I’ve sort of stumbled onto something and it’s going to take me a bit longer to parse it out than I’ve got this week. Hubs is out of town so I am single momming it for the next couple of weeks. This would normally not be that big a deal, but Thursday and Friday are holidays here. Just me and Lil Bit for a four day weekend. I was thinking about doing an impromptu popover to visit my girlfriend in Toulouse but realized that I don’t have my husband’s written permission to take LB out of the country. People have told me they’ve had issues because of that flying through Amsterdam which I would have to do for a cheap ticket to France. Plus, I am just not sure I am up for impromptu travel with a toddler.
Anywho, what I’ve stumbled onto is the idea of social constructs. This is not a new idea. I know I must have talked about how race is a social construct. Hell, the idea of constructed reality goes right back to Cogito, ergo sum. The Latin philosophical proposition by René Descartes of “I think, therefore I am”. However, there seems to be a disconnect as to the power and reality of social constructs. A dismissal of them as not having weight because they are, essentially, all in our heads.
This brings us to scientist Lisa Feldman Barrett and her theory of constructed emotion. I came across this theory in Invisibilia episodes Emotions, Parts 1 and 2. The episodes revolve in part around the case of Tommy and Beverly Jarrett v. Michael Jones which came up before the Supreme Court of Missouri. Jarret was involved in a car crash caused by Jones. In the collision the Jones family lost their daughter. Witnessing this death, feeling responsible for it, sent Tommy Jarrett into a deep depression during which he was unable to work. So, the Jarretts sued Jones for the wages lost during his depression. He won.
Among other things the Jarretts showed that by speeding Jones should have realized that his conduct involved an unreasonable risk. They were also able to prove that the emotional distress suffered by Tommy Jarrett was both medically diagnosable and of sufficient severity as to be medically significant. The ruling was based in the idea that we are at the mercy of our emotions. That this severe depression was something outside of Tommy Jarret’s power. This idea that our emotions are these overwhelming passions over which we have no control goes back, in Western lore, at least to Homer when ancient Greek heroes were succumbing to manly tears left, right, and center.
That’s when the show switches to Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Barrett believes that we are not at the mercy of our emotions because they are created by our brains. She even has a TED Talk boiling her theory down to twenty minutes or less.
Based on my admittedly limited legal knowledge even if it is true that emotions are nothing more than a social construct that Jarrett’s case would fall under the legal eggshell skull rule I mentioned before. But this whole idea of constructed emotion has led me down many roads, asking many questions. Particularly when I consider the neuroplasticity of the brain. First there is the basic question of what emotions actually are. That leads to the question, what are social constructs? Are social constructs real? What is real? If emotion is a social construct how much responsibility do we bear for the way we feel? What about the societal aspect of a social construct? What about mental illness? And, most importantly, how can we make this work for us?
The next few, longer, posts will be exploring the questions. Until next week, have a good one.