226: Where emotions come from (and why it matters) Part 1

Adrian:: 00:02

Hi, I'm Adrian in suburban Chicagoland, and this is Your Parenting Mojo with Jen Lumanlan. Jen is working on a series of episodes based on the challenges you are having with your child. From toothbrushing to sibling fighting, to the endless resistance to whatever you ask, Jen will look across all the evidence from thousands of scientific papers, across a whole range of topics related to parenting and child development to help you see solutions to the issue you're facing that hadn't seemed possible before.

Adrian:: 00:33

If you'd like a personalized answer to your challenge, just make a video if possible, or an audio clip if not, that's less than one minute long that describes what's happening and email it to support@YourParentingMojo.com. And listen out for your episodes soon.

Jen Lumanlan:: 00:53

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Have you ever wondered where our emotions come from? Do you think that if you look at a person's face, you can have a pretty good idea of how they're feeling? But at the same time, do your child's feelings often seem mysterious to you, like you can't figure them out? The idea of where our emotions come from has a lot of important implications for how we try to understand our children's emotions, as well as for how we talk about them. So we might look at our child and see them scowling and think, well, I can tell that they're angry right now. But if we did that, then a decent chunk of the time, we might be wrong. Not all people scowl when they're feeling angry. And here you might be thinking, well, my child always scowls when they're angry. But people also scowl for other reasons too. They might be feeling upset that their foot hurts, and they're going to have to miss a sports event that they've been really looking forward to, or perhaps frustrated that we said no to them about something, but not fully angry.

Jen Lumanlan:: 01:49

There's a lot of parenting advice out there these days about letting your child feel their feelings, and naming feelings, and not stuffing feelings down. But sometimes you might also wonder, well, how much is too much? What if my child seems to get stuck in their difficult feelings and can't get out of them? At what point is empathizing you seem really frustrated right now, no longer helpful? These are the kinds of questions we're going to get at in two episodes on this topic. We're joined by two very special guests. Firstly, we have a listener, Akiko. She's the one who introduced our second guest's work to me, and that's Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett.

Jen Lumanlan:: 02:24

Dr. Barrett is the author of over 275 peer-reviewed articles on the topic of emotions.

She is among the top 0.1% of cited scientists in the world. She is a university distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University. She also holds appointments in the departments of psychiatry and radiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is also chief science officer for the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior. She's the author of the books How Emotions Are Made and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

Jen Lumanlan:: 02:54

Dr. Barrett's work describes a theory of how emotions are constructed in your brain and are expressed by your body that is quite different from what you might have assumed or believed was the case up to this point. Whenever I interview a scientist, and especially when I co-interview with someone who has their own interests and ideas that they want to explore, it's pretty much inevitable that we're going to run out of time to discuss all the things we want to talk about. And we could easily have spent 20 minutes laying the groundwork to describe the theory in the interview. But I think it's the implications of her theory that are the most interesting part in terms of what it means for us as parents who can sometimes struggle with our emotional responses, as well as what we teach our children about emotions. So that's what I wanted to spend most of the time discussing with her and Akiko.

Jen Lumanlan:: 03:36

In this introduction, I'm going to give you an overview of the theory so you can be oriented towards it before the conversation starts. And I ended up breaking the whole thing down into two episodes so I could provide the groundwork now and also draw some conclusions about this first half of the conversation at the end, as well as some broader conclusions at the end of the second episode and not have the whole thing be massively overwhelming. So if you've thought at all about where emotions come from before now, chances are you're familiar with what Dr. Barrett calls the classical view, which is that emotions are inborn and they're universal.

And that means that in every part of the world, people experience feelings like sadness in the same way that you do.

Jen Lumanlan:: 04:16

Emotions are a kind of reflex that you can't control. They're often at odds with rationality.

We get angry instantaneously and we want to lash out at our kids when they do something they know drives us up the wall. But our rationality reminds us that this is not aligned with our values. This view of emotions has been around for millennia, from the time of Plato through Aristotle, the Buddha, Charles Darwin. It's still taught in every intro to psychology college textbook, in Sesame Street and in the Pixar movie Inside Out.

Jen Lumanlan:: 04:44

Our legal system holds us to a lower standard of responsibility if we can show that we weren't in control of our emotions at the time we committed a crime. The Transportation Security Administration spent $900 million to teach agents to detect deception and assess risk based on facial and bodily movements, but it didn't work. If a woman goes to the doctor complaining of chest pressure and shortness of breath, she's more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety and sent home, while men are more likely to be diagnosed with heart disease and receive life-saving treatment. Doctors think they can detect emotions like anxiety and that women are inherently more emotional than men, so women over the age of 65 die more frequently of heart attacks than men do because they don't get the right treatment. Dr Barrett has marshaled a lot of scientific evidence that calls into question this classical view that emotions have unique fingerprints in our feelings and in our faces and bodies. So how did the classical view get so embedded?

