How to see clearly through deceptive emotions | Kristen Lindquist

• Powerful emotions feel like irrefutable facts. They wash over us, take over our bodies, and change our perceptions. We call this: where your emotional experiences feel like they are the truth of the world around you, when in reality, the culture that we live in is, in a sense, shaping your emotions and your emotions are then serving as a lens for interpreting the world around you.

And the notion that people could be thinking and feeling something that is completely different from what we would think or feel in that context is, frankly, kind of scary. But understanding that people don't necessarily have the same emotional mind as us could really open our eyes to how it is that we're perceiving interactions in day-to-day life.

I'm Kristen Lindquist, and I'm a professor of psychology and neuroscience at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I study the neural and cultural basis of emotion. The study of emotion has really come from sort of two intellectual lineages over time: one is medicine and the other is anthropology and the study of culture, and as a result, to this day, psychology still kind of pits these two different perspectives against one another.

Ultimately, what our brain is doing, on a moment-to-moment basis, is trying to keep us alive, and many scholars have suggested that emotions actually evolved in order to keep us alive; to ensure our survival in a world that was filled with bears and tigers and big animals that were trying to eat us. Cultures evolve too. Emotions are like cultural artifacts. They're things that are passed down over time from one individual to the next, like art and religion and the language that you speak.

Now, I should clarify, this is not to say that there isn't a biological basis for those things. All humans are born with the basic hardware that helps the brain create emotions, but which emotions a person experiences are very much a product of their culture. So your culture is shaping your emotions and your emotions, in turn, are shaping your perception of the world.

So the brain, ultimately, is a predictive organ. What that means is that it's trying to create a model of the world around it based on learning and prior experiences, and use that information to make best guesses about what's going to happen next. And the experiences that you've had, which are very much nested in culture, can trickle down to the operation of single neurons that are processing visual sensations in the world around you.

So in the moment when you're experiencing a strong emotion, you have this instance of affective realism and that is coloring how it is that your brain is literally picking up the information that it's taking in from your eyes and your ears and all of your other senses. And so in that sense, we can have these emotion-induced biases whereby what you're feeling is literally shaping whether you see the presence of a threat.

A very classic example of this is something called a 'shooter bias.' When people are under particularly high cardiovascular intensity, they tend to misperceive objects as things that are threatening, like guns. So one thing that we can do to check our emotion bias is to be aware of what we're feeling in any given point in time.

And to also check in and think, "Is this feeling consistent with the context? Does this feeling actually make sense given what's going on around me?" It's important to understand that emotions are not universal across cultures. There's important differences in what it means to feel angry or sad or fearful, and one of the most prominent focuses of this work has been on cultures that are high in what's called Many Western, industrialized cultures are cultures that are high in individualism; where you really seek to see yourself as an individual who has their own thoughts, their own beliefs, their own emotions, and so on.

Now, collectivist cultures are, in many ways, opposite to this in the sense that who you are doesn't really matter so much—and you derive value, and a sense of self even, from being a part of that group. It's interesting that even the effect of stress seems to have a slightly different impact on people in cultures around the world.

As a case in point, in the United States, anger is about making yourself different from the people around you; it's about showing that some sort of violation has occurred, setting a line in the sand and saying, "You did something wrong to me." And when individuals in the United States experience anger, we see an increase in inflammation. Too much inflammation, too much stress ends up creating things like cardiovascular disease and many other disorders.

In Japan, anger does not show a robust increase in inflammation. In Japan, anger is a signal that harmony in the group has been disrupted, and a signal to mend bonds. A different physiological response to the same exact emotional experience. Culture very much defines who we are, who we see ourselves as, who we want to be, and people talk a lot in biology about biological sex differences, and this topic certainly comes into play when thinking about emotions.

People think that in mammals, females are caregivers and males are not and that, as a result, this has entrained the brain over the course of biological evolution to be more emotional, perhaps, in females of the species and less in the males. However, it's also the case that our cultures bring to bear a lot of top-down information with regards to gender—and this gendered information is imposed onto biological sex.

So women are perceived as overly emotional in many cultures, to the extent that women who go to the hospital, for instance, with heart palpitations are often diagnosed as having anxiety as opposed to heart attacks. Women die of heart attacks more frequently when admitted to the ER. Whereas boys are expected to be relatively stoic or, if they express emotions, to have strong, dominant emotions, such as anger or pride.

