Nikhil Kabadi

Ever wondered what happens in your brain that leads you to feel fear, stress, joy, or any of the emotions that drive your life?

In my quest to understand how emotions are made, I came across the theory of constructed emotion in a book aptly titled How Emotions Are Made by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett.

The theory of constructed emotion suggests that your brain doesn’t passively receive information and then react with an emotion (e.g., see a snake → feel fear). Instead, emotions emerge as predictions based on your past experiences, bodily sensations, and learned concepts. In other words, what “snake” and “fear” mean to you personally determines how you feel, behave, and act in that moment.

This theory neatly summarizes three things,

1. You are not at the mercy of emotions; you construct them. Unlike Plato’s horses (the allegory of noble and wild horse representing moral emotions and impulsive emotions being driven by a charioteer – our intellect), you’re not battling emotions – you’re actively creating them.
2. Because emotions are constructed, you can shape them. You can change how you experience emotions by changing what you learn, how you interpret sensations, and how you label them.
3. Your brain doesn’t have two separate minds – one for emotion and another for reason. It’s a single, integrated system that predicts, interprets, and acts based on both feelings and thoughts. And like any system, it can be trained to make better decisions – emotional or otherwise.

This flips everything. You don’t just feel emotions – but you build emotions.

Let’s explore this concept of emotion with an example: What happens when you receive an unexpected email from your manager/boss?

Breaking Down Emotional Construction: The ‘Ambiguous Manager Message’

Let’s consider the situation – you receive a short email from your manager: “We need to talk first thing tomorrow. – [Manager]”. What happens next illustrates the step-by-step process of emotion construction.

Recognizing the Message

1. Your brain makes its first guess amidst uncertainty – what does this mean?
2. This guess is called a prediction. This prediction is based on your previously learned knowledge structure stored as concepts (your experiences with managers, the prevailing undercurrents in the company, or company culture) that fulfill a particular goal at the moment (assessing if this is good or bad news).
3. A concept is a mental category you’ve built through past experiences, language, and cultural learning. You will also have concepts for “promotion”, “performance review”, “bad news”, “money”, and many more, which shape how you interpret the situation.
4. In brain language: A prediction and concept are the same – a cascade of neurons firing, constantly adapting to incoming signals. The same email received next month could trigger a different prediction, depending on new experiences.
5. Concept formation: When you first started working, a vague email from your manager might not have triggered strong emotions. But over time, repeated experiences (positive or negative) shaped your reaction today.

Your Body Reacts

1. Even before you fully process the message, your body reacts; your heart rate picks up, shoulders tense, or a pit forms in your stomach.
2. Your brain is now allocating energy in anticipation of the next action. This is required to make further predictions – what is this conversation about?
3. These bodily shifts are part of your body budget (allostasis) – your brain adjusting internal resources based on expected needs.
4. Your brain not only depends on your concepts, but it also uses the feedback from the body to refine its predictions.

Refining the Prediction

1. As you process the feedback, your brain updates its concept:
   • If there is a new project discussion happening, your prediction shifts toward “maybe it’s about a new opportunity”.
   • If you’re amidst a uncertain environment, your prediction leans toward “I’m in trouble”.
   • If you are in a company culture where boss is HIPPO, then your prediction is a habit “what now?”.
2. This prediction triggers new bodily adjustments – your breathing may slow, or your muscles may tighten further as your brain fine-tunes the assessment.
3. This feedback loop between body and brain is called interoception – where internal sensations help refine predictions.

Predictions Are Adaptive

1. Interoception is not a one-and-done process. The brain continuously updates its predictions as more context emerges.
2. Your brain sorts through possibilities – performance review, urgent task, promotion, but suppose it settles on “layoff” as the most probable scenario.
3. This cycle of prediction → body-budget → interoception → updated prediction continues until your brain settles on a dominant interpretation eg: “boss wants to give me bad news tomorrow morning”.

Concepts Are Unique to You

1. Another colleague receiving the exact same email might react completely differently – seeing it as a routine check-in or even good news.
2. Your concepts – shaped by personal experiences, workplace culture, and past events – dictate how your brain interprets ambiguity.

You Start Feeling Uneasy (or Not)

1. With each prediction update, your body budget adjusts, and you start experiencing a feeling even before consciously labeling an emotion.
2. These feelings are called affect and it exists along two dimensions:
   • Pleasant ↔ Unpleasant (valence).
   • Calm ↔ Activated (arousal).
3. If your prediction leans toward bad news, you feel an unpleasant and activated state.
4. If your prediction is neutral or positive, your state remains calm and balanced.

Constructing the Emotion

1. Your brain labels this state using emotion concepts:
   • If your past manager experiences were stressful, your brain labels the feeling as either anxiety or a more resilient sisu.
   • If you’ve only had positive one-on-ones, your brain may label it as excitement or anticipation.
2. Another person or culture might label the same affect differently – “concern”, “interest”, or even “torschlusspanik”. This highlights how social reality and language shape emotions.

You Take Action

1. Based on your constructed emotion, you may spend the evening catastrophizing.
2. This action serves body budgeting, as new sensory input updates your brain’s prediction loop – which may lead to rumination.
3. But there’s another crucial player in this process – the control network.
   • This is the brain’s executive system that decides which prediction to act on and which to override as mere noise or an unhealthy perception.
   • If your prediction leads to anxiety, your control network can help reframe it into curiosity or preparedness – intentionally adjusting your body-budget to support your well-being.
4. In brain language: Your emotions (emotion concepts) are not stimulus → response but rather prediction → correction with the with the control network acting as the regulator.

Different Outcomes Based on Prediction Updates

Consider the following scenarios as you walk into your manager’s office the next day:

1. Your boss wants your input on an upcoming project.
   • If you had predicted bad news, your stress was unnecessary, and your body spent excess energy preparing for nothing.
   • This is a prediction error. The difference between the guess and the sensory inputs leading to new learning.
2. You receive a critical but constructive review.
   • If you had assumed positive intent, you approach feedback with a growth mindset instead of feeling defensive.
   • This is a new learning about how your boss thinks. If this happens a few times, you have new concepts about employee-boss relationships.
3. It turns out to be a promotion.
   • If you had spent the night worrying, you were depleting your body budget on an incorrect prediction (again a prediction error).
   • However, this prediction error may not result in new learning if it’s an isolated incident.
4. It’s a layoff.
   • Since you labelled the emotion as sisu, you remain emotionally steady and respond thoughtfully.
   • However, if your emotion was dread, this news may dovetail to stress unless you confront it with a mindful productivity skill like STOP.

---

🍪 Fortune Cookie:

“An emotionally intelligent person not only has lots of concepts but also knows which ones to use and when. Just like painters learn to see fine distinctions in colors, and wine lovers develop their palettes to experience tastes that non-experts cannot, you can practice categorizing like any other skill.” – Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett

Emotions are constructed. Not given. The same ambiguous email led to wildly different emotional experiences – not because of the message itself, but because of the concepts each person used to interpret it.

Understanding the theory of constructed emotion helps you recognize that we’re constructing these emotions so that we can pause, question our assumptions, listen to our body, and learn to label our emotions more appropriately.

Below are some skills from Mindful Productivity which is built on the theory of constructed emotions to help you make better decisions in life.