Jen Lumanlan:: 05:43

Darwin has to accept a good chunk of the blame, because in his book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, he claimed that emotions and their expressions were an ancient part of universal human nature. All people, everywhere in the world, he said, could exhibit and recognize facial expressions of emotion without any training whatsoever. In the 1960s, some psychologists decided to test this idea, so they coached some actors to give clear examples of facial expressions for six basic emotions. These were anger, fear, disgust, surprise, sadness, and happiness, even though the actors weren't actually experiencing most of those emotions when the photographs were taken, they were acting. And then the scientists showed the pictures to a bunch of people in a whole bunch of different countries and asked them how the people in the photos were feeling. Except they didn't just show the pictures. Often they would show the picture along with the six emotion words and ask the participant to choose which emotion the person in the photo was feeling. Another variation tells participants her mother died and she feels very sad, and then asks them to pick the appropriate face. When you do the test this way, about 85% of people in Eurocentric countries can match the face with the expected word, and about 72% of people in countries like Japan, Ethiopia, and Turkey can do it. But when you show the participant the photo without the list of potential words and just ask them, what is this emotion? Participants only match the faces with the expected emotion words 58% of the time, and in subsequent studies, the results were even lower. If you show photos of two different actors and ask participants if the people in the photos are feeling the same emotion, and they only have to answer yes or no, the matches are correct only 42% of the time.

Jen Lumanlan:: 07:24

Dr. Barrett has also tested people who have temporarily disabled emotion concepts, which you do by saying an emotion word like anger over and over and over again until it becomes disconnected from its meaning, and then performance on these kinds of tests dropped to 36%.

They tested subjects with semantic dementia, which is associated with permanent brain (7:45) lesions. The patients were unable to group the faces by emotion and only produced positive, negative, and neutral piles of photos.

Jen Lumanlan:: 07:54

Finally, researchers tested toddlers. They taught the toddlers the meaning of the words, but then the toddlers still couldn't even match two pouting faces, even though they could match a pouting face with the word sad. An emotion concept is a way of making meaning out of the sensory signals that your brain receives from your body and from the world. If our stomach aches and the leftovers we ate for dinner last night were a week old, we might conclude we have food poisoning. That same stomach ache might be experienced as dread if we're about to see our in-laws and we don't have a good relationship with them, or anxiety if we get a call from our child's preschool that they hit another child. We're combining the information about our stomach ache, along with the food we've eaten, what visits we have coming up, a call from our child's preschool, to create a meaning or a concept that then creates our lived experience. What Dr. Barrett is showing through all these experiments is that as emotion concepts become more difficult to access, people do worse and worse at perceiving the emotions that people in the photos are supposedly displaying. This provides strong evidence that people see an emotion in a face only if they know the corresponding emotion concept.

Jen Lumanlan:: 09:02

Dr. Paul Ekman and his colleagues were big proponents of the classical view in the 1960s and they took their posed emotion photos to people in cultures with little contact with our Eurocentric world. Four studies in that period used the method where the participants were provided words and asked to match them with the pictures, and these studies found evidence of universal emotions. Three more used the free labelling method where the emotion words weren't provided and didn't find evidence of universal emotions. The three that didn't support universal emotions were published in book chapters rather than peer-reviewed papers and so are very rarely cited. The four studies providing the so-called evidence of universality were hailed as a breakthrough and hundreds more studies used the forced choice method, usually in cultures with exposure to Eurocentric cultural practices and norms, and claimed that emotional universality is a fact.

Jen Lumanlan:: 09:54

Many scientists still think it is. Dr. Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, was quoted in a 2013 Boston Magazine profile of Dr. Barrett as saying, “I think Lisa does a disservice to the actual empirical progress that we're making. There are a zillion data points on a perspective that conforms to Ekman and the alternative has yet to be documented convincingly.” He said he himself had coded thousands of facial expressions using Ekman's system and the results are strikingly consistent. But as early as 2006, a team of forensic psychologists at the University of British Columbia said they were unable to find evidence of the link between the microexpressions of liars and certain universal emotions, which is the kind of link on which Ekman's theory depends. They wrote, “We, like most everyone else, it seemed, presumed the firm empirical foundation of the validity of microexpressions in relation to deception. But in 2006, despite reading of anecdotal evidence, we were unable to find any published empirical research on the phenomenon, end quote.” And in that same year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report saying that the TSA's behavior detection program might have been launched without proper scientific confirmation that its underlying premise was valid. We can look into the research, of course, but we can also produce our own evidence. If you've ever looked at your partner and thought that they were feeling angry when actually they were feeling frustrated or disappointed, you've already generated your own evidence against universal emotions. If you've ever felt angry and pursed your lips up and then another time you felt angry and you furrowed your eyebrows or you've cried, you've generated evidence against the universality of emotions. I had a similar challenge when I made the picture-based list of feelings that you can download from YourParentingMojo.com/feelings. I had to do multiple rounds of revisions with the illustrator because she would think that a face was displaying a particular emotion and I thought it was something else.When I showed the test drawings to children, they often couldn't name the emotion that went with the face because I didn't offer a list of words to choose from. The participants in the studies are differentiating between emotions that are usually associated with really dissimilar facial configurations.

