But, says neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, it’s possible that they might remain confused even if my face were more expressive. Barrett, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University, is the author of How Emotions Are Made. She argues that many of the key beliefs we have about emotions are wrong. It’s not true that we all feel ...
When those sensations are very intense , we typically use emotion concepts to make sense of those sensory inputs. We construct emotions. Let’s back up a bit.
But learning new emotions words is good because you can learn to feel more subtle emotions, and that makes you better at regulating your emotions.
If you were to pit a face against anything else, it will always lose. If you show a face on its own, versus if you pair it with a voice or a body posture or a scenario, the face is very ambiguous in its meaning. There are studies where they actually took people’s whole faces but removed the bodies.
And in fact that’s how schadenfreude feels to most Americans because they have a word they’ve used a lot. It can be conjured up very quickly.