Latest Issue of the MindBrainEd Think Tank + (ISSN 2434-1002) 5 MindBrainEd Bulletin V4i5 Think Tank Emotion May | Page 13

Think Tank:
Emotion
Harumi Kimura
If emotions are made, we can reframe L2 anxiety
and empower learners
It is really counterintuitive to say that emotions are not reactions to the world but are
creation of our brain, or predictions our brain constructs. More simply put, we make
our own emotions. Both scientists and ordinary people have naïvely believed that
emotions are hardwired and universal. People see a face and can tell what emotion it
expresses: happiness, surprise, sadness, fear, anger, or disgust. This is because our
brain has emotion circuits and they are culture-independent. Well, not really. Dr.
Barrett says this idea is a total myth because neuroscientific evidence has
demonstrated otherwise.
We do experience simple pleasant/unpleasant and jittery/calm feelings. With these
sensations, and with our past experiences as a guide, our brains are constantly
making predictions about the world. Among the predictions, they keep the most
probable one and constructs the world we experience. What we are experiencing at
this moment is actually what our brain predicted a moment ago.
Dr. Barrett also says that emotions are socially constructed. Take an example of what
we call some tiny plants in our garden: either flowers or weeds. According to Dr.
Barrett, it is, at least to some extent, the perceiver who makes meaning of the world,
depending on whether she perceives them as comfort
(pleasant and calm) or nuisance (unpleasant and jittery),
and whether her culture says one or the other. A colleague
and friend of mine, Marc Helgesen, gave me the example
of tanpopo (a Japanese word for dandelion) vs. dandelion.
In Japanese culture, tanpopo is a flower and people
generally see a sign of spring in it and love it, while in
American culture, the same plant is a weed and people
generally hate it. We see the plant through the eyes (brain)
of Japanese vs. American. Furthermore, we humans need
emotion concepts to perceive, explain, and make meaning
of the world and in this process, words play a significant
part. We have words that represent those concepts.