The past decade has been an exceptional period for neuroscience, crucial discoveries have been made, old theories have been debunked, and new ones proposed.

In my previous article, I spoke about how dopamine works in the brain and why the reward system is actually a prediction error system. Now, I want to introduce you to the most recent and widely accepted theory about how emotions are made: the theory of constructed emotions.

This theory has been developed by Lisa Feldman Barret — she is among the top one percent most-cited scientists in the world — and conveys a completely new approach to the way emotions are created and experienced.

I believe it is important to tell the story that gave birth to this new paradigm because outside neuroscience, many people still hold a classic view of emotions that has been rejected by empirical evidence.

Debunking The Classical View of Emotions

Lisa Feldman’s experiments are numerous and consistent with other researchers’ to show that there is no fingerprint for emotions, neither in the brain nor in bodily conditions or facial expressions.

Let’s start with brain imaging techniques.

Lisa’s team examined every published neuroimaging study on anger, disgust, happiness, fear, and sadness, and combined those that were usable statistically in a meta-analysis.

Altogether, this comprised nearly 100 published studies involving nearly 1,300 test subjects across almost 20 years.

The result was shocking: overall, no single brain region contained the fingerprint for any single emotion.

For many years, we have been told that different emotions are located in different brain areas.

Certain groups of neurons, fired together creating electric signals in these regions of the brain, for example, fear was associated with strong brain activity in the amygdala.

However, the reality is that both for a single person and across many individuals, different instances of the same emotion involve the activation of different groups of neurons.

This came as a shock to the field of neuroscience.

Furthermore, the same thing happened where emotions and the autonomic nervous system are concerned:

Four significant meta-analyses have been conducted in the last two decades, the largest of which covered more than 220 physiology studies and nearly 22,000 test subjects. None of these four meta-analyses found consistent and specific emotion fingerprints in the body.

Instead, the body’s orchestra of internal organs can play many different symphonies during happiness, fear, and the rest.

What about facial expressions?

More of the same.

In study after study, the facial muscle movements do not reliably indicate when someone is angry, sad, or fearful. They don’t form predictable fingerprints for each emotion.

How Emotions Are Constructed In The Brain

In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning.

When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion, that is why it is called the “theory of constructed emotion”.

The key here is that emotions are more than just a hardwired reflex triggered by sensory inputs.

Your emotions are created as a result of a combination of unique sensory inputs and the brain’s best predictions based on your individual experiences.

In fact, your brain predictions’ anticipate sensory inputs such as vision or taste even before they happen. Then real sensory inputs either affirm the mind’s predictions as correct or wrong — if wrong, then the brain learns updates new predictions.

So the process is not like this:

Sensory Input(I see a lion) → Emotion triggered (I feel scared)

It is rather like this:

Anticipated Sensory Input + Interoceptive Concept (your experience) → Prediction + Real Sensory Input → Prediction Error + Emotion

When an emotion is felt, it is compared to the expected feeling and subsequently updated. This is the process of learning.

Emotion + Prediction Error → Emotion Updated → Learning

This is why the whole experience of feeling an emotion can vary a lot from one person to another depending on their past experiences. Some people experience fear when they see a snake, some people just love snakes.

Even one single person may experience a myriad of different instances of fear, anger, or joy.

Sometimes you might cry while feeling overwhelmed, sometimes while feeling happy.

You might be scared of snakes but start liking them after been exposed to them repeatedly and realizing that nothing bad happens to you.

As your life develops, you update your experiences and concepts, thus, the way you experience your emotions vary accordingly.

Therefore, emotions are much more individual experiences than we thought, and crucially, they are much more subject to change than we used to believe. We are not left at the mercy of our emotions, because they are not written in our genes, they are constructed from interoception, or what Lisa calls concepts.

The environment in which you are living your life, and the experiences you have lived create the concepts that your brain assigns to sensory inputs in order to create a feeling.

This is called interoceptive experience in neuroscience, although Lisa uses the word “concepts”, which might be easier to understand.

The interoceptive experience helps explain why cognitive and behavioral therapies have shown success in psychology because as a person updates her beliefs, her experiences of emotion, and therefore her whole feelings, change in consequence.

Cultural Beliefs and Emotional Experience

Another observation revealed by research is that not only do people not experience emotions the same way but culture also shapes our concept of emotions.

Contrary to popular belief, emotions are not universal across cultures, and there isn’t a universal response in the brain to each emotion.

For instance, in the Tahitian language, they don’t have any words to describe sadness. Rather, they use a word meaning something along the lines of “the fatigue that comes with the flu.”

Our reality depends on the concepts we have to describe what’s around us, and these depend on our culture. So our idea of what emotions are is a convention of the culture we live in. This means that once we know the concept of emotion, we can experience that emotion.

You might be surprised to learn that smiling is a relatively recent concept. Interestingly, the Ancient Romans didn’t even have a word to describe it. Humans probably didn’t “invent” it until the Middle Ages. It’s likely there was some other gesture in Roman culture to indicate happiness, but we don’t know.

Therefore, we have a ton of different words to describe the wide variety of feelings we experience, and it makes little to no sense to argue about calling a particular emotion one word or another because they are very personal and changing experiences.

The Concept of Emotional Core Affect

The theory of constructed emotions subscribes to the idea of emotional core affect, characterized by dimensions of arousal (how intense is the emotion) and valence(whether it feels positive or negative), and views these as low dimensional representations of interoceptive sensations.

What is then added to this core feeling — the “constructed” aspect of the theory — are concomitant sensory experiences, awareness of the eliciting situation, predictions about what might happen next — in short, everything of which you are conscious at that point in time.

So any given conscious experience of emotion includes core affect, bodily feelings, knowledge, and thoughts about the situation that caused the feelings, and other conceptual representations.

An important aspect of the theory is that memory and expectations are used in large part to construct the emotion — it is not simply caused by a stimulus. In this respect, the theory is in line with a large topic in neuroscience (so far mostly focused on sensory processing) that considers perceptual representations as arising from expectations and predictions.

If one considers interoceptive sensations analogously, one view is that the prediction error between expectations and the actual body state constitutes an important part of the conscious experience of emotions.

This view has been elaborated by the cognitive neuroscientist Anil Seth and is also a component of Feldman Barrett’s theory.

Because of all the aspects considered above, the theory of constructed emotion is probably the most comprehensive attempt to incorporate all the rich content of conscious experience to make sense of our feelings.

Conclusion

The theory of constructed emotion does not believe in “basic emotions” as universal, fixed experiences.

Instead, categories like fear, anger, and sadness are not “natural types of emotions”, but socially constructed categories that will vary by individual differences, learning, expectations, and culture.

The theory of constructed emotionargues that the whole process of feeling a positive or negative emotion is the result of a constant loop, in which the brain takes in sensory inputs and past experiences in order to make predictions — Then an emotion is felt.

Once predictions are proved right or wrong, they are updated — And your emotional state changes. This is the neural basis of learning.

Consequently, there are no systems for joy, fear, or anger, or indeed any emotions, that one could search for in the brain.

There are domain-general brain networks affecting many different sensations at the same time and constantly changing.

Finally, there is a key implication to be derived from this theory: we can have an influence on our emotions.

By living experiences and thinking about them we update our belief system and our interoceptive concepts. This will have an impact on our emotions the next time we construct them.