How Emotions Are Made

How Emotions Are Made Plot Summary

Introduction

For centuries, we've understood emotions as universal, hardwired reactions triggered by events in the world. We believe we can "read" emotions in others' faces and bodies, and that our own emotional responses happen to us rather than being created by us. This classical view suggests that emotions like fear, anger, and happiness are essentially the same across all humans, with distinct "fingerprints" in our facial expressions, bodily responses, and brain activity. The theory of constructed emotion challenges this fundamental understanding. Rather than being universal reactions, emotions are constructions of our brains—predictions based on past experience that give meaning to our bodily sensations in specific contexts. This revolutionary perspective explains why emotions vary so much across individuals and cultures, why scientists have failed to find consistent "fingerprints" for emotions, and why our emotional experiences are so deeply influenced by language and concepts. By recognizing emotions as constructions rather than reactions, we gain new insights into emotional intelligence, mental health, and human connection that can transform our understanding of what it means to be human.

Chapter 1: The Classical View vs. Construction Theory

The classical view of emotions has dominated our understanding for centuries. According to this perspective, emotions are universal, innate reactions triggered by specific events. They exist as distinct entities in dedicated brain circuits, each with its own fingerprint—a unique pattern of facial expressions, bodily responses, and neural activity. This view suggests that emotions like fear, anger, and happiness are essentially the same across all humans, regardless of culture or context. In contrast, the theory of constructed emotion proposes a revolutionary alternative. Rather than being hardwired reactions, emotions are constructed in the moment by multiple brain systems working together. They are not universal fingerprints but highly variable experiences created through a combination of physical sensations, past experiences, and conceptual knowledge. This theory explains why emotions feel so real and distinct while actually being flexible constructions of the mind. The construction process begins with interoception—your brain's perception of your body's internal state. Your brain constantly predicts your body's needs and initiates internal changes to maintain balance, creating sensations like racing hearts or queasy stomachs. These sensations alone aren't emotions; they become emotional experiences when your brain makes meaning of them using concepts learned throughout your life. This is why emotions vary across cultures and individuals—we construct them using different conceptual knowledge. What makes this theory so powerful is its explanation for the tremendous variability in emotional experiences. Research has consistently failed to find reliable "fingerprints" for emotions in facial expressions, bodily responses, or brain activity. Instead, each instance of an emotion is unique, constructed to meet the needs of the specific situation. The same physical sensations might be constructed as fear in one context and excitement in another, depending on your conceptual knowledge and predictions. The theory of constructed emotion also explains why emotional experiences feel so automatic and uncontrollable. Your brain is constantly making predictions based on past experiences, often outside your awareness. When these predictions include emotional concepts, you experience emotions as happening to you rather than being created by you. This illusion of emotions as reactions rather than constructions is powerful but misleading. Understanding emotions as constructions rather than reactions has profound implications. It means emotions aren't universal triggers beyond our control but flexible tools we can learn to regulate. It explains why people experience emotions differently across cultures and even within the same person across different situations. Most importantly, it gives us greater agency over our emotional lives by revealing that emotions are not something we discover but something we create.

Chapter 2: The Brain as a Predictive Organ

The traditional view of the brain portrays it as a reactive organ that passively waits for sensory input from the world before responding. In this view, information flows from the outside world through our senses to our brain, which then processes this information to determine what's happening and how to respond. This bottom-up processing model suggests that perception is largely driven by the external world. The predictive brain theory fundamentally reverses this understanding. Rather than passively waiting for sensory input, our brains are constantly generating predictions about what we're about to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. These predictions are based on our past experiences and learning. When sensory information arrives, the brain primarily uses it to check whether its predictions were accurate, rather than to build perceptions from scratch. This top-down approach means that what we experience is largely shaped by what our brain expects to experience. This predictive process operates through what neuroscientists call prediction error. When there's a mismatch between what the brain predicts and what sensory information indicates, this creates prediction error. The brain can handle this error in several ways: it can update its predictions to better match reality, it can seek more information to resolve the uncertainty, or it can ignore the error and maintain its predictions. Importantly, the brain is motivated to minimize prediction error because this is metabolically efficient - it requires less energy than constantly processing new information from scratch. The brain's predictions aren't just about the external world but also about our internal bodily states. Our brain constantly monitors and predicts our physiological needs - like hunger, thirst, and energy levels - to maintain homeostasis. These internal predictions form the basis of our affective feelings (whether we feel pleasant or unpleasant, activated or calm). When we feel anxious before giving a speech, for instance, this isn't just a reaction to the situation but partly our brain's prediction about how our body will respond based on similar past experiences. Consider what happens when you enter a dark movie theater after being outside on a sunny day. Initially, you can barely see anything, but your brain quickly adjusts its predictions about the visual input it expects, allowing you to navigate to your seat. Or think about how you can understand someone speaking in a noisy environment - your brain predicts what words are likely coming next based on context and your knowledge of language, filling in gaps in what you actually hear. These everyday examples demonstrate how our experience of the world is constructed through prediction rather than passive reception. The predictive brain theory explains many phenomena that are difficult to account for in reactive models, such as how we can experience hallucinations, optical illusions, or placebo effects. It also helps explain why our perceptions are influenced by our expectations, beliefs, and emotional states. When we're anxious, for instance, we're more likely to perceive ambiguous situations as threatening because our brain is predicting danger based on our affective state.

