One of the things that science is for is for dispelling myths
about how the world works. So, for example, we used to believe that
the Sun revolved around the Earth, we used to believe that the
Earth was flat -- it turns out that many of our most basic beliefs about emotion
also turn out to be myths. And so today we're going to take on three of these
myths and and dispel them. The first is that emotions are displayed on the
face with expressions that we all recognise. So the idea is that we're
supposed to smile when we're happy, we're supposed to scowl when we're angry, we're
supposed to frown when we're sad and for many years scientists believed that
everyone in the world would express emotion in exactly the same way so we
would all scowl when we were angry and we would all recognize a scowl as anger
everywhere around the world. So have a look at this face when I ask audiences
well how does this person feel they'll say oh she feels sad maybe she feels
grieved she might be feeling fatigued, actually this is my daughter Sophia
having what I can only describe as a profound experience of pleasure. And this
little sweetie is also having a profound experience of
pleasure. What this demonstrates to you is what hundreds of experiments have
also now shown which is that exactly the same emotion can be expressed with very
different sets of facial movements now this face when I ask audiences well how
does she feel people say she's she's in terror or she's in pain
this is actually a photograph of Serena Williams after she beat her sister Venus
in the US Open a couple of years ago the reason why her face looks as if it is
displaying terror when we don't have any context is that in fact this face is
made in terror so not only is it the case that
different express different facial movements express the same emotion it's
also the case that the same face expresses different emotions so when it
comes to an emotion a face does not speak for itself it seems to us as if we
are just reading other people's emotions on the face in the way that we would
read words on a page but that's actually not what's happening at all our brains
are actually guessing at what facial movements mean in a given context and
those guesses are proceeded pretty much the way that a Neil Seth described this
morning in his talk which I'll come to again later in this talk as well and
even for those of us who feel super confident that we are really good at
reading other people our brains are just guessing so is this person surprised
afraid angry well yes he could be any of those things depending on the context
and so what about these expressions right these presumed universal
expressions where did they come from well it turns out that they weren't
discovered by scientists by observing how people express emotion in everyday
life in fact these expressions were stipulated by a small group of
scientists and then adopted as universal they are in fact stereotypes of emotion
and for a number of years the science of emotion was really the science of
emotion stereotypes now I want you to consider for a minute what this means
because everywhere around the world these stereotypes are displayed in
classrooms and preschools and children are taught that these are the presumed
universal expressions of emotion in international politics and in industry
strategies for cross-cultural communication in a globalized world
assume universal expressions of emotion and then of course we have you know the
emerging emotion economy where companies are spending a tremendous amount of time
and money and effort to develop emotion gadgets emotion apps and technology to
read emotions in the face of other people right and so they'll tell you
that they are really able to read anger in a face when in fact what the reading
is a scowl and the scowl may or may not indicate anger in a particular situation
so when you consider the fact that all of this effort and money and creativity
is being expended it's a bit mind-boggling when you realize that
they're being inspired by a misunderstanding of the fundamental
nature of emotion I'm not suggesting here that the efforts are useless what
I'm suggesting is that they're being targeted to the wrong question and it's
a question that you know can't be answered because it's the wrong question
here's the second myth women are more emotional than men if you ask women with
questionnaires how emotional are you they will tell you that they are more
emotional than men and men agree women are more emotional but when you take men
and women and then you ask them to report on their experiences in a
moment-to-moment way in their daily lives what you find is that men and
women on average do not differ in their emotionality that is some people report
a lot of emotion other people report less but there are no differences on
average by sex so where do these beliefs come from that women are more emotional
than men the answer is that they are stereotypes that we learn and they're
the stereotypes that actually guide our perception of other people which then
reinforce the stereotypes and so I'll give you one example of a study from my
lab of which there are many and they go something like this we show people
a face like this expressing a very subtle expression of emotion in this
case it's anger and we give a reason for that expression so this woman argued
with a co-worker and then later in the experiment we just present the face
alone and we ask is this an emotional person you know person who has an
emotional nature or is this somebody who's just having a bad day are they
just reacting to the situation and we do this from male faces and for female
faces and as some of you might have realized this is actually the same face
we just stuck female or male hair on the face and what we find is that test
subjects and I'm talking here about men and women both male and female test
subjects tend to see the face with female hair as having a more emotional
nature than the men than the face with the male hair so basically she's a bitch
he's having a hard day so on average men and women are equally emotional so you
know some people kind of float along the river of life in relative tranquility
other people you know are navigating a raging river of agony and ecstasy most
of us fall somewhere in between but on average there's no difference by sex
that being said our beliefs about men's and women's emotionality has a great
impact in many many spheres of life for example in the law the law embodies a
very gendered view of emotion so for example when a woman is charged with a
violent crime if she expresses anger or is seen to express anger she actually
receives a more severe sentence if a man is charged with violent crime and he
express his anger or his scene to express anger he's actually given a
lighter sentence because clearly he's less in control of his behavior because
his emotions took him over similarly in business we often see the case that
women face a double kind of double-standard if you express emotion
