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Where do your emotions come from?

Matt Hussey

• 4 min read
Where do your emotions come from?

Do you always make a sad face when you’re upset, or an angry face when raging? Apparently, I do not. So much so I've often been described as "very difficult to read". Put me in a car, on the other hand, and I'm racked with road rage in about five minutes. That got me to thinking over the weekend, where do emotions come from and how do we express them?

Prehistoric fear 🦖

According to psychologist Arne Ohman, we get some of our emotions from our ancestors. In a slightly sadistic experiment, he showed people images of spiders and then images of flowers and shocked participants with a small amount of electricity.

When he showed people the images of spiders again, he found they had a more fearful response - measured by raised blood pressure and higher heartbeat. However, the opposite happened with images of flowers. Ohman had to shock the people multiple times to generate the same fearful response.

What Ohman was trying to prove is that our fear response comes from a time when we lived in a world where spiders signified danger, and in some cases, death. Whereas flowers, unless you have crippling hay fever, do not.

But where exactly are those emotions being expressed in our brains?

No emotions here 😶

There is no single brain region dedicated to any single emotion. In fact, to emotion altogether, according to pioneering psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, and her book How Emotions Are Made.

When her team went looking for parts of the brain responsible for emotion via brain imaging, they found the parts of the brain we thought were solely responsible for feelings were active when we weren't feeling very much at all. So what's going on?

Barrett argues that emotions arise when our brains are trying to convey what's happening in our bodies to our conscious selves. These messages bubble up from an autopilot system called “interoception”, which is receiving information from two different sources.  

The first is what Barrett calls the “body-budgeting region”. It’s the equivalent of a resource manager, trying to understand what’s going on and divvy up energy, blood, and hormones to the things it thinks you might need. So if you’re out jogging, your body budgeting region says "release more glucose" to keep you going. If you're knee-deep in a Netflix series, meanwhile, your mind manager tells your organs to get on with things while nothing else is happening.


The second region of the brain important for emotion forming is the “primary interoceptive cortex”. This is where our brains are trying to work out sensations in the body: for example when we feel butterflies in our stomach. It's the combination of the two that provide the building blocks for emotion.

If there is an imbalance in resources and a raised heart rate, for example, our brains translate this to an agitated state. If there are plenty of resources and our heart rates slow, this is a restive state, which our brains might translate to a sense of happiness.

The remaining pieces of the emotional puzzle come from our culture.

Brain drain 📉

You’re on a crowded train (remember those?) and someone pushes into you while trying to get out the door. You’re annoyed and a bit stressed.

The author argues this is because your brain is trying to process all this new information and it’s becoming unbalanced, causing you to feel a bit peeved.

The peeved bit is your brain’s explanation for the imbalance. On top of that, culturally, being shoved past is a sign of rudeness, so we add on a dollop of "hey this is not the done thing here, stop being a dick". The context, and the convention for our experiences are determined by the worlds we live in, says Barratt.

Greek grins 😊

Take the history of smiling as an example. Today, we associate smiling with happiness. The ancient Greeks and Romans however, had no word for “smile”. Smiling only came into fashion once dentistry improved the appearance of our teeth during the 18th century.

Having good teeth, was a sign of healthiness which, we now connect with happiness. Weird isn’t it? On top of that, when photography first came along no one smiled, because there was no convention to smile in photographs.

According to photo historians, smiling only emerged decades after photography was invented. The reason, early photographs emulated what people looked like in paintings. Smiling in art was often seen, through the eyes of the prudish Victorians, as a sign of lewdness, or madness. It was only in the 20th century when those formal ideas began to wane, and smiling crept in.

Learning the feels 🤔

Sadness, happiness, anger, disappointment, and depression aren’t universal emotions, says Barratt. They are concepts we start learning from the moment we’re born, from our parents and from society. Of course, babies experience pain and pleasure, but these are seen as 'affects' rather than emotions.

So what does it all mean? The more we learn about describing and distinguishing emotional concepts, the better we can get at conveying them to others, and ourselves.

Emotions are like learning a language. Take the word Schadenfreude for example. There is no English equivalent for taking pleasure in the misfortune of others, but when someone says the German word, we instantly understand that feeling, but have no word to describe it. We have effectively learned an emotion.  

When we receive all these messages about how the body is feeling, our brains attempt to translate them into words and concepts we can understand. But it's not all that precise.

Take the sensation of feeling butterflies in our stomach: that physical feeling can be felt when we're excited, nervous, shocked or sick. We have to guess what that sensation means, depending on what's happening around us.

The good news is, the more time you spend on learning to express these imprecise sensations, the better you get at understanding how you feel, and hopefully those around you, too.

Ok, where can I learn more? 📚

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