The Constructed Emotion Theory
The Constructed Emotion Theory 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 relevance of this to misophonia should be obvious: some sufferers feel panic in response to trigger sounds, whereas others feel rage. According to the constructed emotion view, we might say that the trigger produces the basic ingredients of a fight or flight response—negative affect and high arousal—and then the brain uses context, past experience, and other information to construct whichever emotion seems most appropriate.
There is another aspect to the basic pre-emotion stage of a misophonic response, which is the sense of violation or loss of bodily autonomy. This may be separate from the changes in affect and arousal or causally connected to them, but it precedes the construction of whichever fight-or-flight emotion the sufferer ultimately feels. That depends on the affect/arousal state, the sense of violation, and the brain’s continuously updating model of which emotion best fits that combination of states.
The constructed emotion theory is described fully in Feldman Barrett’s book How Emotions Are Made. I highly recommend reading it for a whole range of reasons, but the important take-home for the purposes of what I write about here is the basic distinction between affect/arousal and higher-level emotions, and the idea that emotions themselves are highly context-dependent and dynamic.
Lisa Feldman Barrett has also appeared in numerous podcasts and talks, including: