How do we learn our emotions?

A few ideas from my recent lecture on Discipling our Emotions

I had the opportunity to guest lecture in the God and Emotions class I am taking this semester at Wheaton College with Dr. Aubrey Buster. It’s an interdisciplinary upper level undergrad course that combines Old Testament and psychology. Another PhD student, Bradley Cameron, is taking it also, and he shared his OT dissertation work on fear of God with the class a few weeks ago. (Bradley took these pictures for me.)

Dr. Buster introduced me as “Professor Castle Miller,” and I have to admit, I got choked up. I absolutely LOVE teaching, and it was a delight to spend the morning with these bright students. Side note: Good on them for being so engaged in an 8:30 am Thursday class! I loathed early classes as an undergrad.

Okay, so one of the theories I’m working on for my dissertation proposal is that Jesus shapes the emotions of his followers in the same way that socializing figures do today. Our caregivers and teachers and authority figures socialize us into appropriate emotions that will make us good members of our culture.

I draw from the work of affective psychologist and neuroscience researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett, who pioneered the theory of constructed emotion, and social psychologist Batja Mesquita, a leading expert on how cultures create emotions.

What are constructed emotions?

First, a quick overview of what it means that emotions are concepts we construct.

Paul Ekman advanced a theory of universal emotion that considers emotion to be innate and universal, meaning that all humans around the world experience the same basic emotions, and those emotions are inborn and have specific biological markers in the brain and body that distinguish emotions from each other. Ekman particularly focused on the facial expressions that accord to each emotion. Ekman’s work has been disputed by Barrett, who repeated his experiments on universal emotion and found his results were not reproducible. Barrett has since pursued affective neuroscience research leading to her theory of constructed emotion

If emotion is not innate and universal, what is it? Emotion is now becoming better understood as uniquely and socially constructed in a person and between persons. Emotions are concepts that function like other concepts in our minds. They are groups of instances that we lump together—for example, we know that “Apple” can be red, green, pink, or a combination of colors, and all variations belong to the same fruit, while similar color variations between small citrus fruits give us two different concepts; a green “Lime” and a yellow “Lemon.” Our minds can categorize known concepts in microseconds.

In the same way, I know that both effusive weeping and one tear on my cheek can be bodily experiences that lead me to construct an instance of “Sadness.” But someone from a different culture might construct a different emotion from their tears, such as the Polish emotion “Zal,” an untranslatable word that includes “melancholy felt at an irretrievable loss” as well as “disappointment, regret, and even violent fury.” (Tiffany Watt Smith, The Book of Human Emotions, 285).

If emotions are concepts, this means 1. we learn them as we grow up from our caregivers and wider culture, 2. we can learn new emotion concepts throughout our lives, and 3. every culture constructs different emotions.

Recap:

The innate/universal view: emotions are hardwired/inborn (and have identifiable biological fingerprints including facial expressions) and emotions are universal (same basic emotions across all cultures).

The socially constructed view: emotions are concepts, constructed in the moment based on interoception/memory/vocabulary/prediction, and they are socially shaped by each unique culture.

If emotions are socially constructed, how can we learn new emotions?

Learning new emotions

Mesquita writes about how socializing figures such as parents form the emotions of children.

• Parents or cultural agents help kids connect a cultural concept to an unfolding episode, rather than recognize their deep mental states – early life emotions are often connected to relational acts between people

• Provide them with emotion concepts to disambiguate what is going on

• The more emotion words the parents use, the more the kids learn

• Emotion concepts are containers holding instances of that emotion that seem different but belong to the same bucket

• Parents teach the culture’s values, meanings, social norms, and goals via emotions

• Cultural emotion concepts involve cultural collective memory

• Parents prompt appropriate behavior and emotional expression

• Parents create opportunities for kids to experience emotions

• Parents model culturally appropriate emotions with their own behavior

Barrett gives several ways to learn new emotions:

• Learn new emotion words: “Words seed your concepts, concepts drive your predictions, predictions regulate your body budget, and your body budget determines how you feel. Therefore, the more finely grained your vocabulary, the more precisely your predicting brain can calibrate your budget to your body’s needs.” “As you build up the associated concepts [to the new words you are learning] you’ll become able to construct your experiences more finely.”

• Learn emotion words in a new language. (Do you think you might start to construct “Zal” now?)

• Invent your own emotions concepts using conceptual combination and share them. Barrett invents an emotion concept called “Chiplessness”—it combines existing emotions like disappointment and thwarted desire to express the emotion of reaching the bottom of a bag of chips.

• Fine-grained categorization helps regulate emotions—when trying to handle a difficult emotion, the best strategy is to be mindful of how the body feels and finding specific ways to express that emotion. This works better than distracting yourself or trying to change how you think about it (cognitive reappraisal)

• Track your positive experiences each day so your brain will more quickly construct comfortable emotions in the future. For Christians, one way we can achieve that is daily gratitude in prayer.

• Parents can be their child’s emotion tour guide in life, and I think this also applies to the people we are mentoring or discipling.

Discussion: How did you learn your emotions? I would love to hear from you in the comments.

What emotions did your caregivers explicitly teach you? Implicitly? What emotions did they model for you?

What about your church? What emotions did they implicitly or explicitly teach you? What emotions did they model for you?

Did they teach you any emotions of the kingdom of God that are different from the emotions of your dominant culture?

And finally, how awesome is my Hobbiton dress?