My notes on the Theory of Constructed Emotions. Dr. Ricardo Sosa sosa.ricardo@gmail.com

2. The theory of constructed emotion:
- Your brain continually predicts and simulates all the sensory inputs from inside and
outside your body, so it understands what they mean and what to do about them.
- These predictions travel through your cortex, cascading from the body-budgeting circuitry
in your interoceptive network to your primary sensory cortices, to create distributed,
brain-wide simulations, each of which is an instance of a concept.
- The simulation that’s closest to your actual situation is the winner that becomes
your experience, and if it’s an instance of an emotion concept, then you experience
emotion.
- A group of people agrees that a concept exists. This shared knowledge is called collective
intentionality.
- The combination of language and collective intentionality build on one another in complex
ways and allows people to categorize cooperatively, which is the basis of communication
and social influence.
- This is how brains, bodies, and societies create reality. This is also how emotions
become real.

4. “I’m not the first person to propose that
emotions are made. The theory of constructed
emotion belongs to a broader scientific
tradition called construction, which holds that
your experiences and behaviors are created in
the moment by biological processes within
your brain and body.”
“A constructionist approach to emotion has a
couple of core ideas.
One idea is that an emotion category such as
anger or disgust does not have a fingerprint.
Variation is the norm.”

5. “Your familiar emotion concepts are built-in only because you grew up in a
particular social context where those emotion concepts are meaningful and useful,
and your brain applies them outside your awareness to construct your experiences.
Heart rate changes are inevitable; their emotional meaning is not. Other cultures
can and do make other kinds of meaning from the same sensory input.”

6. “The theory of constructed emotion incorporates elements from:
- Social construction, it acknowledges the importance
of culture and concepts
- Psychological construction, it considers emotions to
be constructed by core systems in the brain and body
- Neuroconstruction, it adopts the idea that experience
wires the brain.”

7. https://wallhere.com/en/wallpaper/1758247

8. “After conducting hundreds of experiments in my lab, and reviewing thousands more
by other researchers, I’ve come to a profoundly unintuitive conclusion:
Emotions do not shine forth from the face nor from
the maelstrom of your body’s inner core. They don’t
issue from a specific part of the brain. Our emotions
aren’t built-in, waiting to be revealed.
They are made. By us.
We don’t recognize emotions or identify emotions: we
construct our own emotional experiences, and our
perceptions of others’ emotions, on the spot, as
needed, through a complex interplay of systems. ”

9. Interoception is your brain’s representation of all
sensations from your internal organs and tissues, the
hormones in your blood, and your immune system. This
interoceptive activity produces the spectrum of basic
feeling from pleasant to unpleasant, from calm to jittery,
and even completely neutral.
Usually, you experience interoception only in general
terms: those simple feelings of pleasure, displeasure,
arousal, or calmness that I mentioned earlier. Sometimes,
however, you experience moments of intense
interoceptive sensations as emotions.
That is a key element of the theory of constructed
emotion. In every waking moment, your brain gives your
sensations meaning. Some of those sensations are
interoceptive sensations, and the resulting meaning can be
an instance of emotion.

10. The Nobel laureate Gerald M. Edelman called
experiences “the remembered present.” An instance of
a concept, as an entire brain state, is an anticipatory
guess about how you should act in the present moment
and what your sensations mean.
This is the phenomenon of making meaning from the
world and the body using concepts. In every waking
moment, your brain uses past experience, organized
as concepts, to guide your actions and give your
sensations meaning.
The concept cascade of predictions explains why an
experience like happiness feels triggered rather than
constructed. You’re simulating an instance of
“Happiness” even before categorization is complete.
Your brain is preparing to execute movements in your
face and body before you feel any sense of agency for
moving, and is predicting your sensory input before it
arrives. So emotions seem to be “happening to” you,
when in fact your brain is actively constructing the
experience, held in check by the state of the world and
your body.

