Emotions, Trauma, and Predicting Differently
I came across a nice 5-minute video from someone that has a lot of research I've been following lately (link here).
Her book How Emotions Are Made introduces the foundations of her research. But essentially, she started off her psychology career wanting to increase education on emotions. She noticed a lot of folks could not identify emotions based off pictures of faces (she used Tomkins' test of faces). So, she started designing her experiments but she couldn’t find significant results that support the notion that any one face represents this one emotion. Then, she started to see research saying that emotional recognition varied across cultures. Adding onto that, she wondered about this idea of universal emotions. After doing a meta-analysis, there were no significant results for the notion that emotions are located in one area of the brain over another. From this she builds her constructivist view of emotions. We learn to recognize emotions only through our predictions of what these faces mean. And when it comes to her neuroimaging studies on emotion recognition, she found that the areas originally thought to house emotions are actually responding more when there’s something new in the environment.
She builds off of this idea of the brain responding to novel stimuli when she incorporates the term 'uncertainty'.
Zooming out of her work for a moment, the research program Active Inference talks about the brain's use of predictions in the world (echoed by Barrett in this video). For humans, the goals is to have an internal model of the world that closely aligns with the outside - yet we can never have a perfect model. So when it comes to missing the mark, our brains experience this 'uncertainty' (it's also called free energy in Active Inference) and our brains try to minimize that uncertainty either by changing the environment (do something to change what you're experiencing) or changing what we believe about what happened (so that we're prepared for next time).
Back to Barrett, her constructivist view of emotions now incorporates Active Inference. If our brains respond to novel situations then what we are doing is responding to uncertainty. And as she goes on to say in this video, so often our mental health diagnoses are actually engrained patterns of predictions. What happens is that we want to predict the trauma and are uncertain about anything new (could be very potentially dangerous) and so we don't take in new experiences. But, like she goes on to say, that means we are reinforcing those models. Without learning (and she does a great job of giving examples of learning), we cannot move into a place where we take control of our predictions. If we can start predicting how we will feel then perhaps we can be surprised in a good way when we find that we're actually able to not be so crippled by our trauma.
One of the most helpful elements of her research, and Active Inference overall, is the stance that we can have a mental connection with how our body responds - and we can talk to our bodies. Dr. Barrett even goes as far to say that we do not have a lizard brain, but you'll have to read more for yourself!
Elmo and the Need for Play
Earlier this week, Elmo (@elmo) posted on X, formerly Twitter, the following: “Elmo is just checking in! How is everybody doing?” The response was wholly unpredicted. Read the response here.
As you can read in the post, individuals quickly went to tell Elmo just how not-good they were actually doing! Not only did this surprise me, but it also didn’t surprise me in a way. I think because everyone’s responses showed just how deeply they were feeling, especially ever since coming out of the pandemic. The response strikes a cord with just how important those childhood sense of belonging, having things together, and being free to imagine are.
Jaak Panksepp was a researcher who did a phenomenal job illustrating how 7 different emotions can be so important that they actually emphasize 7 engrained brain networks - that every individual has! One of those networks is Play. Now, I capitalize that because he does but, I think it’s also good just for emphasizing that everyone should pay attention to Play. Coming at this from a more primal approach, one of the purposes that Panksepp outlines for play is this: that fundamentally, when we play we are putting ourselves out there for the other person to interact with. Play is a moment to decide what it looks like to dominate an interaction or decide to let the other person win (to “gracefully disengage, submit, or accept defeat" (2012, p. 355). We present ourselves to another person, we interact to see first who will come out on top; but then, it starts to transform into this space where you know where you stand with the other person. The friendship blossoms. The friend learns that there’s healthy give-and-take. But beautifully, you start to create a space where you are known - and children are doing this. Panksepp calls it the “stratified social fabric” (p. 355). It’s the idea that Play is ultimately meant to help us learn how find our place with others.
Back to Elmo, I imagine that when people saw the tweet they went back to a place where they knew where they stood in the world. They were drawn back to that place of childhood belonging. And as it may have been completely counter to what’s expected on social media, everyone embraced that space as this collective space where you belong. That was the magic of Elmo. That was the magic of Play.
It makes sense that the post had that response because when people saw that it was Elmo asking, they knew it was a safe space. Beautifully, everyone was transported emotionally to this collective place where they were known. And that is the reason Play is so important. Without it, we lose the sense that someone else out there might not be against us, might give us a shot, and might not tell us all the things we don’t want to believe about ourselves.
Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The archaeology of mind: Neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.