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“I didn’t know it at the time, but as I considered emotion categories in all their diversity, I was unwittingly applying a standard way of thinking in biology called population thinking, which was proposed by Darwin. A category, such as a species of animal, is a population of unique members who vary from one another, with no fingerprint at their core. The category can be described at the group level only in abstract, statistical terms. Just as no American family consists of 3.13 people, no instance of anger must include an average anger pattern (should we be able to identify one). Nor will any instance necessarily resemble the elusive fingerprint of anger. What we have been calling a fingerprint might just be a stereotype. Once I adopted a mindset of population thinking, my whole landscape shifted, scientifically speaking. I began to see variation not as error but as normal and even desirable. I continued my quest for an objective way to distinguish one emotion from another, but it wasn’t quite the same quest anymore. With growing skepticism, I had only one place left to look for fingerprints. It was time to turn to the brain.”

– Lisa Feldman Barrett, in “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain” (2017)