Are emotions built by the brain rather than born in it?
A psychologist argues that emotions are not triggered but created: your brain builds each one as it goes.
▶ Start the storyAre emotions built by the brain rather than born in it? That is the central claim of the theory of constructed emotion, proposed by the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett. It says that instances of emotion are constructed predictively by the brain in the moment, as needed. It is one side of a contested issue in affective science.
Barrett's starting point is what she calls the emotion paradox. People have vivid experiences of anger, sadness and happiness in daily life, yet psychophysiological and neuroscientific evidence has failed to yield consistent support for such discrete categories. What the evidence does suggest, in her account, is that what exists in the brain and body is affect, basic feelings of pleasure, displeasure, arousal and calmness, and that emotions are constructed by multiple brain networks working together.
Her analogy is color. People experience blue and red as discrete categories, and the categories vary across cultures, although the physics of color is continuous. In the same way, continuous affect is sorted by emotion concepts, which are culturally embodied knowledge, into experiences like fear or anger. Barrett's simplified summary says the brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning.
Step 1: Past experience
Organized as concepts
Step 2: Prediction
Of the body's state and of what comes next
Step 3: Affect
Pleasure, displeasure, arousal, calm
Step 4: Concept
Categorized with an emotion concept
Step 5: Emotion
An instance, such as fear
The opposing view is just as clear. A basic-emotions researcher would say that you see a snake, and that input triggers a dedicated fear circuit. Paul Ekman has for more than 40 years supported the view that emotions are discrete, measurable and physiologically distinct, and Cordaro and Keltner, both former students of Ekman, have extended the list of universal emotions beyond his original six.
Barrett's own path into emotion research began with a puzzle. As a graduate student, she failed eight times to replicate a simple experiment, until she realized that her failures were successfully replicating a previously undiscovered phenomenon. The research direction that followed, understanding emotion in the brain, became her life's work.
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Recap
Barrett holds that emotions are constructed from affect, concepts and culture, while basic-emotions researchers hold they are discrete and universal; the question is still contested.
💡 A trick to remember it · Built, not born: affect is the clay, concepts and culture shape the pot.
Surprising fact · The theory says your brain can construct fear before any sensory input of a snake reaches awareness.
Sources (5)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (16 claims) cites at least one of these.