I’ve already touched on the case of Tommy and Beverly Jarrett v. Michael Jones in Socially Constructed, but I want to go into it a little more here. The Invisibilia episode included interviews with Tommy Jarret, the plaintiff, and Amanda Thornberry, wife of the defendant. Amanda Thornberry grew up in an environment in which displays of emotion were punished. In her words, “I was raised that emotions are a burden, something that we have to control.” Tommy Jarret was educated along similar lines. His dad taught him that, “Sometimes you can let emotions control your behavior. Get over it – plain and simple or suck it up.” Jarret would embrace this philosophy, going on to teach it to his children. Thornberry would abandon this theory of control and suppression for something a bit more modern. With her eldest daughter, Makayla, she talked, explored, and expressed emotion.
On a summer day Thornberry was riding in the car with her family. Her husband was driving, and her two girls were strapped into their child seats in the back. Jarret, now a truck driver, was driving in the opposite direction. A sudden downpour caused Thornberry’s husband, Michael Jones, to lose control of the car. The vehicle crossed the median into the lane where Jarret was driving. It happened quickly. When it was over Makayla was dead. A year later, Tommy Jarrett sued Makayla’s family for emotional distress. And won.
After the accident Thornberry grieved so hard the pain was physical. Feelings so intense she doubted their veracity. Jarret felt guilt. Shame. His father had not just taught him a man needs to be in control of his feelings. He taught him that a man needs to be in control. Jarret saw his inability to avoid the accident as an internal flaw. He saw himself as a killer. A baby killer. It damned near destroyed him.
Nine months later, in the grip of a deep depression and unable to work, Jarett found a doctor who explained that Jarrett had PTSD. As a result of the accident his emotions had overwhelmed him. Jarrett was not in control. He needed to recognize it and deal it. This is the basis of Jarrett’s lawsuit. That emotional distress is just as damaging as anything physical. The depression as a result of the accident had caused him tens of thousands of dollars in lost wages. He wanted to be reimbursed for that money just as he would have been if it had been a physical injury from the accident that kept him from getting behind the wheel. The courts agreed.
But Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychology professor at Northeastern University, does not. Professor Barrett believes that emotions are not built into our brains at birth. It feels like they are. That there is an obligatory response to a particular stimulus. In this view, one held by much of humanity for countless eons, we can respond to an emotion, redirect it or suppress it, but the emotion itself just is. Emotion doesn’t just bind us all together as human beings. It defines us as human beings. And it is something that we all share.
Except, according to Barrett, we don’t. For Barrett there is nothing inescapable about our emotions. In her latest book, How Emotions Are Made, she contends rather than emotions being an internal reaction to outside stimuli that, instead, emotions construct the world. Integrating emotion research from a range of fields, including neuroscience, biology, and anthropology. Our brains control the systems that run our bodies. Most of the time all of this goes on in the background. We don’t have to consciously think about breathing, making our hearts beat, digestion, etc. We can feel these sensations going on within us. This is called interoception and it monitors what’s going on inside of us. Generally, these feelings are just background noise that allows us to focus our attention on other things. The brain keeps it simple. Things are pleasant or unpleasant, calm or arousing. When we sense something through interoception our brains look to our past history with that feeling to try to figure out what’s going on. Context creates concepts.
Every culture has myriad social concepts we learn from our families, our friends, and from our societies at large. Emotion is just one, immense, category of concepts. Emotion cannot exist without these concepts. Even the most basic emotion, fear. This is similar to sight. Without concepts, the social construction of categorizing things into trees, houses, faces, all we would see is light and darkness. People who have been blind from birth but become able to see in adulthood, for whatever reason, can’t make sense of the world for days to weeks. Some things may take years. They have to build the concepts to categorize what’s in front of them.
A good example of this is the videos surrounding EnChroma glasses, the glasses that help colorblind people see color. Most include the person demanding names for these new visions even though they already have a concept of color. EnChroma co-founder Donald McPherson relates the story of a retired Berkeley neuroscientist who did not realize he was seeing green until he saw it in the context of a green traffic light. According to McPherson the scientist had to pull over because, “he had this epiphany that he has finally seen [green].” Without the context he hadn’t been able to process what he was seeing. Colors are more than the mechanics of our eyes. They are thoughts and ideas formed from memory, anticipation, and context. Perhaps this is why the dress controversy left some people positively shaken by the fact that people around them may see colors very differently.
Later in the Invisibilia interview one of the hosts, Rosin, says, “That emotion that the court had validated (in Jarrett v. Jones), felt real, but it wasn’t telling him anything real about the world.” I don’t know if the flaw here is Barrett’s or Rosin’s but the clear insinuation is that though the emotion felt real, it wasn’t. What Barrett is understood as saying is that, until we categorize it, a thing or an emotion has no meaning. Our experiences, emotional and otherwise, are not objective. They are a response to things we, ourselves, have created. In her words, “That means that you have more control over your emotions than you might imagine…Because concepts are not hardwired. We can change them. Ultimately, we have control.” The problem is, even if this is true, concepts are not individually created in each of our heads. They are also based on our culture. Making emotions a social construct like money, nationhood, or gender.