11. A fast-beating heart has a physical function,
such as getting enough oxygen to your limbs
so you can run, but categorization allows it to
become an emotional experience such as
happiness or fear, giving it additional
meaning and functions understood within
your culture.
Emotions are meaning. They explain your
interoceptive changes and corresponding
affective feelings, in relation to the situation.
They are a prescription for action. The brain
systems that implement concepts, such as the
interoceptive network and the control
network, are the biology of meaning-making.

12. “The seeds of emotion are planted in infancy, as
you hear an emotion word (say, “annoyed”) over
and over in highly varied situations. The word
“annoyed” holds this population of diverse
instances together as a concept, “Annoyance.”
The word invites you to search for the features
that the instances have in common, even if those
similarities exist only in other people’s minds.
Once you have this concept established in your
conceptual system, you can construct instances
of “Annoyance” in the presence of highly
variable sensory input. If the focus of your
attention is on yourself during categorization,
then you construct an experience of annoyance.
If your attention is on another person, you
construct a perception of annoyance. And in
each case, your concepts regulate your body
budget.”
http://www.livestrong.com/article/530878-why-a-toddler-is-nervous-and-covers-the-ears/

13. “Is an apple red?”
The common-sense answer is yes, the apple is red.
The scientific answer, however, is no. “Red” is not a
color contained in an object. It is an experience
involving reflected light, a human eye, and a human
brain (and a human society).
For the brain to convert a visual sensation into the
experience of red, it must possess the concept “Red.”
This concept can come from prior experience with
apples, roses, and other objects you perceive as red,
or from learning about red from other people.
Emotions are real, but real in the same manner of the
sound of a tree falling, the experience of red, and the
distinctions between flowers and weeds. They are all
constructed in the brain of a perceiver.

14. This brings us to one of the most challenging ideas in this book: you need an emotion
concept in order to experience or perceive the associated emotion. It’s a requirement.
Without a concept for “Fear,” you cannot experience fear. Without a concept for
“Sadness,” you cannot perceive sadness in another person.
You could learn the necessary concept, or you could construct it in the moment
through conceptual combination, but your brain must be able to make that concept
and predict with it. Otherwise, you will be experientially blind to that emotion.

15. “You cannot experience saudade
with all of its cultural meaning,
appropriate actions, and other
functions of emotion unless you
have the concept Saudade. - a
strong, spiritual longing”

16. Your muscle movements and bodily changes become functional as
instances of emotion only when you categorize them that way, giving
them new functions as experiences and perceptions. Without emotion
concepts, these new functions don’t exist.
Emotions become real to us through two human capabilities that are
prerequisites for social reality.
- First, you need a group of people to agree that a
concept exists, such as “Flower” or “Cash” or
“Happiness.” This shared knowledge is called
collective intentionality.
- The second prerequisite for social reality: language.
The combination of language and collective
intentionality build on one another in complex
ways and allows people to categorize cooperatively,
which is the basis of communication and social
influence.

18. It is commonly assumed that a person’s emotional state can be readily inferred from his or her
facial movements, typically called emotional expressions or facial expressions. Yet how people
communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across
cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation. Furthermore, similar
configurations of facial movements variably express instances of more than one emotion category.
In fact, a given configuration of facial movements, such as a scowl, often communicates something
other than an emotional state. We make specific research recommendations that will yield a more
valid picture of how people move their faces to express emotions and how they infer emotional
meaning from facial movements in situations of everyday life.

19. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/sep/24/matt-bevin-kentucky-governor-greta-thunberg-remark/

21. In our review of the scientific evidence, we test two hypotheses that arise from the common view of
emotional expressions:
a) that certain emotion categories are each routinely
expressed by a unique facial configuration
b) that people can reliably infer someone else’s
emotional state from a set of facial movements.

22. Example figures from recently published articles that reinforce the common belief in prototypic facial expressions of emotion.

24. There are two crucial questions about generalizability when it comes to the production and perception of
emotional expressions:
1.Do the findings from a laboratory experiment
generalize to observations in the real world?
2.Do the findings from studies that sample participants
from Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and
democratic (WEIRD) populations generalize to people
who live in small-scale remote communities?

