{"id":6455,"date":"2021-12-29T12:40:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-29T11:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/illis.se\/en\/?p=6455"},"modified":"2025-03-22T13:26:32","modified_gmt":"2025-03-22T12:26:32","slug":"constructed-theory-of-emotions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/illis.se\/en\/constructed-theory-of-emotions\/","title":{"rendered":"My problems with the Constructed Theory of Emotions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Updated June 2024<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I finally finished reading a book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It took me three years to read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it\u2019s not because I\u2019m a slow reader. I plowed through Brandon Sanderson\u2019s 1100-page brick The Way of Kings<\/em> in less than a day. So why, then, did this particular book take me so long?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, before I tell you, let me frame the context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a book that\u2019s getting a lot of traction amongst animal trainers lately, specifically amongst the behaviour analytic crowd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book is called How Emotions Are Made<\/em><\/a>, and it\u2019s by Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of Psychology and a neuroscientist. In the book she makes a big, and in many peoples\u2019 eyes, compelling, case of emotions being constructed<\/em> rather than innate<\/em>.
So, many behaviour analysts love the book, and I feel like a complete dissenter in that crowd, because while they\u2019re all nodding in agreement, I shake my head thinking that some of the main conclusions in the book are seriously flawed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Swimming against the behaviour analytical crowd<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ll get to my objections in a minute, but let\u2019s start with: what is the central idea behind the Constructed Theory of Emotions?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

What the Constructed Theory of Emotions (CToE) is all about.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The case Barrett makes is that rather than being innate<\/em>, emotions are constructed<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the CToE, emotions are not our reactions<\/em> to the world, they are our constructions<\/em> of the world. The theory suggests that our past experiences guide us in making sense of incoming stimuli, and emotions would then be actively constructed from sensory input, previous learning, and language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the book, Barrett goes on a quest looking for what she refers to as \u201cfingerprints of emotions\u201d<\/em>; looking for evidence that humans would have innate facial expressions indicating different emotional states, or that these different emotional states would be processed in specific parts of the brain; in a \u201cfear center\u201d or an \u201canger center\u201d, for instance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her conclusion is that we do not have innate facial expressions related to emotions, but rather, we learned for instance to smile when happy by watching others do it<\/em>, and she also rejects the notion that categories of emotion such as sadness, fear or anger would take place in a distinct brain location, or brain blobs, as she jokingly calls it, but rather she leans on a body of research that proposes that each instance of emotion is a whole-brain state; emotional processing taking place throughout the whole brain at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She rejects what she refers to as the \u201cclassic\u201d view of emotions being innate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHuman beings are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits buried deep within animalistic parts of our highly evolved brain: we are architects of our own experience\u201d<\/em>.(p 40)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Human infants don\u2019t feel emotions, according to Barrett, because they lack the rich set of concepts required to construct them. They do feel affect, though: pleasant or unpleasant sensations, but not fear, sadness or joy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barrett also suggests that if someone doesn\u2019t have a concept to describe an emotion, they won\u2019t be able to perceive it. They might still feel the bodily sensations associated with the experience, but won\u2019t be able to label them precisely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, according to the CToE, the range of emotions a person can experience is limited by their emotional granularity<\/em> \u2013 the ability to construct and identify more precise emotional experiences. And language is crucial here \u2013 without language, there would be simply pleasant or unpleasant feelings (affect), and specific emotions concepts are not constructed until we start labelling them, using language. According to Barrett, a person with low emotional granularity may experience a stomachache in a particular situation, in contrast to a person with a more granular emotional vocabulary, who might experience anger in the same context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is, animals don\u2019t experience emotions, according to the CToE: they simply feel affect. Since they lack language, they can\u2019t categorize emotions, and they go through the world experiencing pleasant and unpleasant situations, and reacting with different degrees of arousal \u2013 but not emotions as such. No fear, anger, sadness, joy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason why we think<\/em> animals feel emotions, according to the CToE, is because we<\/em> feel emotions, and we anthropomorphize and project. To paraphrase Lisa Feldman Barrett, humans might perceive a dog crouching with ears back and lip licking as fearful, when in fact all he\u2019s feeling is an unpleasant experience, not \u201cfear\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barrett suggests that we think animals have emotions because we make the mental inference fallacy<\/em>: we unknowingly apply our own emotion concepts to the behaviours we observe in the animal, and we wrongly attribute emotions to those behaviours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cConstruction views of emotion are frequently misinterpreted as saying \u201cdogs don\u2019t have emotions\u201d[\u2026] Such simplistic statements are meaningless because they assume emotions have essences so that they can exist, or not, independent of any perceiver. But emotions are perceptions, and every perception requires a perceiver. And therefore every question about an instance of emotion must be asked from a particular point of view.