Let’s examine a book written for the wider public that discusses a common topic in psychology – emotions. Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) – How Emotions Are Made promotes an allegedly new and scientific outlook on the field. Following the previous post, this book will serve as an illustration of contemporary psychological literature. As with all things psychology in this blog, criticism is unavoidably imminent. Nevertheless, radical behaviorist conditioning shall always allow us to extract something useful:
Many behavioral scholars, having spent much of their professional lifetimes scrutinizing psychological literature for useful items, have grown skilled at finding them.
Lawrence Fraley & Stephen Ledoux (1997, p. 26) – Chapter 5 of Origins, Status and Mission of Behaviorology
Every sour has its sweet
The book has come to my attention while reading the 2nd quarter issue of 2020 of the Operants magazine where Joe Layng discussed a behavioral interpretation of emotions:
We experience a range of emotions which we may or may not share with others. In describing our emotions we have a problem. As B. F. Skinner pointed out, the problem lies with how we learn our emotion words. We are trained by verbal communities, that have no access to what we are privately experiencing, to use words to express our emotions. The best we can do is teach certain words occasioned by instances of observable behavior as it occurs under certain conditions.
Joe Layng (2020) – Emotions In The Time Of A Pandemic: Beyond Cognition And Behavior. in Operants Q2 2020
There is no certainty that the behavior is actually accompanied by a private experience of sadness, or anxiousness, or excitement, for example. We can never know if the anger we feel is the same as what others feel, or that any particular physiological change is always experienced as anger. Since accurate discrimination training is impossible, there is no possibility of accurately tacting these inner, private events. But are there not common measurable physiological changes occurring that we can learn to describe? Neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman-Barrett in her book How Emotions are Made suggests there are not.
As was stated in Layng’s discussion, the 3 initial chapters of How Emotions Are Made provide the main take-away for the radical behaviorist: phenomena expressed by emotion words are not fixed reactions – neither physiological, nor cerebral, nor facial. Emotional vocabulary is emitted in various conditions and reflects general patterns of contingencies:
… the emotion is part of the contingency; in a sense, it describes it.
When we tell others we fear something, they readily understand there is an event where distancing ourselves from the event is a reinforcer.
We may also experience reinforcer loss, typically described by sadness. We may find we want to drive those situations away. Where behavior is reinforced by distancing the event, rather than removing oneself, we typically report feeling angry.
To change emotions we change contingencies.
Joe Layng (2020) – Emotions In The Time Of A Pandemic: Beyond Cognition And Behavior. in Operants Q2 2020
Lisa Feldman Barrett affirms in her book that emotion words are evoked by variable conditions – this leads to the realisation of the importance of cultural conditions and individual history:
It means that on different occasions, in different contexts, in different studies, within the same individual and across different individuals, the same emotion category involves different bodily responses. Variation, not uniformity, is the norm. (p. 15)
An emotion word such as “anger,” therefore, names a population of diverse instances… (p. 35) <..> In our culture, one goal in “Anger” is to overcome an obstacle that someone blameworthy has put in your path. (p. 100)
Your experiences become encoded in your brain’s wiring and can eventually change the wiring, increasing the chances that you’ll have the same experience again, or use a previous experience to create a new one (p. 281)
The human brain is structured to learn many different concepts and to invent many social realities, depending on the contingencies it is exposed to. (p. 282-283)
Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) – How Emotions Are Made
A long winter after a brief summer
Beyond the refutation of objective emotional reactions, the search for useful knowledge in the book is much more troublesome. As has been previously argued for psychological literature in general, Barrett’s book in particular continues the unscientific traditions – it is ignorant of proper behavioral science, overloaded with terminology, haunted with psychologisations of behavior and generally stuck in Cartesian dualism.