The result is that at the level of the individual, if you're not meeting the norms of your society, if you feel out of sync with those norms, then that can cause a lot of stress and self-doubt and feeling like you are somehow different from people around you, when in reality there's actually far more variation in the emotions that people experience, of both genders, than the sort of stark gender differences would suggest.

So if we took a second and checked how it is that we think the world should see us, as opposed to how we actually want to see ourselves or how we actually feel ourselves to be, then that might open up some avenues for people to feel more authentically like themselves. Much can be learned from the language that people use to describe emotions.

We have taken for granted, in the science of emotion, for really decades now, that people around the world experience the emotion categories that we as English speakers think are the sort of central emotion categories of life. And these are what in language are called: Basic level categories are those that new language learners acquire first, so for instance, when you are learning to differentiate animals, you differentiate dogs and cats and birds, you don't differentiate terriers and Siamese, and robins, and in very much the same way, emotion categories such as anger and sadness and fear and disgust are basic level categories in English.

Now, on the one hand, people have argued, "Well, language is just the tool that's used to communicate the experience." Yet, enough research has been done over time to suggest that the words do have different meanings in ways that are important culturally. The evidence suggests that only about 22% of languages around the world have a word that is roughly similar to the English language word "fear," and really only 13% have a word that is equivalent to the English language word, "surprise."

So one thing that people often question when they hear these types of statistics is, "Well, what does it mean for a culture not to have a word like fear?" Fear itself seems so basic, so critical to our survival and surely people from cultures around the world experience threats and experience their hearts beating quickly when their lives are in danger.

And that is not in question. The question is, how it is that their brains are making meaning of those instances, and experiencing them as something separate from other types of mental states. And there's some evidence that in some small-scale cultures, in particular, emotion words just aren't that central to how it is that individuals are making meaning of their own internal lives and the internal lives of others.

Instead, they focus much more on the behavioral actions that are accompanying situations. The result is that we can misunderstand what others are feeling because of the language that they're using to describe their states. In much of the early theorizing about emotion, it was assumed that facial muscle movements were automatically triggered means of signaling somebody's internal state to other people.

The theory has progressed on this over time to suggest that it may be that people are communicating what they feel with their facial expressions, but not automatically and reflexively, in much the same way that they would use language. I will use the term, "Resting Bitch Face," as an example of people misperceiving what it is that somebody is experiencing when a woman, in particular, has a relatively flat, slack face, people assume that she is mean or grumpy.

I always note that there is no corresponding "Resting Jerk Face" for men, but that also has to do with our cultural biases about who should be experiencing which emotions when. There's some nice work that has been done using computer graphics to randomly display an avatar's face and randomly move its facial muscles, and so participants from China saw a movement of an eyebrow or a wrinkling of the lip that Western perceivers did not see.

In the U.K., there were facial muscle movements associated with an emotion like anger that were not perceived to be associated with that emotion category in China. So there's a fair amount of variability in which specific facial muscle movements are associated with different categories. And what's really critical to understand is that the signals that people make with their face need not give some veridical representation of what it is that they're feeling, but secondly, that we are imposing our own cultural biases onto people's facial muscle movements.

A case that comes to mind occurred when I was in Japan, and I was in a place where a lot of foreigners didn't typically visit and I was sitting in a cafe by myself and tried to put a finger on why it was the case I was feeling so uncomfortable, and I suddenly realized that nobody was looking at me. I was sticking out like a sore thumb, as this foreign white woman, sitting in this suburban cafe and not a single person was paying attention to me, trying to figure out why I was there, who I was—and I realized that in the United States it would be very typical to feel curious, to, you know, give somebody a smile, to make them, you know, feel more welcome perhaps, or even just indicate that you noticed that they were unique.

And in Japan, that very much goes against the grain of the culture. It is rude to stare at somebody. I realized that my cultural frame was influencing my emotional experiences and how I expected others to be having emotional experiences. This all comes down to something which in philosophy is called: which is that we can never truly understand the content of other people's minds.

And yet, when we encounter people from different cultures in daily life, even within our own cities, people who come from different regional backgrounds or have different religious backgrounds or even have different political identities, it can be stressful to encounter other cultures and realize that something is just a little bit out of sync.

If you recognize that everybody's psychology is a little bit distinct, and that you are perhaps imposing your own bias onto things and have more of an open mind about trying to learn what somebody is feeling, instead of assuming, then there's more avenues for connections across groups. Each person is bringing to bear, really, something that is unique, a unique angle on the world around them and, ultimately, this diversity in perceptions could lead us to better answers about how it is that the world works.