Chapter 3: Interoception and the Body Budget

Interoception refers to our brain's perception of our body's internal state - the sensations that arise from our organs, tissues, hormones, immune system, and metabolic processes. Unlike the five external senses that tell us about the outside world, interoception informs us about what's happening inside our bodies. These sensations include hunger, thirst, temperature, pain, pleasure, energy levels, and countless other internal signals that we may not consciously notice but that profoundly influence how we feel and behave. The brain doesn't simply passively receive these internal signals; it actively regulates and predicts our body's needs through what can be called a "body budget." This budget tracks resources like glucose, salt, water, and oxygen that our bodies require to function. Just as a financial budget manages money, our body budget manages these physical resources, allocating them where needed and making predictions about future requirements. When your brain predicts you'll need energy for an upcoming task, it might trigger hunger. When it anticipates a threat, it might prepare your body for action by increasing heart rate and blood pressure. This budgeting process is largely automatic and occurs outside our conscious awareness. Your brain constantly makes thousands of predictions about your body's needs based on past experiences and current context. If you're about to give a presentation, your brain might predict you'll need more energy and oxygen, increasing your heart rate and breathing. If you're relaxing at home after dinner, it might predict a lower need for alertness, allowing digestion to take priority. These predictions create internal sensations that we experience as feelings - from comfort to discomfort, calmness to agitation. When our body budget becomes imbalanced - when we consistently spend more resources than we take in - we experience this as unpleasant affect. Chronic stress, poor sleep, inadequate nutrition, and social isolation can all deplete our body budget, leading to persistent negative feelings and potentially contributing to various physical and mental health problems. Conversely, when our budget is balanced or has a surplus, we experience pleasant affect. Activities like exercise, adequate sleep, healthy eating, and positive social interactions help maintain a balanced budget. Consider how differently your body responds when you're walking alone at night and hear footsteps behind you versus when you're walking with friends and hear the same sound. In the first scenario, your brain might predict danger, allocating resources for a potential fight-or-flight response - increasing heart rate, tensing muscles, and heightening alertness. In the second scenario, your brain predicts safety, maintaining a balanced budget. The external stimulus is identical, but your brain's predictions about what the footsteps mean for your body budget create entirely different physiological responses and emotional experiences. Our body budgets are also deeply social. Other people can help regulate our budgets through comfort, support, and connection, or they can deplete them through conflict, rejection, or threat. This is why social relationships have such profound effects on our physical and emotional well-being. A supportive conversation with a friend can literally help balance your body budget, while social rejection can create a physiological state similar to physical pain.

Chapter 4: Concepts and Emotional Granularity

Concepts are the brain's tools for making meaning of the world. Rather than being static definitions stored in memory, concepts are dynamic constructions that our brain creates on the fly to help us categorize and understand our experiences. When you see a chair, your brain doesn't match it against a stored template of "chair-ness"; instead, it rapidly constructs a concept of "chair" based on your past experiences with similar objects, the current context, and your goals in the moment. This is why you can recognize both a beanbag and an office chair as chairs despite their physical differences. Emotion concepts work the same way. Your concept of "fear" isn't a fixed definition but a flexible collection of diverse instances from your past experiences. These instances might include being startled by a loud noise, feeling anxious before a job interview, or experiencing dread when watching a horror movie. What unites these varied experiences is not a single pattern of physical responses or neural activity but the meaning your brain has learned to assign to certain bodily sensations in specific contexts. Emotional granularity refers to how precisely you can construct emotional experiences. Someone with high emotional granularity can distinguish between feeling disappointed, dejected, and despondent, while someone with low granularity might label all these experiences simply as "feeling bad." This precision isn't just linguistic sophistication - it reflects actual differences in how emotions are experienced. People with higher emotional granularity construct more nuanced emotional experiences, which gives them more flexibility in how they respond to situations. The development of emotion concepts begins in childhood through a process called concept learning. As children experience various bodily sensations, they learn to categorize these sensations with the help of adults who provide labels and explanations. When a child falls and hurts herself, a parent might say, "You're feeling sad because you got hurt." Over time, the child learns to associate certain bodily sensations in certain contexts with the concept "sadness." This learning process is heavily influenced by language and culture, which is why emotion concepts can vary across different societies. Consider how this works in everyday life: Imagine you're at a party and your heart starts racing. If you have a rich concept of "excitement," you might categorize this sensation as anticipation and engage enthusiastically with others. If your concept of "anxiety" is more accessible, you might categorize the same physical sensation as social anxiety and withdraw. The physical sensation is the same, but the concept you apply dramatically changes your experience and behavior. This is why developing a diverse vocabulary of emotion concepts can literally change how you feel. Research shows that people with greater emotional granularity tend to cope better with stress, have fewer mental health problems, and even recover more quickly from physical illness. They have more tools in their conceptual toolbox to make sense of their experiences in ways that are adaptive and functional. By learning new emotion concepts - whether from books, therapy, or other cultures - you can expand your emotional repertoire and gain more flexibility in how you experience and respond to life's challenges.

