How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

A recurring theme in Barrett's work is the profound importance of language in the development of emotion concepts. Barrett explains that humans can create emotion concepts only after learning to associate certain words with particular sensations and behaviors. For example, if a parent labels a child’s crying behavior as “sadness,” and this same word is used to describe other people’s actions in different scenarios, the child will form an emotion concept of sadness. The brain then uses this knowledge to create predictive thinking so that the child can respond to certain situations or interpret bodily sensations.

Barrett explains why this process would be impossible without words: “As children grow up, they definitely form a whole conceptual system for emotion. This includes all the emotion concepts they’ve learned in their lives, anchored by the words that name those concepts” (102). Barrett argues that this means that if you don’t have a word to describe a sensation or event, you may not readily feel a particular emotion about it. For instance, Mandarin has five different words for “anger,” while German has three. According to Barrett, a non-native speaker can adopt these emotion concepts, especially if the learner is sharing a social environment with the native language speakers and can contextualize their emotion concepts.