How Emotions Are Made
by Lisa Barrett · first published 2018
81% recommend15% neutral4% critical
Why HN recommends it
Accessible, research-based case that emotions are constructed by the brain, not universal fingerprints or facial expressions; useful for laypeople and anyone working on emotion AI or rethinking older views.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…emotions from photographs, so there's zero chance for AI. While I don't agree with much of what she writes, the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett gives an excellent overview of why at the start of her book "How Emotions are Made". But a short explanation is that 1) emotions are expressed not just with the face but with the whole body, 2) the expression of emotion is a sequence of changes over time that can't be captured in a…
on “Time to regulate AI that interprets human emotions?” ↗"How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain" by Lisa Feldman Barrett should be considered for this list.
on “Must-read psychology books” ↗…looking into the theory around "memory reconsolidation." - Kaj Sotala does a good job of summarizing an important book in the field here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i9xyZBS3qzA8nFXNQ/book-summa... - How Emotions are Made also provides a perspective from neuropsychology on what's going on: https://www.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Made-Lisa-Barrett/dp/132.... - The Polyvagal Theory stuff mentioned in the article is also great,…
on “Anxiety is in your body, not your mind” ↗Maybe a bit more niche, but these two have been real eye openers. The Book of Why - Judea Pearl. A very down to earth book about causality and related concepts. How Emotions are Made - Lisa Feldman Barrett. Emotions make a lot more sense after reading her book.
on “Ask HN: What book changed your life?” ↗…willpower). Respectfully, this is a discredited scientific model of the brain. In short, emotions are "whole brain" things which cannot be localized to one part of the brain that precisely. See Barrett's book "How Emotions are Made" for more.
on “A Book Summary of “The Procrastination Equation”, by Dr. Piers Steel” ↗saw numerous pop psychology book recommendations and this one should be read first how emotions are made it is the new new thing, really thought-provoking, a lot of ideas are speculation, but if it true(I believe most are) we are seeing a new system to explain our current problems and create a new path…
on “Ask HN: Recommend one book I need to read this summer?” ↗…comment on that. But then again, most people don't use it in clinical terms anyway. Still, I think this is distinctly different from 'sad', as in, the context is different for the two states. The book 'How emotions are made' by Lisa Feldman Barrett might be interesting to you, it goes exactly into this sort of phenomenon.
on “I built an app to fix my depression” ↗…about this topic and how it relates to emotions. I thought it was a little longer than it needed to be, but it was still the most interesting no-fiction book I read that year. [0] https://www.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Are-Made-Secret-ebook/dp...
on “Your brain runs your body using something like a budget” ↗Fieldman Barrett's book, "How Emotions are Made" is really, really interesting and goes into way more detail about the subjects she mentions here and others. She backs up all of what she writes, as well: a good 20% of the book is simply footnotes.
on “Myths about the brain” ↗How Emotions are Made, Lisa Feldman-Barrett IMHO, it will take another century before the world works through the full consequences of what she's written.
on “Ask HN: What is one book you would recommend everyone to read?” ↗Anyone interested in this application of machine learning might be interested to read How Emotions are Made by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. She makes a compelling case that emotions cannot be reliably understood through facial expressions alone, and that context must be included to improve our own human accuracy…
on “30% of Google's Emotions Dataset Is Mislabeled” ↗Check out How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, by L. Barrett. But I probably take it a bit further than that :) The system would believe it is experiencing pain. Its model of itself would use the pain concept to describe…
on “Sora could ruin peoples lives” ↗…research/understanding going on in this domain which is worth studying. You might find the following two books interesting; 1) The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life by Joseph Ledoux. 2) How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
on “Why doesn't advice work?” ↗This is simply false, a series of claims that have been disproven but refuse to die. See Lisa Feldman-Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made.
on “The Language of Faces” ↗…advise people to act on them. This is silly and wrong. Emotions and Feelings are fundamental to Mental Health and by extension to Physical Health. See the research by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and her book How Emotions are Made. The Mind at Work: Lisa Feldman Barrett on the metabolism of emotion - https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/work-culture/the-mind-at-wor... > The "feeling hungry" part is emergent, root cause largely being…
on “The brain summons deep sleep for healing from life-threatening injury” ↗