Jen Lumanlan:: 12:02

Again, those were happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust. But when you put a face representing anger next to one representing frustration, it can be pretty hard to tell the difference, even though the sensations that accompany the experience of these emotions can be quite different. We redrew them to get as close as we could to what the children in my community thought represented the emotion, but I've heard of one family who redrew them themselves because their child didn't get the pictures. I don't think it's incredibly important that the pictures actually exactly match the emotion in this case because they're sort of placeholders to help children remember the emotion words. If people like the pictures as they are, then great. If not, and they want to redraw them, that's fine. And I do note on the page that the pictures should be used as a guide rather than definitive expressions of these emotions because of the research that we are discussing today. So if emotions aren't universal, then what are they?

Jen Lumanlan:: 12:57

Well, Dr. Barrett's theory uses the idea of emotion concepts that we've already mentioned and says that emotions are not reactions to the world. We are not passive receivers of sensory input, but active constructors of our emotions. Our brains take the input that we're receiving from our senses, they match that information to our previous experience and construct meaning out of the information and then prescribe action. If we didn't have emotion concepts that represent our past experience, each time we encountered an emotion, it would be just new information that we wouldn't know what to do with. The idea of an emotion like anger exists because you and I agree that it exists, much like we agree that pieces of paper with numbers and white men's heads printed on them are money, because we both have a concept of what money is and what it does.

Jen Lumanlan:: 13:46

We might disagree on whether a dandelion is a flower or a weed because we have different concepts of a dandelion. And we might even change our own concept of a dandelion when we're picking them out of a lawn and see them as a weed, and when our child hands us a bouquet of flowers they've at which point the same dandelion is transformed into a flower. Our brains create the meaning of a flower, a weed and money just like we create the meaning or the concept of an emotion.

Jen Lumanlan:: 14:12

Dr. Barrett is not arguing that our emotions aren't real, but rather that the interpretation of events that happen outside of our bodies plus the sensations in our bodies as anger is a concept that people have defined, which means different people in different places have defined it differently. Cross-cultural research has also identified ways that these concepts differ across cultures. Study participants in the US tend to incorporate descriptions of their feelings as they talk about a series of events that happened, including some backstory to give context.

They relate their behaviors to feeling an emotion in their heads and they put themselves (14:52) and their achievements at the center of the story.

Jen Lumanlan:: 14:54

A study of the Hadza people in Tanzania found that they tend to give concrete practical descriptions of events without giving any backstory. They describe their behavior as being related to the event and to their bodily experiences during the event, as well as how the experience was shared with other people. Neither view of emotions is correct, but we tend to perceive our way as both correct and the way emotions are experienced in context by everyone, when that is not the case. Okay, so that's a basic grounding on the idea of the theory of constructed emotions. I also want to add that we talked for a little extra time with Dr. Barrett than we had planned and that with this introduction as well it would have made for quite a long episode.

Jen Lumanlan:: 15:35

So I'm cutting the interview part way through so that it doesn't become unmanageable and I'm going to kind of draw some conclusions from this first part at the end of this conversation and then very soon I'll release the second part of the conversation with an overarching summary and implications of what I think that this means for us as parents. So now let's head into the conversation with Akiko and Dr Barrett.

Jen Lumanlan:: 15:56

So hello Dr Barrett, it's so great to have you here with us today.

Jen Lumanlan:: 15:59

Oh it's a pleasure to be here.

Jen Lumanlan:: 16:01

And welcome Akiko as well for being the person who introduced me to Dr Barrett's work and kind of kicked off the whole thing.

Akiko:: 16:08

I'm really honored to be here, thank you for having me.

Akiko:: 16:11

So Dr. Barrett, you have a different view from sort of how most people think about emotions and it's the idea is that emotions are constructed. I'm curious, you know, because I see signs that the idea that emotions are constructed is not prevalent in everyday life. I'm wondering, you know, what kind of pushback people have against this idea and why and how do you respond to these people who might be pushing back against it?