you're seen as overly emotional and not really qualified to lead a company if
you don't express emotion then you're actually violating your the stereotype
of being a woman and so you're not trusted and you're you're seen as more
dishonest if you are very serious as a woman and you're in charge you're often
seen as aggressive and I have to tell you I mean I've never met a woman who is
accepted as a leader who doesn't go through the stage of being seen as a
bitch first it's kind of like a necessary evil here's the third myth
we're gonna take on today this is the idea that there are dedicated circuits
in the brain for emotion so a lot of the time we feel emotion it kind of feels
like it's hot there happening to us you know like they kind of take us over
causing us to do and say things that we would rather not and so this makes it
seem to us as if we must have buried deep inside some inner beast a set of
pre-wired emotion circuits that our rationality has to control but our brain
is a master of deception it creates experiences for us at the same time as
misleading us as to how those experiences are created and I'll give
you just one example so this what I'm displaying here in the red is a outline
of a brain region called the amygdala so if I were to split my brain do a
cross-section of my skull kind of pop open the front this is what you'd be
looking at when all the blood is cleared away the red is the amygdala the
amygdala is kind of like the rock star of brain regions it is in the media all
the time people write articles about it and typically writing articles about the
amygdalas importance in fear so fear the fear circuit is supposed to live in this
brain region and the question is does it right so in my lab we fat we collected
all hundreds of studies brain imaging studies of people when they were
experiencing I'm and other emotions and we summarized
them and so sure enough when you look at the number of experiments where people
experience fear you see that about 30% of the experiments show an increase in
the migdal activity so that's better than chance but it's not what you would
expect if the amygdala actually was the home of fear you'd expect something much
greater and in fact you see a migdal a-- activity increase in every emotion
that's ever been studied and in fact in many studies that have nothing to do
with emotion at all and this finding is basically what you find for any brain
region or network or pattern of activity that has been claimed to be the home of
emotion so emotions are complex constructions they are not simple
circuits in fact emotions are not built into your brain they're built by your
brain as you need them and they are not reactions to the world they are your
constructions of the world or more specifically they're your constructions
of what bodily sensations what an eel I'm told this earlier called
interceptions what those sensations mean in the context that you're in right now
so the most intimate part of you you're the internal parts of your body are are
kind of a mystery to you most of the time your brain is actually wired that
way and so your brain has to guess at what
these internal sensations mean in the context that you're in right now and so
an emotion is your brain's explanation of your internal sensations in the given
context that you're in and when your brain is creating these explanations
creating these emotions it's not creating one meaning one story so anger
for example is not one reaction it's actually a population of
instances that vary from one another in a way that's very strongly tied to the
situation so sometimes in anger you will scowl but sometimes in anger you'll
laugh sometimes in anger you'll sit quietly in sive plotting the demise of
your enemy and in each instance your brain and your body's doing something
different so very quickly in your brain you carry around a model of the world so
we heard markets talk about this we heard Anil talk about this your brain
uses this model of the world to anticipate what is going to happen next
both in your body and in your brain so the brains internal model kind of works
like a scientist it makes a prediction about what's going to happen in the
world and in the body and then it compares its prediction to incoming
sensory inputs from the world and from the body and if it's correct
that prediction becomes your experience this is akin to what people refer to as
system 1 system 2 is when your prediction isn't quite right and so your
brain has the opportunity to change its prediction tweak its internal model we
have a special word for this and in science we call it learning and this is
also what is referred to as system 2 in the sense that this is a much more
effortful thing to do system 1 and system 2 are not literal networks in
your brain there are different modes of brain processing so what does this mean
for you in everyday life particularly if you want to change your emotions and
control your emotions well what it means is that the the horizon of control that
you have is much greater than you might imagine so I'm not telling you here that
you can snap your fingers and change how you feel if that were the case we'd
probably all be happier and scientists like some of those you've heard today
we'd all be out of a job there'd be no mystery that's actually not how it works
right but it is important to realize that the brain is using three sources of
information three sources of three ingredients if you will to make emotions
and if you change any of these ingredients you have more control over
what you feel so one set of ingredients is information from the body right so
you can change the state of your body really easily you can get up you can
move around you can eat something you can take drugs in fact the opiate crisis
and the United States you know is one consequence of this actually another
thing you can do is change your surroundings literally by moving from
one context to another or by figuratively changing your surroundings
by attending to different things this is what happens when you learn how to be
mindful but you can also change your internal model that is if it's the case
that the brain is using past experience in order to make predictions about the
immediate future which then becomes your present experience then you can
cultivate new experiences with a little bit of effort and seed your brain to
make predictions differently in the future so first this is something that
takes effort you know and then it becomes automatic kind of like driving
what is first automatic eventually I mean when his first effortful eventually
becomes automatic and this is the way that you have much more control and much
more responsibility in in creating experience because in fact you actually
are the architect of your own experience and the ideas that I just described
today and many others are actually available in the book that that I just
published and thank you for your attention
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