As we have already established in i’m real, social constructs are very real. In fact, their reality is absolutely integral to their functionality. In getting past his depression another interpretation is that Jarrett didn’t change his emotion but how he processed it. The emotion Jarrett was experiencing was not “I am a killer.” or “I should have been in control.” Those thoughts are the reaction to the emotion. Or, more, accurately, the complex cocktail of emotions: guilt, grief, horror, betrayal, a traumatic event like the accident would spawn. It’s the idea that emotions aren’t obligations; they don’s control us. They’re revealing; they’re narratives revealing stories that we can control and alter. Changing the thoughts and reactions we have to our emotions is cognitive behavioral therapy. Something that has been around for decades.
Accepting that emotions are merely an interpretation of pleasant or unpleasant, aroused or calm. Is it to be understood that we can only feel one of these at once? If I feel both pleasant and aroused, what is it? Emotions are the social constructs we use to categorize the feelings we have. Back to color, there are three primary colors. They then combine to make secondary colors, tertiary colors, and so on and so forth to the full explosive palette of colors we can see in the universe. Unpleasant, pleasant, aroused, calm – these are four distinct sensations strong enough to demand our brain’s attention. As they combine and recombine in a billion different ways, they form a cascade of emotions that are then filtered and categorized by our interactions with our families, our friends, and our societies. They are constructed, but the foundation is nonarbitrary and the construct built upon that foundation very real. In this theory the only reason these feelings of pleasant, unpleasant, aroused, or calm are not emotions is because Barrett says they are not.
In Trolls S3, E2, Smidge, feels strong sensations of unpleasantness and arousal when she sees Milton, another Troll. Her heartbeat speeds up, her breath comes faster, she goes into a fugue state, and has an almost uncontrollable urge to hold his hand. Until her friends point out that this indicates a crush, Smidge just feels uncomfortable, and vaguely angry which is Smidge’s go to emotion. Barrett’s interpretation would be that Smidge and her friends “created” the crush by naming Smidge’s emotions. A more traditional view would be that her friends recognized the crush. Once her friends named these sensation Smidge could suddenly make sense of them. Like the image in a magic eye painting, the emotion was already there even if Smidge couldn’t see it.
Barrett complains of the tenacity of essentialism but seems to suffer from it in her own work. Or maybe just in the pop psychology marketing of her theories. She softens the sheer power and reality of social constructs and focuses on the power and responsibility of the individual. A very American, individualistic, point of view. Especially for a Canadian. Her claim that “science is science” is deeply flawed. Among other things, science has a replication problem. Especially the so called “soft” sciences, but all sciences suffer from this issue because all sciences include the perceptions of people. Be it at the start or at the end our prejudices and biases tend to influence how we understand a thing. After all, science, which is more than anything else is the categorization of things, is itself a social construct.
More there is the fact, which Barrett does explore in her research, that unlike concepts of color or even of sight, humans need emotion to become, well, fully human. When my daughter joined our family at the age of ten months there were concerns about bonding. This concern is there any time a baby is brought into a family. Parents are encouraged to embrace kangaroo care, skin to skin bonding, to gaze into their baby’s eyes, to hold, to laugh, to tickle, to coo. For most of us this comes naturally. When we become the primary carer for a child, even one we have not birthed, our bodies prep us with a surge of hormones that make us want to bond with this tiny human in our arms. Without those bonds it becomes difficult for humans to fully develop emotion. And when humans don’t fully develop emotions, it affects us both physically and mentally.
In the 15th century the Italian, Franciscan monk, Salimbene di Adam, recorded the experimentations of Holy Roman Emperor and Scottish King Frederick II in The Twelve Calamities of Emperor Frederick II. While there are doubts to its full authenticity there are supports as well. One of the most infamous experiments, one I learned of as far back as high school, was one delving into the origin of language. King Frederick placed a group of infants to be cared for by nurses who were given strict instructions to take care of the babies’ basic needs and no more. The infants were to be cleaned and fed but otherwise not interacted with. The king wanted to discover if they would then speak man’s original language. Instead, starved of emotional affection, they died.
In the modern era this experiment played out in the 90s orphanages of the post-Soviet era. By 1998 there were more than 18,000 children adopted from eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union living in the US. Somewhere between 20 and 30 percent were deeply traumatized after having been submitted to a form of institutional care that lacked both affection and sensory stimulation. These children often endured these conditions for years before being adopted, most often as toddlers.
These conditions meant that the children formed insecure attachments. Insecure attachments may cause children to fail to develop social skills or emotional regulation. This can lead to low self-esteem, exclusion, and social rejection. On top of this there are cognitive impairments. Visual problems, sensory-integration deficits, trouble processing the personal and social aspects of language and of following spoken language at speed, delayed fine and gross motor skills, and can fail to physically develop being both undersized and underweight. The damage caused by physically adequate but emotionally indifferent care can trigger depression, anxiety, and even psychopathy. All of this as early as preschool.
For children three and under, consistent, loving care generates the connections between brain cells which permit the brain to grow. Humans may have to be taught the ability to recognize emotions by visual and auditory cues before we can learn to feel them, but we must learn in order to fully become human in all of humanity’s infinite variety. For the maturing brain emotion, love, is abstract, absolutely necessary, and very real.
Sources
https://www.floridatechonline.com/blog/psychology/the-importance-of-attachment-in-early-child-development/
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/enchroma-colorblindness/521817/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/colorblindness
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/24/magazine/the-disconnected-attachment-theory-the-ultimate-experiment.html
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233597995_Royal_Investigations_of_the_Origin_of_Language
https://www.npr.org/2017/06/01/530928414/emotions-part-one
https://www.npr.org/2017/06/01/530936928/emotions-part-two