Summary
The theory of constructed emotion holds that emotions aren’t ready-made reactions set off by events. The brain makes each one on the spot, as its best guess at what the body’s sensations mean. It comes from the psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, in her book ‘How Emotions Are Made’ and a 2017 paper, and is set against the older view that each emotion has its own innate circuit.
The guessing draws on past experience and on concepts shared with other people. A scowl means anger, Barrett says, only because “we all agree that scowling is anger”. Her summary: “Emotions are constructions of the world, not reactions to it.”
Rationale
We didn’t draw on Barrett, but she gives Part 1’s ‘priors’ a body. If even anger is a guess learned in company, it’s clearer why dispositions feel like plain fact and rarely yield to argument.