Constructed emotion
Why it’s life-changing: realising that emotions are actively constructed in the brain as a best guess at interpreting sense data, in exactly the same way as the brain constructs concepts from e.g. visual data, makes you realise that you don’t have to go down a spiral of introspection and rumination until you have “figured out” a negative emotion; you can just let it pass.
Constructed emotion is a theory developed by neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett in order to explain how we can feel distinct emotions in ourselves, and perceive them in others, in the absence of a unique or consistent physiological fingerprint underlying each one. Its central claim is that the subjective experience of an emotion is simply what we get whenever our brain constructs an instance of an emotion concept, and that the way it does this is no different from how it constructs other kinds of concepts.
Just as the brain might use visual data along with context in order to construct an instance of the concept “chair”, it uses affect and arousal—sense data from interoception, again along with context—in order to construct emotions. Affect and arousal are not emotions themselves, but rather the basic ingredients of emotion concepts. This means that the same combination of affect and arousal can be interpreted as completely different emotions in different contexts, according to individual history and personality.
The constructed emotion theory is described fully in Feldman Barrett’s book How Emotions Are Made.
She has also appeared in numerous podcasts and talks, including: