How Emotions Are Made: The Theory of Constructed Emotion
Unravel the intricate tapestry of human emotions and explore the groundbreaking Theory of Constructed Emotion. This revolutionary perspective challenges traditional views, suggesting emotions are not hard-wired, but rather, crafted by our brains based on our experiences and perceptions.
A new take on personal responsibility
As an adult, you absolutely do have choices about what experiences you expose yourself to, which shapes the concepts that ultimately drive your actions.
- Responsibility, in this view, is about making deliberate choices to change your concepts.
- You have more control over your emotions than you think.
Interoception and Body Budgets
Everything your body does requires energy, so to manage its “body budget” across hundreds of body parts and billions of cells, the brain has to constantly predict the body’s energy needs.
- The process of interpreting these bodily sensations is called interoception, managed by an “interoceptive network” in the brain that takes in information from your internal organs and tissues, hormones in your blood, and your immune system, and labels this information with a concept such as “hunger” or “heartbreak.”
- Emotions are not objective facts, they are concepts built by the mind out of pieces of sensory data, cultural knowledge and a history of social interactions.
Write about your experiences
Our brain relies on models of what is happening or likely to happen in the outside world to make budgeting decisions.
- Writing allows us to make our thinking more concrete, outside our heads, where it can be more objectively evaluated, analyzed, and changed.
Improve your vocabulary
The more finely grained your vocabulary, the more precisely your brain can identify what’s happening in the body and calibrate its budget accordingly.
- Higher emotional granularity is associated with less frequent doctor visits, medication less frequently, and fewer days hospitalized for illness.
Experiential blindness
The inability to perceive what you don’t already have a concept for
- We are not experiencing the world directly; we are experiencing our mental simulation of it
- Our concepts allow us to perceive things in a world that always provides only incomplete, ambiguous information
- External perception meets internal construction before you know what’s happening, so it seems like happiness is happening to you when in fact your brain is actively constructing the experience
Constructing social reality
We use emotions to construct our social reality.
- When you interact with people you know and like – your spouse, friends, lovers, children, teammates, or close companions – you synchronize your heart rates, breathing, and other physical signals, leading to measurable benefits.
The Theory of Constructed Emotion offers a radical new take on what emotions are, where they come from, and how they shape our lives.
Presented by psychology professor and neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett in her best-selling book How Emotions Are Made, it also contradicts many of our most firmly held ideas about how human emotions work.
Final word
No technique is guaranteed to work every time, but they open up the possibility of working toward a healthier body, more fulfilling relationships, and a more flexible and potent emotional life.
- The promise of constructed emotions is not that we will somehow gain complete control over how we feel, but that we can learn to surf those waves with skill and pleasure.
Emotions are predictions
In order to act more quickly, the brain starts reacting even before it has received all the data – it creates a “simulation” or prediction of what it thinks might happen next.
- The simulations we create in our heads are more real to us than the physical world. What we see, hear, touch, smell, taste, and smell are simulations of the world, not reactions to it.
Try on new perspectives
Concepts don’t exist in an abstract, rarified realm separate from biology.
- Learning or changing concepts (also known as mental models) directly impacts how our body functions minute-to-minute
- Try out different body-budgeting regimes by trying new experiences
Recategorize What You’re Feeling
When you’re feeling bad, recognize what is actually happening: you are experiencing unpleasant affect based on interoceptive sensations.
- Try labeling what you are feeling more precisely, meditating on different parts of the body, or looking for more immediate, physical causes such as hunger, dehydration, or lack of sleep
Modern culture and body budgets
Much of the food we eat is full of refined sugar that warps our body budgets.
- School and jobs have us waking early and going to sleep late, leaving over 40 percent of Americans between 13 and 64 regularly sleep-deprived
- Advertising plays on our insecurities, suggesting we’ll be judged badly by our friends if we don’t look or buy a certain way
- Social media offers even more opportunities for social comparison, while constant mobile device usage means we never truly relax
- The entire experience of emotions relies on our brain’s predictions about what it thinks our body needs. If those predictions become chronically out of sync with our body’s actual needs, it can be hard to bring them back into balance.
The Importance of Emotional Granularity
The range of emotions a person can experience is limited by their emotional granularity – the ability to construct and identify more precise emotional experiences.
- If you can learn to distinguish more precise meanings for “Feeling great” (happy, content, thrilled, relaxed, joyful, hopeful, inspired, prideful, adoring, grateful, blissful, etc.) or “feeling crappy” (angry, aggravated, alarmed, spiteful, grumpy, remorseful, gloomy, mortified, uneasy, dread-ridden, resentful, afraid, envious, woeful, melancholy, etc.), your brain will have many more options for predicting, categorizing, and perceiving emotions, allowing more flexible responses to our challenges.
Talk about what you’re feeling
One of the most effective ways of questioning the mind’s often overly dramatic interpretations is to talk about them with others
- Getting feelings out into the open lends us a degree of objectivity and allows others to show empathy and understanding
Move your body
Whether through walking, yoga, stretching, weight-lifting, or other forms of exercise, we can re-synchronize the signals flowing between our body and mind, putting our body budgets back into balance
- All animals use movement to regulate their body budgets
- Humans are unique in that we can use purely mental concepts to shift our budgets
Emotions are concepts
The Theory of Constructed Emotion takes its name from its central premise: that emotions are concepts that are constructed by the brain.
- Emotions like “fear,” “sadness,” and “disappointment” are concepts just like any other
- When you see something new, your brain doesn’t ask “What is this?”; it asks “what is this like?”.
- This is much easier than figuring out what it is from scratch