A Socially Co-Constructed World: Constructed Emotions, Framing, and Rewilding

The Theory of Constructed Emotions, Framing, and Rewilding our World – An exploration into Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made, Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant, and Bekoff’s Rewilding Our Hearts
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The Nobel poet Derek Walcott said that “Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe … I don’t think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.” What conditions of “awe” would astonish the soul though? Perhaps beauty, the sublime, and wonder would suffice. However, in an acceptance speech for the National Book Award, Rachel Carson shared a parallel sentiment to Walcott that may help uncover this prerequisite: “The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.” The relationship of truth to awe is shared in the Eureka! moment of the scientific discovery but I also think it is what motivates learning and expression in general.
 
Mos Def pulls this idea together for the self in the Black Star album with Talib Kweli: “My narrative expands to explain this existence…” The intertwined self/non-self creation of reality is explored in a new book by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. Barrett is the Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University and has a new book that provides an explanatory eureka moment for me. In How Emotions are Made Barrett develops her Theory of Constructed Emotion - an alternative to the Classical View that emotions happen to you. Instead of “anger” bubbling up from somewhere within your brain due to your neurochemicals reacting to a physical stimulus, the Theory of Constructed Emotion says that you created and continue to create your relationship with the concept of “anger” in concert with your environment, upbringing, and how you see the world through your Social Reality. This is a non-intuitive and contrary idea to how we understand emotions, especially in the Western world. When we feel “anger” it feels like it comes from inside and we respond to it accordingly. But, Barrett says that is only how we experience it because it has been explained that way.
 
Anger seems so universal that it may not be the best example of Barrett's theory. In her book she uses several examples with one of the most powerful being schadenfreude. In the English language there was no word or concept for “pleasure derived from another person's misfortune” and therefore we did not explicitly feel that emotion more than a confused jumble of emotions until the German word was adopted into our language. Now that we have the language, we have the emotion. The constructed social reality relationship literally creates the emotion within us, with our self being an integral co-creator of the emotion but also the social reality.
 
As other examples, Barrett shares the Japanese concept of when someone has done you a favor that you didn’t want from them and which may have caused difficulty from you but you’re required to be grateful anyway. Or, the Spanish concept of feeling sorry for someone else’s misfortune. There are rough emotional translations into English but they are not the same felt emotion as those in the indigenous language. To understand these concepts you have to expend a lot of energy to make several known emotions come together to make that concept make sense. To those who know the emotion concept it is as normal as “happy” or “sad” but for you they are not emotions because you don’t know these emotion concepts. Just as the constructed social reality creates concepts of money or color -and neither money nor color exist in the physical world- emotions exist in our heads through an agreed-upon relationship with the rest of society.
 
Think of the consequences of this theory for processing the firehose of stimuli we experience everyday – some of it very traumatic. The poet and scholar Aime Cesaire developed the concept of Negritude to explain the black experience for exactly this reason. Barrett shares the Philippine concept of enjoying the duty of violence in war for this reason as well. She says that U.S. military personnel experiencing PTSD after returning from war are trying to cope with the contradictory ideas of being proficient with violence during wartime and categorizing this ineffectually when they return. If they had the Philippine concept, she says, they would be able to feel this emotion and therefore process it effectively.
 
George Lakoff, the cognitive scientist who wrote Don’t Think of an Elephant, mentions that in Tahiti there is a high number of suicides. In exploring why, the anthropologist Bob Levy found that the Tahitians have no concept for the emotion of grief and therefore could not process that emotion; it just became a jumble of various and disconnected feelings. Lacking a socially constructed capacity to deal with the psychological effects of loss and deep sadness the Tahitians find solace too often in the only expression that makes the confusion of feelings seem bearable: suicide.
 
Lakoff’s goal in his book is very different from Barrett's goal but the idea of socially constructed truth holds for his ideas of framing. According to Lakoff, “Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world. As a result, they shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a good or bad outcome of our actions. In politics our frames shape our social policies and the institutions we form to carry out policies. To change our frames is to change all of this. Reframing is social change.” In one of Lakoff’s blog posts he says that “We can see only what our brains will only allow us to understand.” He calls this “hypocognition – the lack of the ideas you need, the lack of a relatively simple fixed frame that can be evoked by a word or two.” Lakoff spends the rest of his powerfully short book creating a how-to manual for political activists in the exercise of reframing.
 
If the world exists through a socially co-constructed emotional activity developing frames with which we see the world through and participate in promulgating, how can we highjack this for the benefit of conservation? If we are to reframe for social change and if we are to create language to reappropriate the emotional experience within our natural world, what words do we create? The poet Robinson Jeffers could only describe the life of the flight of the hawk as Enskyment. Timothy Merton created Hyperobjects to explain Styrofoam and nuclear waste – objects that exist beyond human concepts of space and time. Many writers, from Gary Snyder to Bill Mckibben and more, have pointed out that nature as “out there,” beyond the human world doesn’t exist.
 
Along these lines, Michael Soule, Reed Noss, and others developed the concept of Rewilding to empower ecological restoration. The ecologist Marc Bekoff defines Rewilding as: to make wilder or to make wild once again. He goes on to say that that Rewilding primarily means opening our hearts and minds to others. In his book Rewilding Our Hearts, Bekoff states that rewilding is a conservation strategy utilizing what ecologist Caroline Fraser calls the 3 C’s to conservation: Cores, Corridors, and Carnivores. One of the most ambitious of these 3 C’s projects highlighted in ecologist Cristina Eisenberg’s books is the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative.
 
The movie Jaws framed our inherent fears of man-eating monsters and when you think of a shark it is hard not to think of this frame. However, Jeff Corwin and the late Crocodile Hunter realized that the only way to challenge this frame of fear was to create a new frame to inspire beauty, majesty, and compassion of an ancient and magnificent beast. They show that it is the responsibility of the conservationist to actively develop frames with which to construct conservation as the best of humanity: caring, innovative, compassionate, seekers of awe and beauty, goal-driven, and understanding.
 
Criticizing Andre Gide, E.M. Forester asks: “How can I tell you what I think till I see what I say?” Barrett and Lakoff would ask: how can I know what I am until I see the world I exist within? In this new way of understanding emotion, social co-constructed reality, and our re-created environment, the revelatory awe of truth inspires the application of this new theory upon perceiving the world through new eyes. If we are to Rewild our world we need to create the language to do so.