“Mastering your Emotions” by Lisa Feldman Barrett: A Critical Perspective from a proud Hysteric

Social reality transmutes to physical reality. This is a major takeaway from this chapter in How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017) which details a constructionist view of emotions and provides biological evidence to affirm what many social scientists, sociologists, philosophers, artists and dancers have already been writing for centuries–that reducing complex phenomena like identity to strictly material processes can perpetuate corporealities of structural violence–as we come to embody and internalize the dominant Symbolic Order. I am from the philosophical camp that we are all faced with melancholy in the Lacanian ‘Real’ as we are stuck between the Symbolic (societal) and the Imaginary (physical) realms and I propose that from a psychoanalytic perspective dancing and embodying our desire creates a rupture back into the ‘Real’, which can offer important insights/incites towards biocultural change. A positioning that will take more of your time than I have here.

In this chapter, “Mastering your emotions” psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett masterfully (pun intended) integrates her discoveries from affective science, neuroscience, social psychology and philosophy to illuminate how the brain puts feelings together and how we can consciously contribute to these unconscious processes that sometimes overwhelm our experience of agency and empowerment. Her contributions offer a great deal to Dance/Movement Therapists (D/MT’s) looking for a non-pathologizing approach to working with clients across the lifespan in illness situations that present both physical and mental symptoms or who are working with emotional “regulation/dysregulation” (arguably every D/MT). The text may also be of interest to dance educators looking to incorporate wellness and somatic awareness into their dancemaking spaces, a consideration made more urgent by the collective illness situation of the Covid-19 pandemic. Barrett’s terminology is definitely that of a scientist in late capitalism, as she writes about balancing body budgets and fostering emotional intelligence, but her approach to explaining the theory of constructed emotion employs examples from popular culture and humorous anecdotes that end up making the material approachable to readers who may not have an interest in biology and neuroscience otherwise.

The reason I chose this chapter is that Barrett’s constructionist theory blurs the boundary between the physical and the social realms, especially where “illness” is concerned. The old essentialist, classical view (proposed by Darwin and continued by Eckman) keeps a strict division between mental and physical illness and informs why Western medical models send you to the doctor when you have a stomach ache, and to a psychiatrist if you are suffering from heart ache, for example. A constructionist approach however recognizes the tremendous variability and overlap of symptoms found in illnesses like anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and chronic stress that do not fit into clear physical/mental compartments. This is because of degeneracy in the brain–a counter model of Darwin and Eckman’s emotional fingerprint. Degeneracy is the finding that neural activation pertaining to the same emotional stimuli in different environments/situations will evoke different neural tract firing patterns. In short, there is no expressive recipe associated with each emotion/feeling in the brain. Barrett writes “Emotions are said to influence a variety of debilitating medical disorders like depression, anxiety, and unexplained chronic pain as well as metabolic function that lead to type 2 diabetes, heart disease and even cancer” (p. 200). This suggests that phenomena like physical pain and emotional stress are more intertwined than once recognized by researchers and applied by medical professionals within Western models of care. According to Barrett

this physical/mental blurring creates greater possibilities for answering many of the most perplexing questions doctors and therapists come across in their work: Are people who suffer with chronic pain with no identifiable tissue damage mentally ill? Why do so many people with heart disease develop depression? (ibid)

In regards to developing a more holistic or integrative approach Western models have been far less sophisticated than many indigenous systems of care which use sacred symbols like the Haudenosaunee Medicine Wheel to teach that physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of a person's healing must happen at every level for lasting change (Longboat 2019).

My excitement for future writing that includes dancing and dancemaking (Batson & Wilson 2014) in its recommendations towards balancing one’s body budget and learning to improve interoceptive potentials may overshadow my ability to see major gaps at this point. Barrett highlights meditation/mindfulness practices and exercise (p. 178), but misses dance or mindful dance/movement, which the somatic psychology literature evidences as an effective practice for integrating physical and mental perceptions of ‘Self’. If Barrett is right when she says that mindfully incorporating new words into our emotional lexicons will increase emotional intelligence by training responses to be granularly attuned to each situation (p. 179), then as many D/MT’s before me have proposed, incorporating new bodyful repertoires to express this expanding emotional vocabulary might compliment these improvements to wellbeing and lead to greater flourishing. Not to mention, populations with neurodegeneration or who are not neurotypical may require more physical outlets of expression if linguistic processing is not available to them. I propose an integrative bio-psycho-social model of emotional education that would be non-representational and not solely linguistic, but also expressive and focused on presencing emotions not just representing them; that is, finding a synchrony between one’s inner world (working with the interoceptive network and affect in the present) and the outer world (working with the concepts we learn through the Symbolic order in representation).