25. https://deadline.com/2019/12/robert-de-niro-sag-life-achievement-award-winner-1202784165/

26. We are not suggesting that facial movements are meaningless and
devoid of information. Instead, the data suggest that the meaning
of any set of facial movements may be much more variable and
context-dependent than hypothesized by the common view.

27. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001429/mediaviewer/rm165349888

28. The scientific findings we have reviewed thus far —dealing
with how people actually move their faces during emotional
events— does not strongly support the common view that
people reliably and specifically express instances of emotion
categories with spontaneous facial configurations. Adults
around the world, infants and children, and congenitally blind
individuals all show much more variability than commonly
hypothesized.

29. Studies of posed expressions further suggest that people
believe that particular facial movements express particular
emotions more reliably and specifically than is warranted by
the scientific evidence.
https://bogolovan.com/emotional-expression-or-how-open-are-you-in-expressing-your-feelings/

30. https://www.newsweek.com/dont-blame-obama-syria-catastrophic-war-428781

31. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/25/opinion/campaign-stops/the-obama-theory-of-trump.html

32. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2112461/latest-xi-jinping-book-gives-clues-decline-communist

33. Consequently, it is misleading to refer to facial movements with commonly used
phrases such as “emotional facial expression,” “emotional expression” or
“emotional display.” More neutral phrases that assume less, such as “facial
configuration” or “pattern of facial movements” or even “facial actions,” are more
scientifically accurate and should be used instead.
https://howwegettonext.com/silicon-valley-thinks-everyone-feels-the-same-six-emotions-38354a0ef3d7

34. We next turn our attention to the question of whether people reliably and specifically infer certain emotions
from certain patterns of facial movements, shifting our focus from studies of production to studies of perception.
https://www.hollywood.com/tv/fan-theory-recap-that-pesky-fly-in-westworld-60668320/

35. Hundreds of experiments have asked participants to infer the emotional meaning
of posed, exaggerated facial configurations by choosing a single emotion word
from a small number of options offered by scientists. This severely limits the
possibility of observing evidence that can disconfirm the common view of
emotional expressions, however, because they restrict participants’ options for
inferring the psychological meaning of facial configurations by offering them a
limited set of emotion labels.

36. Three key shortcomings in the scientific research that have contributed to a general misunderstanding about
how emotions are expressed and perceived in facial movements and that limit the translation of this scientific
evidence for other uses:
1. Limited reliability: instances of the same emotion category are
neither reliably expressed through nor perceived from a common
set of facial movements
2. Lack of specificity: there is no unique mapping between a
configuration of facial movements and instances of an emotion
category
3. Limited generalizability: the effects of context and culture have not
been sufficiently documented and accounted for

37. These research findings do not imply that people move their faces randomly or that facial configurations have
no psychological meaning. Instead, they reveal that:
Facial configurations are not “fingerprints” or
diagnostic displays that reliably and specifically signal
particular emotional states regardless of context,
person, and culture.
It is not possible to confidently infer happiness from a smile, anger from a scowl, or sadness from a
frown, as much of current technology tries to do when applying what are mistakenly believed to be
the scientific facts.

38. When facial movements do express emotional states,
they are considerably more variable and dependent on
context than the common view allows.
https://filmschoolrejects.com/westworld-kiksuya-review/

41. There appear to be many-to-many mappings between
facial configurations and emotion categories
https://sweetnessonmovingimages.home.blog/2019/11/27/right-and-wrong-watchmen-this-extraordinary-being/

42. Recent evidence suggests that people’s categories for emotions are flexible and responsive to the types and
frequencies of facial movements to which they are exposed in their environments.
Western gestures, symbols or stereotypes fail to capture the rich variety
with which people spontaneously move their faces to express emotions
in everyday life. A stereotype is not a prototype: a prototype is the most
frequent or typical instance of a category, whereas a stereotype is an
oversimplified belief that is taken as more applicable than it actually is.

43. Presently, many consumers of emotion
research assume that certain questions about
emotional expressions have been answered
satisfactorily when in fact this is not the case.

44. Our review of the scientific evidence
indicates that very little is known about how
and why certain facial movements express
instances of emotion, particularly at a level of
detail sufficient for such conclusions to be
used in important, real-world applications.