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett:: 16:40

So when you say people, do you mean scientists or do you mean (16:44) civilians as we call them in my house? 16:46 Which means, you know, anybody who's not, doesn't do science for a living.

Akiko:: 16:52

A little bit of both, but maybe like the scientists mostly.

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett:: 16:55

Sure, because I will tell you that civilians, I don't get a lot of pushback from people. I think, I was surprised because I thought the classical view of emotion that you've got these inborn circuits and they're triggered and so on, I thought that was pretty much the common sense view, at least in the West, you know, like, and because it's actually not the view everywhere. And I was surprised the number of people who wrote to me and said, or came up to me after I gave an address and would say, oh, this is actually, this intuitively makes so much sense to me. So I think, you know, that was surprising and also very gratifying. It's a hard question to answer what you're asking me, Akiko, because I think you have to consider where psychology and neuroscience are as scientific fields. So for example, the idea that the aspects of reality that we take to be given, present, out there in the world, separate from us, is really an illusion. And that reality is relational, like it's not all in your head, but that you are part of what makes reality what it is. That idea is very, it's not an alien idea in some circles in physics, for example.

And it's not, I mean, it's very consistent with the relational view of quantum mechanics. And if you look throughout the history of psychology and in neuroscience, you see evidence of elements of scientific understanding that are very consistent with the theory of constructed emotion. So you have to understand that there is pushback, but that pushback is largely coming from people who work in a particular tradition. They make a particular set of assumptions, and there are other domains that are pushing back on those assumptions. And so I think there's, we're somewhat in a moment of flux. I will say that on my darker days, like the days when I'm feeling really beat up or encumbered, or when I'm having some body budgeting issues, it feels like nobody understands anything I'm saying. And, you know, why am I even bothering to try? I mean, I do have moments where I feel pretty pummeled because there's a lot at stake for a scientist when you tell them that they're wrong. My view is that all scientists are wrong about something. I've been wrong. And actually, when I discover evidence that indicates that I'm wrong, usually my reaction is like, really, I'm really excited because it means that now I'm about to learn something I didn't know. So I personally like to grapple with those kinds of issues.

Dr. Jen Lumanlan:: 19:56

Okay. So one of the things I want to dig into really deeply in our conversation today is the implications of your work for parents. And one of the implications is that the idea that feelings are not automatic and universal, right? If we are assuming that they are not automatic and universal, then we believe that we can deconstruct our feelings. Can you tell us what you mean by deconstructing our feelings?

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett:: 20:21

Well, I think we have to be really clear on what we mean by feeling.

So, you know, in our work, we make a distinction between simple feelings that come from the brain's regulation of the body. So your brain's most important job is not thinking or seeing or hearing or even feeling. Your brain's most important job is regulating the systems of your body.

And it's so your heart, your lungs, your metabolism, your immune system, you know, they all have to be coordinated. The brain is constantly attempting to anticipate the needs of the body and then prepare to meet those needs before they arise. So the way you can think about it is like, if you're going to stand up, your brain starts to raise your blood pressure as you stand.

It's not going to wait until after because then there won't be enough oxygen that gets to your brain and you'll faint. And that's really metabolically expensive. So your brain's always trying to control and coordinate your body. And your body's always sending sensory signals back to the brain. And we don't feel those signals as actual sensations in the body. We feel those signals as mood or what, you know, in scientific jargon, we would call affect, affective feelings, feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling worked up, feeling tired, feeling comfortable, feeling uncomfortable.These feelings are not emotions. They're a consequence of your brain's primary function. They're kind of like barometers for how well your brain is kind of managing your body in a metabolically efficient way. And they're with you all the time. So they're features of consciousness. So I think that's the first important thing for parents to know, right? Is that if your kid is moody, so for example, my daughter, since the day she was born, I'm telling you around 4:30 in the afternoon would get super cranky, like, you know, and her pediatrician first called it colic and then he called it something else. And I just figured, you know, her, I have this metaphor that I use, you know, that your brain is running a budget for your body. It is a metaphor, right? All metaphors are wrong, but some metaphors are super useful. So when thinking about how your brain is managing the energy requirements, it's, you know, running a budget. So I'm thinking to myself, you know, her body budget is depleted for around 4 or 430 in the afternoon. And that means that's not the time to be wondering what's wrong, like psychologically, right? So when she was a little baby, I would just seriously sit her in front of the television with, you know, visual noise running over the, and that would capture her attention in a gentle way and would calm her down. Or I'd pick her up and walk outside with her and take a deep breath. And that was a change that reset her nervous system. Or when she was older and, you know, I would pick her up from school every day, you know, the first thing we would do is come home and, you know, relax and have a snack instead of running to this lesson, running to that lesson, running to another lesson. So there's a, they’re body budgeting concerns that you've got to, you know, take into account. So I think that's the first thing to be aware of is that sometimes somebody feels bad, you or your kid, not because something is wrong in the world or with you or with them, but just that you're doing something hard or you're a little depleted. So I think that's the first thing that's important.

