How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

Degeneracy is a term neuroscientists use to refer to the fact that neurons can combine in different ways to create the same outcome in the brain. Barrett explains that this phenomenon is highly relevant to the study of emotion, since varied brain activity can somehow produce the same emotion in the thinker.

Emergent properties are phenomena our brains produce that are more than the sum of their parts. This makes it difficult to identify and study specific brain regions, since we can’t isolate them from their many neural connections and the many outcomes they produce by working together.

Emotion concepts are predictions that our brains create by combining our knowledge of past experiences with our current sensory information. Every instance of emotion, such as happiness, jealousy, anger, and fear, are examples of our emotion concepts. Barrett argues that we learn these concepts beginning in infancy in the same way that we learn more physical concepts such as car or tree. The author particularly posits a strong relationship between language and emotion concepts: We can readily feel and identify emotions in ourselves and others because our culture wired us to recognize certain sensations and behavior using specific terms.

Emotional granularity is the ability to specify exactly how you’re feeling and express it in words. Barrett explains that people with this skill have broader vocabularies for emotional language and can differentiate between different forms of the same emotion, such as resentment, jealousy, anger, or rage. She argues that people with higher degrees of emotional granularity tend to have better mental health than those who struggle to specifically identify emotions in themselves or others.

Barrett uses the term facial configuration as a more neutral term for what we would commonly call a facial expression. She feels that the words facial expressions are so automatically associated with certain emotions that she believes scientists should use a more neutral term when studying emotion.