Are emotions inherent or constructed?

Much of this pandemic-stricken 2020 has been a year of anxiety, consternation, and frustration, even despair. A passel of negative emotions has swept through us all during lockdown, making us, to some extent, feel united in our suffering.

The concern of contracting the virus while availing public transport, the agony of not being able to meet a loved one who is in self-isolation, the disdain for those who have been careless in combating Covid-19, have been real, palpable emotions. Or have they?

Could it be that over the last few months, as indeed since time immemorial, the emotions we have been feeling have not been what they seem. Or maybe they have not been at all?

Could it be that far from being hardwired into our biology, emotions are simply a cultural myth we choose to believe in?

Does the case for emotions being constructed rather than inherent really hold water?

A matter of collective intentionality

In her revolutionary book How Emotions Are Made (that ought to have received more attention than it has), psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett deconstructs the most basic and widespread assumptions about emotions.

A professor at the Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, Barrett argues against what she calls the “classical” view of emotions – the understanding that distinct emotions are generated by distinct parts of the brain, making the most fundamental emotions like happiness, disappointment, anger, among others, universally recognisable across humanity.

Barrett contends that emotions are not present in the brain waiting to be triggered. There are no emotions resting inside our skulls that can be identified as delight or delirium, ecstasy or exhaustion. Instead, all emotions are created spontaneously by several parts of the brain working in tandem alongside a person’s previous experiences, the peculiarities of language and upbringing.

In other words, emotions are acts of construction, examples of “collective intentionality”, wherein a social reality comes into being not because it exists by itself but because we animate it with our collective belief in it.

Thus, happiness is true in the same way that money is. Just as a piece of paper acquires value due to a consensus in its worth, happiness is born because people invest their trust and knowledge in making it a reality, imbuing it with a meaning that depends on context and culture.

This is not to discredit the biological reality that sensations are being processed at all times inside our bodies, as we respond to environmental stimuli and assess the best physiological response to survive in our surroundings. This is to say that labelling these sensations (and their combinations) as an assortment of emotions is a way of stepping out of the technicalities of biology and into the creativity of communication that humans as a species have learnt to master.

Saying is feeling

Barrett notes how the Tahitians have no concept of ‘sadness’ and the Utka Eskimos never display what many of us conventionally know to be ‘anger’. Does this mean that the Tahitians are always upbeat and the Utka Eskimos literally have ice running through their veins?

Most certainly not. What it means is that the way we experience emotions is a product of a complex curation of words that have undergone gradual transformations over time. This has led to the emergence of concepts – say pleasure or pain – that club together different sensations and categorise them as a single emotion (pain) or a group of related emotions (ache, discomfort, torture, struggle, etc). Depending on the depth of our vocabulary, we then describe this emotion using a small set of words or a more elaborate spectrum that aims at “emotional granularity” – splitting similar emotions from each other.

In Barrett’s worldview, there is no room for essentialisation of emotion. Since there is no such thing as authentic joy or genuine misery, each one of us can be architects of our own emotions, adjusting and adapting our individual joys and miseries and converting them into personal artefacts of experience.

This explains why the feeling of watching a picturesque sunset cannot be the same for two people. For even if both of them think they feel exhilarated, their exhilaration is actually unique and unrepeatable, conditioned by their previous memories of a sunset and a notion of exhilaration that has been individualised, even if it cannot always be articulated.

Emotion as enigma

Have you ever felt a surge of comfort and composure course through your body when your plane touches down at your home city or your car bends into the corner that leads to your childhood neighbourhood? Would you describe this feeling as a separate emotion? If yes, what would it be called? Relief, revitalisation, reassurance? Maybe all three? How about ‘homefulness’, an emotion that combines all the other emotions mentioned in this paragraph into a succinct and comprehensive whole.

Homefulness, incidentally, is also an emotion that has appealed to cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith, the author of The Book of Human Emotions, a tome that does precisely what it says – documenting a compelling catalogue of terms that sums up how contextualised emotions can be.

Watt Smith exhibits several fascinating instances of how emotions are specific to the socio-cultural context in which they are conceived, rendering them incapable of translation (at least in the form of a single word or phrase) into English. For example, Koreans have an emotion that nestles hope and sadness simultaneously, while in Scandinavia, each country has a specific term to represent the coziness and warmth that is felt when in the company of dear ones on a cold day!

In Portuguese, there is saudade – the pining for something or someone that is absent, blending melancholy and nostalgia with a dash of romantic passion. The English equivalent for this is, unsurprisingly, non-existent.

The presence of all these diverse emotions points at two things.

First, the status of English as a global lingua franca has resulted in the inadvertent imposition of some emotions that have ascended to the status of common or basic, all the while suppressing the prevalence of indigenous emotions that can often be far more intricate, not to mention, intoxicating.

Second, the business of emotions is a constant negotiation between what really happens to the body and what is perceived to happen to the body through culture and language.

But, then again, if an emotion is not natural and inherent but artificial and constructed, does it make the act of emoting any less powerful?

Perhaps it does for some, perhaps it does not for others. This question, like the world of emotions, is an open one.

The more important aspect behind the subjectivity of emotions is that it provides each one of us with a personal palette of feelings, one that is not constrained by the rigid taxonomy of the laboratory, but open to the richness of human expression and the inevitable enigma that is life itself.

(Priyam Marik is a freelance journalist writing on politics, culture and sport)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.