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett:: 24:01

The second thing I think to say is that I'm telling you mood affect, it's not emotion, but your brain is always attempting to make sense of the signals from your body in relation to the signals in the world. And your brain has a lot of flexibility in how it does that. So for example, when things are really uncertain, there's a lot of arousal that comes from certain chemicals and certain changes that are happening inside you because your brain is attempting to learn, attempting to take in information it doesn't have. And learning involves chemicals that usually you will feel as an increase in arousal. But the meaning that we give to that in this culture is usually anxiety, but not all high arousal where you're feeling jittery is, is anxiety. It could be determination. It could be just uncertainty. And when I say that your brain is making meaning, what I mean by that is every set of meanings goes with an action. So if I, if I'm constructing anxiety, I'm more likely to withdraw or to perform certain actions as opposed to uncertainty where I'm more likely to forage for information as opposed to determination where I'm more likely to persist. So concepts, meaning-making are tools for, for action. And I think the thing we don't realize is we have, first of all, we have a lot of flexibility. Second of all, the brain's doing it super automatically. And third of all, when you use words with your kids, you're teaching them that concept, you're teaching them that that set of signals that they're experiencing is anxiety.

And you, so a little, it's a little bit like supervised learning where in the same way, when, you know, like my daughter, when she was, I don't know, under two would see a truck and I would say, look at the truck, look at the doggy, look at the whatever. I'm teaching her a set of concepts for how to make sense of the signals that she's perceiving. It's exactly the same thing when you use words like angry and sad and afraid. First of all, you're wiring their brain with emotion concepts, and then you're inviting them to use those concepts. And so you have to be mindful. I think once you know that you maybe say a different way, not so prescriptively, once you're aware of that, you become mindful of what you say to your children or even in the presence of your children. That's the other thing I think that is really important, you know, because little kids, really little kids, like three-month-olds, four-month-olds, use words, even though they don't understand what the word means and they can't produce the word, they use words to learn concepts without any awareness on your part or theirs. (And so I'll just give you an example that's not about emotion, but you'll see why it's relevant. You know, when my daughter was maybe six months old, seven months old, maybe, she was sitting in her high chair and we were sitting at dinner. She was sitting at the table. And it must have been seven months because she was just starting to, you know, try to eat Cheerios or something. And she said, you know, I'm here. My husband, her dad is in front of me across the table and she's sitting over here in between us. And I say something to him about the oven, which is behind me. And she turns and she looks at the oven. And we were like, what, seriously? So then I was like, okay, keep your eyes on me. Don't move. Don't look anywhere except at me. I'm going to say some words and we're going to see what she does. So say the word ceiling, say the word, you know, flower, say the word. And she would basically, she turned and looked at the objects that we were talking about.

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett:: 28:02

And I was like, this was before I knew any of this literature, which has been out there for probably 20 years, which suggests that infants, really little ones use words to learn concepts. And so when you speak words to your children, you're basically wiring their brain. And you're not only wiring their brain with knowledge, you're also teaching them when to use that knowledge to make sense of their own experience, to actually create the experience, take a simple mood and conjure it into anxiety, an instance of anxiety or an instance of determination or an instance of uncertainty. And so this is, I think, a tool that you have that you can use when you're parenting.

Jen Lumanlan:: 29:02

So I think coming out of that, right? One of the ideas that's really important for parents is that there is no direct correlation between a physical expression and an emotion. And I think that gets parents into trouble because we think there is a direct correlation. And so we make mistakes about interpreting the emotions that other people might be feeling. And so some of the ways that that comes up, right? If our child hits their sibling, we might think, oh, my child is angry. And we assume they're angry, but oftentimes one child will hit another as a strategy to invite the other child to play. And then if we imagine that our child has hit another child on the playground and we might point to the child and say, oh, yeah, you hit so-and-so. And now they're feeling really sad. And maybe so-and-so is not actually feeling very sad. Maybe they're feeling frustrated or overwhelmed or angry or something else. And so it seems as though, I mean, as an autistic person, I know I struggle with this, but it seems as though neurotypical people good at understanding what's going on for somebody else. And I'm wondering, is that actually the case? How do you use this information?