Chapter 5: Emotions as Social Reality

Emotions are real, but they are real in a special way - as social reality. Like money, laws, and national borders, emotions exist because people collectively agree that they do. This doesn't make emotions any less important or powerful; after all, people live and die for money and nations. But it does mean that emotions require a perceiver to exist, just as colors and sounds do. Consider the riddle: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is present to hear it, does it make a sound?" The scientific answer is no - the falling tree creates vibrations in the air, but these vibrations become sound only when something special is present to receive and translate them: an ear connected to a brain. Similarly, facial movements and bodily changes exist objectively, but they become emotions only when a brain with the right conceptual knowledge categorizes them as such. This perspective helps explain why emotion categories vary across cultures. Different cultures construct different emotional realities based on their collective needs and values. The Norwegian concept of "forelsket" (the intense joy of falling in love), the Danish "hygge" (a feeling of close friendship), and the Filipino "gigil" (the urge to squeeze something unbearably cute) are all real emotions within their cultural contexts. They feel as automatic and natural to people within those cultures as anger or sadness does to Westerners. Emotions become real through two human capabilities. First, people must collectively agree that a concept exists - what philosophers call collective intentionality. Second, they need language to efficiently transmit these concepts from person to person and generation to generation. Words invite us to form concepts by grouping physically dissimilar things together for some purpose. The word "fear" groups together diverse instances that have greatly varied movements, sensations, and events in the world. Through these mechanisms, emotions serve crucial functions in human life. They make meaning of sensations, prescribe actions appropriate to situations, regulate body budgets, enable communication between people, and provide tools for social influence. When you construct an instance of anger, for example, you're not just feeling bad - you're making sense of your sensations in a way that prepares you to act, communicates your state to others, and potentially influences their behavior. This social reality perspective explains how emotions persist across generations without biological fingerprints. Emotion concepts are passed down as cultural tools, wired into children's brains through language and social interaction. When parents speak to children about emotions, they're not just communicating - they're creating reality for these children, handing them tools to regulate their body budgets, make meaning of their sensations, and navigate their social world. Understanding emotions as social reality doesn't diminish their importance - it enhances it. Emotions are not just reactions happening inside individuals but shared constructions that bind us together in social groups. They are instruments of culture that help us manage the competing demands of getting along with others and pursuing our individual goals. By recognizing this social dimension of emotion, we gain new insights into how emotions shape our lives and our societies.

Chapter 6: Recategorizing Emotions for Wellbeing

Mastering emotions begins with understanding that they are not reactions beyond our control but constructions of our brains that can be influenced and reshaped. The key to this mastery lies in recategorization - the ability to construct your experiences differently by applying alternative concepts to the same sensations. Rather than being stuck with your initial emotional construction, you can learn to recategorize your experiences in ways that better serve your goals and wellbeing. The process of recategorization starts with developing greater emotional granularity - the ability to experience emotions with precision and specificity. People with high emotional granularity can distinguish between subtle emotional states like irritation, frustration, and anger rather than experiencing them all as a general feeling of "being upset." This precision allows for more effective regulation because you can't manage what you can't name. Research shows that people with higher emotional granularity experience better mental health, more satisfying relationships, and even better physical health outcomes. Emotional intelligence involves not just recognizing emotions but actively constructing them in beneficial ways. This includes maintaining a healthy body budget through adequate sleep, nutrition, exercise, and social connection - all of which provide your brain with the resources it needs to construct well-regulated emotions. It also involves expanding your emotion concepts through reading, conversations, therapy, or exposure to different cultures, giving your brain more tools for constructing nuanced emotional experiences. Mindfulness practices can enhance recategorization by creating space between sensation and categorization. By observing your bodily sensations without immediately labeling them as specific emotions, you create an opportunity to construct your experience differently. For example, the racing heart and shallow breathing that might automatically be constructed as anxiety could be recategorized as excitement or anticipation, changing not just how you feel but how you respond to the situation. The social dimension of emotion construction offers another avenue for mastery. Since emotions are partly social reality, changing your social context can change your emotional experiences. This might involve seeking out supportive relationships, changing your physical environment, or even moving between cultures with different emotional norms. Each new social context provides different concepts and categorization practices that shape how you construct emotions. Perhaps most powerfully, understanding emotions as constructions rather than reactions changes your relationship to your emotional life. Instead of seeing emotions as things that happen to you - forces you must control or endure - you can recognize them as meaningful constructions created by your brain to help you navigate your world. This shift in perspective doesn't eliminate emotional challenges but transforms them from obstacles into opportunities for growth, learning, and deeper connection with yourself and others.

