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!