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett:: 30:10

Well, I think the first thing to understand is that there is no one-to-one correspondence between any set of movements and any internal set of feelings or any internal state. So on average, in the United States, people scowl about 35% of the time when they're angry. Which means 65% of the time, they're doing something else with their face when they're angry. And about half the time when people scowl, they are not angry. They are they could be concentrating really hard.

They could be, you know, having a bad bout of gas. You could have told them a bad joke, you know, and they're signaling, oh, you know, so I think that I'm not going to make a blanket statement about neurotypical people versus neurodiverse. But what I will say is that being humble is better. It's better, it's better for you as a person in your interactions with other people to be humble and to not believe that your feeling of certainty really means that you are reading somebody else's emotions. Nobody reads anybody else's emotions. Expressions or movements are not a language. That's a very, very poor metaphor. They're not like words to be read on a page. That's just important. Now the problem is that, you know, that's the case has been around for like 40 years or more, actually, at this point, probably longer. But yet you still read all these things in the paper and in books and so on. And how many children's books are there that, you know, portray a scowl for anger, the expression of anger and a smile for the expression of happiness? How many preschools have that poster, you know, in their classroom? I mean, yeah. And this, honestly, this was one of the things that prompted me to write How Emotions Are Made. It was this. There were several reasons why I decided to write it, you know, because I swore I would never write a popular science book. I just had no interest in doing it. It wasn't something that I thought I'd be very good at, frankly. And also, I just have, I run a large lab.

And, you know, it's a full time job. And I'm fundamentally, I'm a scientist. So I just thought, you know, this is I can't also do this. But several things happened. And one of them had to do with this, this notion of expressions, because I had read this meta analysis that was using that was teaching kids who were diagnosed with autism, teaching them to these were were pretty impaired kids relative to what you would think of as typical. So in the sense that they struggled to, they struggled with, I think what I would call high levels of arousal, what you know, other people might call anxiety, there was a lot of repetitive behavior, you know, some, some of the more challenging kinds of behavior and the parents, you know, there was a difficulty in the parents feeling connected to these kids.

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett:: 33:38

And so they were teaching the kids how to recognize expressions of anger and sadness and fear as if this was going to help the kids in their social interactions. So they were teaching the children to map an expression of, you know, like a scowl to as an expression of anger, a pout as an expression of sadness, and so on. And these kids, so these are now we're talking, it was a meta analysis. So I think there were, I can't remember if it was six studies or 10 studies, but it was it was a number of studies. In each study, you've got these, these little kids working really hard to learn these mappings. And they do. And it doesn't help them in their everyday life at all in their social interactions. And I was thinking, how would I feel as a parent if I basically subjected my kid to this really hard task, like watch them struggle, watch them learn. And my hope would be that they would be, I would feel more connected to them. I would find they would it would allow us to have more of an emotional connection to each other that I would that I would feel and then it didn't work. And their own social coordination with neurotypical people wasn't improved. How would I feel? I'd feel bereft. And then, but then if I learned that actually, the evidence has been there for like 40 or 50 years, that this wasn't going to work. I would recategorize that feeling as something else. And I thought, you know, I just feel a sense of responsibility. I just have to put the information out there, people can do what they want with it, if they want to ignore it, that's on them, you know, but I at least have to put it out there in a way that is more accessible for people so they can learn. So for example, you know, I think it's important for kids to learn explicitly learn that variation is the norm. People can scowl in anger, they can laugh in anger, they can cry in anger, they can withdraw in anger, they can do many things in anger. And you have to use the context as a guide. It's not a perfect guide. But you have to understand that the meaning of any action is not inherent in the action. It's the action in context. And sometimes that context is inside you. You're carrying around a context with you. Your brain is connected to your body, your brain is modeling and controlling your body. If your body budget, if you're running a deficit, like yesterday, you know, I got I got my COVID shot yesterday and a flu shot. So yesterday afternoon was like not a time for me to be making any decisions about anything important. Because I was looking at the world through affect colored glasses. I was my body budget was compromised and everything seemed horrible. But it seemed horrible because I was my body budget was compromised. I think that that there's something important there, not just for how parents deal with their kids, but also how parents teach their kids.

Jen Lumanlan:: 37:16

Yeah, absolutely. And I wonder if we can just put a super fine point on that. You talked about the context that we carry as parents, right? And so our child might say something to us in a particular tone of voice. And with the context that we carry, we might perceive that as, oh, my child doesn't respect me, when actually the kids just had a hard day at school. And then on the flip side of that is kind of how we're talking with our children about, you know, how other people are feeling maybe. And instead of, oh, you hit that kid, and they must be feeling, you know, I can tell they're feeling sad because they're crying. It might be something more like, you know, their child is crying. I'm wondering if their arm might be hurt. Should we go check on them? So that we're not making this logical leap from I see crying, they must feel sad. But instead it's, shall we go and investigate more?

