The science of emotion has been using folk psychology categories derived from philosophy to search for the brain basis of emotion. The last two decades of neuroscience research have brought us to the ...brink of a paradigm shift in understanding the workings of the brain, however, setting the stage to revolutionize our understanding of what emotions are and how they work. In this article, we begin with the structure and function of the brain, and from there deduce what the biological basis of emotions might be. The answer is a brain-based, computational account called the theory of constructed emotion.
In this paper, we integrate recent theoretical and empirical developments in predictive coding and active inference accounts of interoception (including the Embodied Predictive Interoception Coding ...model) with working hypotheses from the theory of constructed emotion to propose a biologically plausible unified theory of the mind that places metabolism and energy regulation (i.e. allostasis), as well as the sensory consequences of that regulation (i.e. interoception), at its core. We then consider the implications of this approach for understanding depression. We speculate that depression is a disorder of allostasis, whose myriad symptoms result from a ‘locked in’ brain that is relatively insensitive to its sensory context. We conclude with a brief discussion of the ways our approach might reveal new insights for the treatment of depression.
This article is part of the themed issue ‘Interoception beyond homeostasis: affect, cognition and mental health’.
In this article, we integrate two constructionist approaches-the theory of constructed emotion and rational constructivism-to introduce several novel hypotheses for understanding emotional ...development. We first discuss the hypothesis that emotion categories are abstract and conceptual, whose instances share a goal-based function in a particular context but are highly variable in their affective, physical, and perceptual features. Next, we discuss the possibility that emotional development is the process of developing emotion concepts, and that emotion words may be a critical part of this process. We hypothesize that infants and children learn emotion categories the way they learn other abstract conceptual categories-by observing others use the same emotion word to label highly variable events. Finally, we hypothesize that emotional development can be understood as a concept construction problem: a child becomes capable of experiencing and perceiving emotion only when her brain develops the capacity to assemble ad hoc, situated emotion concepts for the purposes of guiding behavior and giving meaning to sensory inputs. Specifically, we offer a predictive processing account of emotional development.
The ‘faculty psychology’ approach to the mind, which attempts to explain mental function in terms of categories that reflect modular ‘faculties’, such as emotions, cognitions, and perceptions, has ...dominated research into the mind and its physical correlates. In this paper, we argue that brain organization does not respect the commonsense categories belonging to the faculty psychology approach. We review recent research from the science of emotion demonstrating that the human brain contains broadly distributed functional networks that can each be re-described as basic psychological operations that interact to produce a range of mental states, including, but not limited to, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and so on. When compared to the faculty psychology approach, this ‘constructionist’ approach provides an alternative functional architecture to guide the design and interpretation of experiments in cognitive neuroscience.
Context in Emotion Perception Barrett, Lisa Feldman; Mesquita, Batja; Gendron, Maria
Current directions in psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society,
10/2011, Volume:
20, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
We review recent work demonstrating consistent context effects during emotion perception. Visual scenes, voices, bodies, other faces, cultural orientation, and even words shape how emotion is ...perceived in a face, calling into question the still-common assumption that the emotional state of a person is written on and can be read from the face like words on a page. Incorporating context during emotion perception appears to be routine, efficient, and, to some degree, automatic. This evidence challenges the standard view of emotion perception represented in psychology texts, in the cognitive neuroscience literature, and in the popular media and points to a necessary change in the basic paradigm used in the scientific study of emotion perception.
Psychological construction constitutes a different paradigm for the scientific study of emotion when compared to the current paradigm that is inspired by faculty psychology. This new paradigm is more ...consistent with the post-Darwinian conceptual framework in biology that includes a focus on (a) population thinking (vs. typologies), (b) domain-general core systems (vs. physical essences), and (c) constructive analysis (vs. reductionism). Three psychological construction approaches (the OCC model, the iterative reprocessing model, and the conceptual act theory) are discussed with respect to these ideas.
There is remarkable variety in emotional life. Not all mental states referred to by the same word (e.g., "fear") look alike, feel alike, or have the same neurophysiological signature. Variability has ...been observed within individuals over time, across individuals from the same culture, and of course across cultures. In this paper, I outline an approach to understanding the richness and diversity of emotional life. This model, called the conceptual act model, is not only well suited to explaining individual differences in the frequency and quality of emotion, but it also suggests the counter-intuitive view that the variety in emotional life extends past the boundaries of events that are conventionally called "emotion" to other classes of psychological events that people call by different names, such as "cognitions". As a result, the conceptual act model is a unifying account of the broad variety of mental states that constitute the human mind.
Highlights ► Phenomena in affective, social, and cognitive neuroscience cannot be specifically localized to distinct brain regions or brain networks. ► Affective, social, and cognitive phenomena ...arise from the interaction of domain-general, distributed functional networks. ► We review the functional roles of “salience”, “mentalizing”, and “mirroring” networks. ► This “constructionist” functional architecture provides a valid level of description for brain imaging data.
Emotions Are Real Barrett, Lisa Feldman
Emotion (Washington, D.C.),
06/2012, Volume:
12, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
It is obvious that emotions are real, but the question is what kind of "real" are they? In this article, I outline a theoretical approach where emotions are a part of social reality. I propose that ...physical changes (in the face, voice, and body, or neural circuits for behavioral adaptations like freezing, fleeing, or fighting) transform into an emotion when those changes take on psychological functions that they cannot perform by their physical nature alone. This requires socially shared conceptual knowledge that perceivers use to create meaning from these physical changes (as well as the circuitry that supports this meaning making). My claim is that emotions are,
at the same time
, socially constructed and biologically evident. Only when we understand all the elements that construct emotional episodes, in social, psychological, and biological terms, will we understand the nature of emotion.
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