How many in summer take advantage of free time to read and among others I read "How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain" by Lisa Feldman Barret where we are told that emotions No. they are universal. In Spain and Mexico we are wasting time trying to guess a person's political ideas by interpreting facial expressions! Not only this, we are also losing it, trying to presuppose emotions by reading the faces of those around us. Genetics and neurology may play a less important role in the emotional footprint than the culture and concepts that we create to interpret reality. Even the division we make between the reptilian brain (amygdala and limbic system) and the human brain (cortex) to explain our lack of control or impulsiveness is not true. Lisa tells us how, invited to dinner by a boy who did not appeal to her much, she finished the dinner with butterflies in her stomach thinking that she had fallen in love, to discover the next morning that she had a fever. What she had interpreted as love was a reading of bodily sensations resulting from her illness!
Our mind is not a battleground between opposing internal forces - passion and reason that determine responsibility for our behaviors. Our mind is a computational moment within a brain that is always making predictions. We predict creating concepts and while scientists debate whether these concepts are genetic or learned, it is unquestionable that many of us learn them based on what surrounds us both physically and culturally. For Feldman, the brain has few mental concepts (pleasant-unpleasant, agitation-calm, noise-silence, light-darkness ...) and we create all the others. The brain creates emotions in each of us to invent social realities depending on our experiences. The only limitation when creating concepts and emotions is the one that has a brain that looks for efficiency and speed.
Emotional intelligence lies in having as many more concepts about emotions as we can have. Fear, for example, is not the same when we fear for our death as when we fear to catch a cold. Could we use different words (concepts) for both fears? Do we know how to distinguish between feeling satisfied, content, pleased, joyous, joyous, happy, happy, fortunate, happy ...? The better we do it the more emotionally intelligent we will be.