BS 199 with Batja Mesquita

(Excerpt from Episode Transcript)

Dr. Campbell: I want to thank Batja Mesquita for taking the time to talk with me. I highly recommend her book, Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions for listeners of all backgrounds.

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As I mentioned in my introduction, today's discussion of Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions by Batja Mesquita complements episode 135 with Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made. I recommend both of these books to anyone who is interested in emotion, no matter what your background.

As I review today's episode, I want to give you a sense of how my own thinking has evolved over the years. I've always considered understanding emotion to be one of the primary topics of Brain Science, because it's something that affects everyone.

My first discussion of emotion was in episode 11, which was posted over 15 years ago, back in early 2007. I don't remember much about that episode, except that I did introduce the famous experiments by Paul Ekman that claimed to show that people across cultures can recognize emotions via facial expressions. I'll come back to the evidence against that conclusion in a few minutes.

Around 2010, I discovered the work of Jaak Panksepp who argued that emotion has subcortical origins that are shared across mammals. He argued for the existence of several universal affective circuits.

And although his work has not been replicated, he made key contributions to the field, including realizing that animals have feelings even if they're different from our own. And that the origins of affect appears to be subcortical.

Then along, came Lisa Feldman Barrett. She challenged Panksepp’s interpretations as well as the assumption that emotions are something innate and universal. She and her coworkers have produced convincing evidence that emotions or feelings, depending on how you define your terms, are learned, and therefore, culturally based.

In How Emotions Are Made, Barrett debunks much of the presumed evidence for universal innate emotions. I want to share just two examples.

One is the idea that there are reliable physiological markers for particular emotions. This is important because this forms the basis for things like lie detector test. Here is a simple example of how this assumption fails.

Consider the experience of your heart racing. Based on context, you might experience several emotions; not just fear or anxiety, you might feel excited or even sexually attracted to someone.

Now, let's return to Paul Ekman's famous experiments with the natives of Papua New Guinea who allegedly recognized emotions from a set of staged pictures. They actually had to choose from a list of emotion words that had been translated from English.

When the experiment was repeated without the list so that they could spontaneously choose, the results were completely different. It turns out that when we judge emotions from facial expression, context is critically important. That's why I worry about the use of artificial intelligence or AI tools to supposedly pick out suspicious people based on their facial expressions.

With all that background in mind, let's consider the key ideas from today's interview. The first key idea is that how we experience emotion is not only learned, but there's diversity across cultures.

As Mesquita’s experience showed, this diversity exists even among Western cultures that seem fairly similar. Based on this realization, Mesquita shared two different ways of thinking about emotions; the MINE model and the OURS model.

MINE stands for Mental INside the person, and Essentialist, which means that emotions always have the same properties. This contrasts with the OURS model, which is Outward Relational and Situational. So, emotions take on different shapes depending on the situation.

It's important to realize that both aspects of emotions occur in all cultures, but the emphasis may be different. So, in the West, we tend to be inside-out oriented or MINE-oriented.

How we view emotions has consequences, especially in a world that is becoming increasingly diverse. We considered some examples such as teachers misunderstanding the body language of their students.

But the biggest take-home point is, don't assume you know what someone else is thinking or feeling. And if you ask, believe their answer, don't discount their experience because it is different from what you consider to be normal or expected.

That's why it's important to understand that based on mounting evidence, emotions are not something innate and universal. They are learned from our culture and each of us has a slightly different experience.

I want to encourage everyone to read Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions by Batja Mesquita. The show notes for this episode will include a list of related episodes, especially for those of you who are new to the topic. And I hope you will let me know what you think by sending me email at brainsciencepodcast.com.

I also hope you will share this episode with others because it's a great example of the practical importance of learning how our brain makes us human.

Next month will be episode 200 and I will be talking with two guests about how embodied cognition affects how we learn and how it should be influencing how we teach.

Thanks so much for listening, I look forward to talking with you again very soon.

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