for socially real concepts like race or ethnicity or nationality. Social concepts have social function, and so come with real consequences based on their function.

In addition, social reality and physical reality are not so separate from each other. As Dr. Barrett references in her book, some research has shown that mindset impacts how our bodies metabolize food, even if the nutritional content is identical. In other words, your body might metabolize a “decadent cupcake” differently than a “healthful muffin” even if the ingredients are the same, just because the mental category is different.

Because our brains are predictive not reactive, and because our brain’s predictions are based on concepts we learn, then the social reality which is made up of all those concepts makes a difference in our body on a physical level.

When it comes to emotions, then, the emotional concepts we use to describe our experience, while socially real rather than physically real, matter both for their social function and for how they impact us physically.

Learning New Emotions

Something really counterintuitive about all this is that different cultures actually have different emotions. Just like different cultures slice up the color spectrum of the rainbow differently, different cultures also categorize body states and social situations differently to create different emotions.

Some of these emotion concepts are somewhat translatable, but some of them aren’t. There are actually concepts of emotion from different cultures that we may not yet know, but can learn, and that our brain can then use in its predictions to help us navigate our experiences.

Dr. Barrett gives some really great examples in her book. Here are a few:

“Liget” (Ilongot tribe in the Philippines) - “intense focus, passion, and energy while pursuing a hazardous challenge with a group of people who are competing against another group”

“Arigata-meiwaku” (Japanese) - “when someone has done you a favor that you didn’t want from them, and which may have caused difficulty for you, but you’re required to be grateful anyway”

“Fago” (Ifaluk) - “love, empathy, pity, sadness, or compassion, depending on context”

Therapy can actually become a space to play with new emotion categories and concepts. It can become a space to notice what makes up our experience, within our body, our thoughts, our behavior, and our social situation, and to play with how we want to categorize that experience. What can we call it? Are there new emotion concepts we can learn and then name, and that then help us more effectively navigate both our physical and social reality?

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