Behavioral ignorance
The progress of the 20th century behavioral science is overlooked and misrepresented in the discipline of psychology. Unsurprisingly, the current author is simply not aware of Skinner’s science and philosophy:
To be sure, faces are instruments of social communication. Some facial movements have meaning, but others do not, and right now, we know precious little about how people figure out which is which, other than that context is somehow crucial (body language, social situation, cultural expectation, etc.).
Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017, p. 11-12) – How Emotions Are Made
More-so we find the staple demonisation of behaviorism:
Thus began the most notorious historical period in psychology, called behaviorism. Emotions were redefined as mere behaviors for survival: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating, collectively known as the “four F’s.” To a behaviorist, “happiness” equaled smiling, “sadness” was crying, and “fear” was the act of freezing in place. And so, the nagging problem of finding the fingerprints of emotional feelings was, with the flick of a pen, defined out of existence.
Ultimately, most scientists rejected behaviorism because it ignores a basic fact: that each of us has a mind, and in every waking moment of life, we have thoughts and feelings and perceptions. These experiences, and their relation to behavior, must be explained in scientific terms.
Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017, p. 171) – How Emotions Are Made
It is obvious that Barrett has not been introduced to the definition of behavior and has not been acquainted with basics of verbal behavior. For the record, radical behaviorists regard emotional words such as sadness or fear as behavior, that follows the same operant principles as any other form of behavior – the evocation of a word is reinforced in particular contexts – this is what we refer to when we speak about “meaning” of a word.
Terminological flood
I’ve counted at least 40 different terms that are introduced in the book – mostly references to circular cognitive concepts and brain functioning. These include simulation, construction, priming, interoception, the clumsily named degeneracy, affect, valence, goals, concepts, mental inference etc. To discuss all the terms separately would simply be too tiresome and wouldn’t be particularly useful. A couple examples will have to suffice.
Throughout the book, Barrett discusses how your brain issues millions of predictions every second:
At the level of brain cells, prediction means that the neurons over here, in this part of your brain, tweak the neurons over there, in that part of your brain, without any need for a stimulus from the outside world. Intrinsic brain activity is millions and millions of nonstop predictions.
Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017, p. 59) – How Emotions Are Made
To understand why the author should claim such things we have to remember her neuroscientist background. The source of control are neuro-imaging studies, which show brains “lighting up” under practically any conditions, for example. Simply, the activity of the brighter areas are identified as predictions.
Primitive teleology is displayed as well:
Yet your brain lumps all these instances into the same category because they can achieve the same goal, safety from [bee] stings. In fact, the goal is the only thing that holds together the category. <..> Emotion concepts are goal-based concepts.
Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017, p. 92) – How Emotions Are Made
This analysis does not provide a clear and parsimonious account of human behavior. Perhaps it doesn’t have to? If we recognize psychology as a political tool, the introduction of further confusion for the layperson regarding behavior might just be instrumental. This is mostly advantageous for corporate behavioral control, where power depends not on idealistic or conceptual analysis but on power and the ability to gather huge amounts of data.
Reactionary psychologisation
The author expresses an overwhelmingly short-sighted and naive interpretation of world events:
Belief in the classical view [of emotions] can even start wars. The Gulf War in Iraq was launched, in part, because Saddam Hussein’s half-brother thought he could read the emotions of the American negotiators and informed Saddam that the United States wasn’t serious about attacking. The subsequent war claimed the lives of 175,000 Iraqis and hundreds of coalition forces. (p. xiv)
As a real-world example, pick any extended conflict in the world: Israelis versus Palestinians, Hutus versus Tutsis, Bosnians versus Serbs, Sunni versus Shia. Climbing out on a limb here, I’d like to suggest that no living member of these groups is at fault for the anger that they feel toward each other, since the conflicts in question began many generations ago. But each individual today does bear some responsibility for continuing the conflict, because it’s possible for each person to change their concepts and therefore their behavior. (p. 154)
Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) – How Emotions Are Made
Once again, such psychologisation of social and political processes misses crucial factors in the persistence of mentioned conflicts and serves to divert attention from economical interests of the parties involved – relevant thoughts by Noam Chomsky and Marvin Harris have been previously cited.