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett:: 38:04

Exactly. That's exactly it. It's shall we investigate more? Be curious, ask questions. If you really think the other child is hurt, you know, you should act quickly, obviously, right? But in a serious way. But most of the time, that's not really what we're facing.

And what a child learns is to become curious about other people's experience. So for example, you know, I remember this research, reading it many years ago, again, with autistic kids, kids on the spectrum, and where they would look on the surface, like they were completely calm. And then something would happen. And they would throw a massive tantrum like out of the blue. And the assumption was, oh, you know, poor self-regulation, this kid can't control themselves. You slap a, you know, now we would call it a Fitbit, but you slap a watch on them that measures their heart rate. And their heart rate was like 170 or something right before. There's no indication of that. So these kids are like their brains are having trouble regulating their bodies, their heart rates going through the roof. When your heart rate is that high, most of what you experience, so every experience you have is some combination of the remembered past, your brain remembering something from the past that's similar to the present, and the sensory present that your brain is taking in. In those moments, though, when your heart rate is through the roof, your experience is mostly the remembered past, you're not tracking what's going on in the world very much. And so the way I would think about these situations is that this is the way a tantrum is sometimes the only way that a kid knows how to reset their, or knows, it's the only way that you can reset a nervous system, or a big cry, you know, because there's like a lot of breathing going on. So I think your own perspective isn't always the one that is most accurate, if you could call. It isn't going to synchronize very well with what's going on with the kid. And the kid also needs to learn that. They need to learn to be curious about other people. And they need to learn that their actions impact others, and sometimes impact others in ways that were not intended by them. And they have to learn that. And they have to learn about the variability. And they have to learn how to use that knowledge.

Jen Lumanlan:: 40:38

I think we also have to learn how our actions impact our kids as well.

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett:: 40:42

Well, that's the other thing, you know, I mean, I will say that, I mean, every parent thinks they know best, you know, I'm saying, like, every for as many parents as there are, that's how many, you know, very strong beliefs there are about, you know, what to do best. But the one thing that I thought was really important all the time, was to treat my daughter like a person, and not an appendage. So from very, very early on, little kids have desires, and they have decisions they make. And your job is not to take that away from them. It's to structure, structure where they're making decisions, and which decisions are available to them to make, and things like that. So the way I think about it is the following, that the world is a big, uncertain place. Okay, that's just there's a lot of uncertainty out there. That's why in some ways, we sort of have the neural machinery that we have is a response to having to reduce uncertainty, which is very metabolically costly. And what we do with our kids, right, is we're constantly titrating just how big their world is, how much uncertainty are they exposed to, you don't want to overexpose them right away to uncertainty. But you also don't want to avoid uncertainty when, you know, by keeping I mean, so being consistent is good. But sometimes, slowly, you have to, like, you know, allow more uncertainty to, to creep in. And you also have to know that dealing with uncertainty is very metabolically expensive for anybody, actually. So you can think about moments in your child's life where, where that expense is gonna shoot up for various reasons, right? If they go to a new school, when they go from a single classroom to middle school, where they're moving around, and there are more kids during puberty, for example, even moments where you know, they go from crawling to being able to get up and walk and move around. That's all of those are moments when there's much more metabolic uncertainty. And that's going to be a challenge for them to deal with for their brains to deal with metabolically speaking, which they will experience as mood. Yeah. So the I sort of see the everything about parenting, actually everything about interacting with other people through that lens.

Jen Lumanlan:: 43:24

Okay, so here are my main takeaways from this first part of the conversation.