Chapter 7: Implications for Health, Law, and Society

The theory of constructed emotion has profound implications for how we understand and address health issues. Many conditions traditionally viewed as separate - depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and even some autoimmune disorders - share common roots in dysregulated body budgeting and prediction. Depression, for instance, isn't simply a chemical imbalance but a complex condition involving chronic inflammation, disrupted interoceptive predictions, and conceptual processes that construct feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness from bodily sensations. Chronic pain illustrates this connection dramatically. Pain isn't simply a sensation but a construction that involves predictions about bodily damage. When the brain chronically predicts damage that isn't occurring, people experience persistent pain despite the absence of tissue injury. This explains why treatments focused solely on physical interventions often fail - they don't address the predictive processes constructing the pain experience. Approaches that combine physical interventions with recategorization techniques show greater promise by addressing both the bodily and conceptual dimensions of pain. In the legal system, the constructed nature of emotions challenges fundamental assumptions about human behavior. Legal concepts like "crimes of passion," "reasonable fear," or "emotional distress" presume that emotions are universal reactions that happen to people rather than constructions they create. This presumption leads to inconsistent judgments influenced by stereotypes about who "should" feel certain emotions in particular situations. Understanding emotions as constructions suggests a more nuanced approach to evaluating emotional claims in legal contexts, one that considers the role of concepts, culture, and individual differences in how emotions are experienced. The workplace represents another domain where emotion construction theory offers valuable insights. Traditional approaches to emotional intelligence focus on controlling or suppressing emotions deemed inappropriate for professional settings. Construction theory suggests a different approach: developing greater emotional granularity and flexibility to construct emotions that serve both personal wellbeing and professional goals. This might mean recategorizing pre-presentation jitters as excitement rather than anxiety or constructing compassionate concern rather than frustration when dealing with difficult colleagues. Even our understanding of animal emotions is transformed by construction theory. Rather than anthropomorphizing animals by projecting human emotions onto their behaviors, we can recognize that while animals experience affect (pleasant/unpleasant sensations), they likely construct these experiences differently than humans do because they have different conceptual systems. This doesn't diminish animal experiences but acknowledges their uniqueness rather than forcing them into human categories. Perhaps most importantly, the theory of constructed emotion offers a new vision of human potential. If emotions aren't fixed reactions programmed by evolution but flexible constructions shaped by learning and culture, then we have far more agency in our emotional lives than previously believed. We can learn new emotion concepts, develop greater emotional granularity, and cultivate social environments that support beneficial emotional constructions. This doesn't mean we can simply think ourselves into happiness, but it does mean that our emotional lives are more malleable and open to growth than the classical view suggests.

Summary

Emotions are not what we've long believed them to be. Rather than universal, hardwired reactions with distinct fingerprints, emotions are sophisticated constructions of our predictive brains, built from bodily sensations, past experiences, and conceptual knowledge. This construction process happens so rapidly and automatically that we experience emotions as happening to us rather than being created by us - an illusion that has shaped our understanding of human nature for centuries. The theory of constructed emotion transforms our understanding of what it means to be human. By recognizing emotions as constructions rather than reactions, we gain unprecedented agency in our emotional lives. We can develop richer emotion concepts, practice recategorization, maintain healthier body budgets, and create social environments that support emotional wellbeing. This perspective doesn't just change how we understand emotions - it changes how we understand ourselves, offering new possibilities for addressing mental and physical health, improving social institutions, and cultivating more meaningful connections with ourselves and others. In revealing emotions as constructions rather than discoveries, we find not a diminishment of their importance but an expansion of their potential to enrich human life.

About Author

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Lisa Feldman Barrett

Neuroscientist, psychologist, and author of popular science books, including "How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain" and "Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain."

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