Furthermore, Lisa Feldman Barrett praises the neurologist Helen S. Mayberg and believes that “mental health” problems can be treated by deep brain stimulation:
Everything you feel is based on prediction from your knowledge and past experience. You are truly an architect of your experience. Believing is feeling.
Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017, p. 78) – How Emotions Are Made
These ideas are not just speculation. Scientists with the right equipment can change people’s affect by directly manipulating body-budgeting regions that issue predictions. Helen S. Mayberg, a pioneering neurologist, has developed a deep brain stimulation therapy for people suffering from treatment-resistant depression.
These statements prove to be ungrounded. The belief that behavioral problems are isolated in the activity of the brain is preposterous. Moreover, the cited methods have shown dubious results and may even include a conflict of interest.
After repeated babblings about the brain and the person as a creator or architect of one’s experience’s, the author unsurprisingly comes to a fitting conclusion:
When you’re a baby, you can’t choose the concepts that other people put into your head. But as an adult, you absolutely do have choices about what you expose yourself to and therefore what you learn, which creates the concepts that ultimately drive your actions, whether they feel willful or not. So “responsibility” means making deliberate choices to change your concepts. (p. 154)
If you grow up in a society full of anger or hate, you can’t be blamed for having the associated concepts, but as an adult, you can choose to educate yourself and learn additional concepts. (p. 155)
Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) – How Emotions Are Made
The implication is that changes to social conditions will never be prescribed because adults individually always can and have to “choose” their concepts themselves.
Cartesian dualism
Finally, it has already been argued that psychology is stranded in the 17th century mindset. How Emotions Are Made neatly illustrates this point where it is still possible to separate the self from the brain and from the mind:
It also demonstrates that you’re not at the mercy of emotions that arise unbidden to control your behavior. You are an architect of these experiences. Your river of feelings might feel like it’s flowing over you, but actually you’re the river’s source. (p. 57)
The law protects the integrity of your anatomical body but not the integrity of your mind, even though your body is just a container for the organ that makes you who you are — your brain. Emotional harm is not considered real unless accompanied by physical harm. Mind and body are separate. (Let’s all raise a glass to René Descartes here.) (p. 241)
Natural selection favors a complex brain. Complexity, not rationality, makes it possible for you to be an architect of your experience. Your genes allow you, and others, to remodel your brain and therefore your mind. (p. 282)
Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) – How Emotions Are Made
Conclusion – the bizarre impasse of psychology
To Barrett’s (or rather her individual history’s) credit, the book is an attempt to introduce a context based interpretation of emotions. Nevertheless, this movement is stunted by lifelong idealistic conditioning, by the sheer amount of cultural mentalistic notions and by the social acceptance of explanations that are mere explanatory fictions. These problems become more intelligible when psychology is understood not as a scientific endeavor, but rather a cultural and political one:
Indeed, psychology as a modern discipline of the self is a political apparatus of modern society to develop and sustain consumers. (p. 56)
Psychology has an explanation for everything because it locates the sources of everything within the self. (p. 64)
Historically, of course, psychological theories are shown to be full of inaccuracies, and new models are superimposed as corrections, only to be later discarded when the next fashionable, new theory emerges on the scene. This provisional nature of psychological ‘truth’ is not simply (as some psychologists would like to argue) a matter of improving techniques and accuracy, rather, it reflects the shifting political sense of what it is to be human and the adaptation of psychological ‘science’ to fit such shifts. Psychological theories, as we have noted, tend to mirror the political climate; for instance, cognitive ‘science’ mirrors the growing importance of information technology and the uniformity of global finance-based capitalism. (p. 64-65)
Jeremy Carrette & Richard King (2005) – Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion
Radical behaviorist leftist 