Emotions
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Theories of Emotion
Two Perspectives
...there is still little consensus within the field of affective science as to the fundamental nature of emotion. Two broad perspectives can be identified. First, many researchers assume that emotions are biologically given action plans that help humans and other animals to navigate the complexities of the world and can be thought of as ‘decoupled reflexes’ (Adolphs and Anderson, 2018). Following Barrett (2006a), this can be called a ‘natural-kind’ view of emotion. A very different perspective, however, hypothesises that emotions are primarily social constructions that emerge from a dynamic brain organisation alongside a highly developed conceptual system that helps to make sense of incoming sensory information. From this perspective, emotions are not reactions to sensory events, but rather they are conceptual constructions of the world (Barrett, 2017a).
Theory of Constructed Emotion: Barrett
‘theory of constructed emotion’ (Barrett, 2017a, 2017b) assumes that emotional episodes are constructed from more basic psychological operations – that are not specific to emotion – by means of the brain making sense of and interpreting the sensory information that comes from the environment and from internal signals (Barrett, 2014).
Barrett (2017b) takes a long view and argues that the ultimate function of the brain is to regulate the internal milieu of the body so that an organism can ‘grow, survive, and reproduce’ (p. 3). This process of ‘allostasis’ therefore dictates everything that happens in the brain. Put simply, the proposal is that the brain creates a series of concepts so that incoming sensory information can be categorised in a meaningful way and therefore guides actions in a useful way. The definition of ‘concept’ that Barrett (2017b) uses, however, is very broad and seems to refer to a whole brain representation of the external environment (based on incoming sensory information and past experience) the main function of which is to predict what is about to happen, what is the best way to deal with the predicted events, and what are the implications of the predicted events for allostasis. The brain codes what actually happens and computes if this fits well with what was predicted.
Emotions are not pre-formed feelings waiting to burst forth...they are momentary improvisations to bodily reactions.
The reality is that the things we’re conscious of—experiences, thoughts, fragments of conversation—are completely different in type from the things we’re unconscious of—all these mysterious brain processes, which lay down and retrieve memories, piece fragments of information together, and so on. The brain is doing lots of unconscious work—but it is not thought in any way we understand it. At the everyday level, thought is what flows through my mind—images, pains, fragments of language. But the unconscious brain activity that generates such thoughts is not more of the same. If we could understand the processes by which billions of neurons cooperate to help us recognize a face or interpret a fragment of speech, we would find these as unrelated to the stream of consciousness as the operation of the liver.