Interoception, Body Budget, and the predictive brain

Your interoceptive network is a fundamental feature of the nervous system which communicates your inner state to the brain and manufactures your feelings, otherwise called affect. According to Barrett your body budget is regulated by predictive circuitry in your interoceptive network (p. 177). Barrett is clear that interoception did not evolve so that we could have feelings but to balance our body budget and help brains “track temperature, how much glucose you are using, whether you may have tissue damage, whether your heart is pounding… and [crucially] your brain is always using past experiences to predict which objects and events will impact your body budget, changing your affect” (p. 73). This means humans tend to perceive what we believe based on our past experiences and concepts unless we are corrected by sensory inputs from the world (p. 76, emphasis my own). This is an important point for my project proposing that D/MT is a useful pathway to correcting these sensory inputs and changing patterns through both interoceptive and proprioceptive feedback (as Shafir 2016 also suggests). This is important on an individual level, but also has implications on a cultural level due to the phenomenon of affective realism. Barrett writes, “When you experience affect without knowing the cause, you are more likely to treat [it] as information about the world, rather than your experience about the world” (p. 75). This in turn can lead us to believe that objects and people in the world are inherently negative or positive instead of recognizing these as somatic associations that can be rewired. So, how does Barrett suggest we get out of predictive emotional patterning that leads to illness–both physical or cultural?

Deconstructing ‘Self’, Recategorization, Changing Location and Cultivating Awe

Deconstructing experiences of ‘Self’ into physical sensations and recategorizing them in the moment is a critical tool for mastering one's emotions in the moment according to Barrett (p. 188). She introduces the psychologist James A. Russell who produced the affective circumplex, a way of tracking affect that could be useful in the D/MT context to get a sense of where a client is at during check-in. I tend to use a sensorimotor approach (developed by Pat. Ogden) who has a slightly simpler model than Russell based on the idea of a “window of affective tolerance”. While easier to communicate to a client who may not be familiar with affect or the nervous system, I appreciate the notion that increasing granularity in terms of emotion concepts increases our ability to attune (a word I prefer to “regulate”) to the outside world. In practice I welcome any tool that helps the client herself formulate a relationship with affective states and communicate that with me. Many practitioners rely on the concept of kinesthetic empathy, (which they justify using the mirror neuron theory) but as my critique of Tal Shafir’s article suggests, the assumption that one can accurately feel or recognize what another is feeling is misguided. According to Barrett getting this wrong is highly probable and in the context of trauma therapy can do irreversible harm. Our predictive brains serve up prediction errors or poor appraisals and this is crucial to acknowledge within the helping professions to avoid false confidence in reading/feeling another person's body. Intense concentration, for example, can easily be mistaken for anxiety if a therapist focuses on the furrowed brow and internally oriented shape-flow of the client.

Nurturing better recognition in one's own body as to whether there is physical discomfort or affective distress is key to emotional intelligence. A recategorization of pain from mental to physical for example may offer relief as it need not be framed in the individual's experience as a personal catastrophe. Changing one's environment is also a key strategy to changing affective state, but this implies mobility which comes with its own set of politics and privileges.

Another strategy for “mastering” one’s emotions (or tapping into their hysteric/unconscious life) is to cultivate experiences of ‘awe’. This is interesting as ‘awe’ is a combination of two opposing emotions (fear and desire simultaneously, see Onians 1994) which according to the basic model should not be able to be experienced at the same time. According to Barrett, people who report feeling awe frequently also have the lowest levels of cytokines that cause inflammation, another case of physical/mental overlap (p.194). Perhaps this also makes a case for continuing the trend in the UK of social prescriptions to attend and view dance, where audience members may experience something novel that could cultivate an affective state of awe.

Why is this important to my research?

Emotions are not discrete products but are ongoing processes, and their relationship to pain–both mental and physical are of utmost interest to integrative development. Emotions may remain mysterious or worse become unbearable as in the case of psychache (ongoing mental anguish) leading to addiction and other maladaptive coping strategies if left unaddressed. As a consulting clinician at Boston Children’s Foundation and a newly elected board member to Dance and the Child International, I see learning, advocating for, and applying the ways dance/movement might help to build emotional intelligence and relieve distress as an important component of my work. Sadly, over half of the children in the United States suffer from one or more Adverse Childhood Experiences, such as: crime, neglect, abuse, witnessing domestic violence, substance abuse, or the loss of a parent and studies show that these traumatic events have far reaching implications into adult life by raising the likelihood of addictive behaviors, incarceration, and violence (Macy, et al., 2004). Ultimately this traumatic legacy is passed on to the next generation of innocent children (ibid). The predictive brain model can help us conceptualize how it is that stress transmutes across generations and encourages us to use the creative tools of dancing as preventative care (as many societies have done and continue to do) addressing physical, mental, emotional, and social formulations of self.

Works Cited

Barrett, Lisa Feldman. “‘Mastering Your Emotions.’” How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 2017, pp. 175–198.

Batson G & Wilson M (2014). Body and mind in motion: dance and neuroscience in conversation. Bristol: Intellect

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Hogarth Press, 1977.

Longboat, Diane. “Kahontakwas Diane Longboat.” The Office of the Governing Council, 18 Oct. 2019, https://governingcouncil.utoronto.ca/kahontakwas-diane-longboat.

Onians, John. Sight & insight: Essays on Art & Culture in Honour of G.H Gombrich at 85.Phaidon Press, 1994. pp. 11-33

Shafir, T. (2016). Using Movement to Regulate Emotion: Neurophysiological Findings and Their Application in Psychotherapy. [Perspective]. Frontiers in Psychology, 7(1451). doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01451

Mila VolpeFebruary 25, 2022