The first important takeaway is that we have a body budget. And Dr. Barrett acknowledges this is an imperfect metaphor, because all metaphors are imperfect, but it does give us some useful information. And what she's talking about here is the capacity we have in any given moment, based on whether our needs for things like food and rest and self care and all of the other needs that we have have been met. There's an interplay between our body budget and our feelings. And sometimes we misread our body's cues. So we might be feeling physically tired, and then we misinterpret that as feeling emotionally tired and down. And we've actually been exploring this in our family recently. Carys has been having a hard time in the afternoons, and also a hard time separating from me at bedtime and wanting me to stay longer with her at bedtime. And so we came up actually with the idea of working on both issues at once. And we have been drawing our feelings together in the late evenings. So we get bedtime started a little bit earlier, so we get into bed a little bit earlier. And then the two of us sit together and we just do some little stick figure drawings, representing ourselves and representing the things that we've done that day, and how we've been feeling at various points in the day. And what we're doing is we're looking to uncover connections between the events that have happened during the day and how she feels. And she has described this this new feeling, dull, and she says that it combines tiredness with boredom. And so we're trying to look for some new ways to address that dull feeling. One of the ideas is not having all of her screen time first thing in the morning, and saving it so that she has it for later in the afternoon. We've also found some friends who live around the corner with us who have a young baby who, not coincidentally, I remember these days well, struggle in the late afternoon when baby's getting a little bit kind of distracted and not super interested in doing the things that they're doing throughout the rest of the day. So we found that her wandering over to the friend's house with the baby actually helps her and it also helps the baby's parents who are welcoming actually her coming over in the late afternoons and to play and to sort of keep them occupied until it's dinner time. So in these cases, we don't necessarily have to look for super deep psychological things that are wrong. We're just trying to better match her activities to her needs at that particular time of day. And if we take this a step further, we might even find that we're misreading somebody else's feelings based on our body budget. So if we're having a crappy day, then we might perceive quote-unquote disrespect in our child's tone when they're speaking to us, when what our child was actually trying to communicate to us was tiredness or frustration.

Jen Lumanlan:: 46:04

The second thing that I want to pull out of this first part of the conversation is the idea of meaning making. And that's one that's been with us way back since our first conversation with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk and then building on the ideas from Dr. Chris Niebauer in his book No Self No Problem. And when I talked to Dr. van der Kolk, I was trying to kind of fit together the ideas that we all have stories about where we've come from and what that means for us in our situation right now. And then the second idea is from Dr. Niebauer that our brains are really overactive. They're constantly making up explanations for our experiences that are not always really tied to what's actually happening. And Dr. van der Kolk told me that quote, “We are meaning making creatures. And when you're traumatized, things are oftentimes so confusing and so scary and so unclear who is causing what, that your head isn't a great muddle. And then finding a way of making meaning for yourself is enormously helpful.” So I think it's important to know that we're teaching our kids to make meaning out of their interactions with the world all the time. So if we see them scowling and we'd label their feeling as anger, then they learn to think of that physical experience as anger, even if they were actually feeling frustrated or confused. So we can teach them the meaning of emotion words, but once they know the meaning of words, it's much more helpful to ask how they're feeling than to tell them. And some kids are not going to want to share and that's okay. And we can hypothesize and we can say, I can see your foreheads wrinkled and your shoulders are hunched and I'm wondering if you're feeling angry right now. So we aren't automatically assuming that we're right in our interpretation of their physical expression.

Jen Lumanlan:: 47:43

And then the last big idea that I want to leave us with today is that we don't always know a lot about other people's internal experience. And this came up in the conversation in the example of training the autistic kids to better regulate themselves, which is unfortunately a pretty common practice. And nobody realized that the kids had been regulating themselves very successfully in an environment that probably was not meeting their needs very well.

And nobody knew they were feeling dysregulated they were doing it so well. And then finally they can't do it anymore and they are perceived as the one with the problem instead of the environment being the thing that's creating the dysregulation. And that maybe we should change that instead. And this is an idea that comes up when I coach parents often.

Jen Lumanlan:: 48:24

So what I want to leave you with is that the more the child's difficult behavior seems to quote-unquote come out of nowhere, the more likely it is there's big stuff happening that isn't working for them. It might be sensory needs that aren't being met, or family changes, or a new school, or new divergence, or something else that just feels really, really big. And when we see their explosive behavior, and not all of the self-regulation they're doing most of the time, then we're missing those root causes. Because they're asserting their needs when they explode, and we would have been punished for asserting our needs when we were kids, we often explode too because it's too much for us to cope with. So if you see that happening in your family, then my Taming Your Triggers workshop is going to help you.I will help you uncover the needs behind your child's out-of-nowhere behavior, and your unmet needs as well, which are not for things like bubble baths and manicures, but for so much deeper things like community, and support, and collaboration with your family members. Enrollment for Taming Your Triggers is open right now, but only for a few more days until Midnight Pacific on Wednesday, October 9th. We do have different pricing options, and we also have a money-back guarantee. Complete 100% money back. It's literally no risk to you.

Jen Lumanlan:: 49:39

So I really hope to see you there, so we can start understanding and meeting your needs a lot more of the time, because when that happens, you will feel triggered a lot less often.

You can find information on the workshop at YourParentingMojo.com/tamingyourtriggers, and all of the references for today's episode, as well as links to Dr. Barrett's books at YourParentingMojo.com/emotionspart1. So that's emotions part and then the number 1.

Adrian:: 50:09

If you'd like Jen to address the challenge you're having in parenting, just email your one-minute video or audio clip to support@YourParentingMojo.com and listen out for your episode soon.