\u201d<\/em> (p 272)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, in Barrett\u2019s view, emotions are the concepts we make up when we think about how we feel in situations characterized by some type of affect \u2013 but those affects themselves are just somewhere on the scale from pleasant to unpleasant, or characterized by a certain degree of arousal. There\u2019s no such \u201cthing\u201d as fear, rage or happiness, neither for humans, nor for animals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This, in short, is my understanding of the central themes of the book and the conclusions relevant for those of us interested in animal behaviour and welfare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I have major problems with these conclusions. In fact, when first reading the book, I finished chapter 1 and thought \u201cthis is clearly wrong\u201d, and so I put the book aside, waiting for someone to debunk it – so that I wouldn\u2019t have to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then I waited a couple of years, but I never came across any such critique \u2013 and yet I see parts of the world of animal training accepting the teachings of the CToE as absolute and irrefutable; I\u2019ve even attended a conference where a leading Behaviour Analyst suggested that we throw out all our old literature on emotion from our bookshelves, more or less hailing the CToE as the new gospel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, since there seems to be no critique forthcoming, I finally bit the bullet and sat down to read the book \u2013 so that I could write one, at long last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I chose to write it in blog form rather than a formal scientific paper, because then a) I don\u2019t have to provide academic references for every other statement, and b) I can easily edit and revise any of the no doubt numerous mistakes and misinterpretations I\u2019m about to make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, fair warning: this blog post may evolve as my understanding of these concepts change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After all, that\u2019s what science is all about. Trying to make sense of the world through observation, experiment and civil discussion \u2013 and our scientific ideas and theories changing over time as we learn more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One reason I suspect that there will be revisions of this blog post is that I\u2019m no neuroscientist or statistician. A lot of the information in the book is simply beyond my area of expertise, and I don\u2019t know enough about the subject matter to assess whether experiments were well executed and actually measured what they claimed to measure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But those shortcomings won\u2019t stop me from writing this post, because I do feel confident and competent enough to raise objections to the CToE from one particular area, and that is the evolutionary perspective. Being an associate professor of ethology, I\u2019m on reasonably solid ground here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And from the evolutionary perspective, the Constructed Theory of Emotions is plain wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And here\u2019s why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The evolutionary perspective.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Whenever we come up with a theory that might explain behavioural or morphological traits in humans or other animals, we must start by doing a quick check whether it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sort of like a litmus test. Does our new theory make sense? If yes, then we can move on and try to figure out the details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the novel theory doesn\u2019t make sense from the evolutionary perspective, then we need to throw it out and start over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Does the theory make sense from the evolutionary perspective?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And let\u2019s be clear: everything<\/em> in biology must make sense from an evolutionary perspective. Unless we\u2019re counting on divine intervention or extraterrestrials to have played any role in how the human condition came about, our biological world, and humans within it, evolved under the unforgiving rule of natural selection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Generally speaking, only the best adapted individuals survive, over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Typically, one way that we evolutionary biologists tackle this topic is by asking a very simple question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWould someone with this trait do better, or worse, than someone without this trait?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this particular case the question would be: \u201cwould someone who constructed emotions do better, or worse, than someone who didn\u2019t construct emotions?\u201d,<\/em> or perhaps rather \u201cwould someone who constructed emotions do better, or worse, than someone who had innate emotions?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which strategy is the most effective?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To answer that question, let\u2019s do a little thought experiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s say we live in a group of pre-historic humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And let\u2019s say that, within this hypothetical group, there are, thanks to some random mutations, two main strategies with regards to emotions: a number of individuals who have the strategy of Innate Emotions<\/em>, such as fear, anger, sadness etc. And one subset of the group has the strategy of Constructed Emotions<\/em>: they learn through experience what to do and how to name the affects they experience in different contexts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, imagine belonging to the second group, and you\u2019re standing there on the savannah, digging for some yummy roots, and all of a sudden there\u2019s a pre-historic big cat with huge fangs rushing towards you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The theory of constructed emotions would then suggest that you may experience an unpleasant reaction, and perhaps get increased arousal\u2026 and then what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without any previous experiences of being ran at by huge-fanged cats, the theory suggests that you experiment to see what works best, and learn from your actions. Perhaps try running. Perhaps try yawning. Perhaps freezing in place, immobile. Perhaps keep digging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A thousand options. Take your pick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the outcomes of those options will be decided by trial and error. Sometimes you choose a good option, and succeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only, and here\u2019s the problem, in some situations, such as when a big fanged cat is sprinting towards you, the errors will get you killed. Out of the four behaviours I listed, only one is likely to lead to survival in this context \u2013 running.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But let\u2019s say there\u2019s another human in that pre-historic group, one that has a propensity of showing innate emotional responses, such as running-in-the-face-of-danger. Another strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, whenever that person sees a big kitty rushing towards him, he\u2019ll get not just an unpleasant feeling, but a fear reaction, and start running. Or show another<\/em> behaviour that\u2019s part of the cluster of fear-related behaviours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so, the person-who-shows-fear-related-behaviours-such-as-running-from-cats is much more likely to survive a random cat attack than the person-who-experiments-and-learns-from-trial-and-error.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in the next generation, the genes from the one-who-runs-from-cats will be more prevalent than the genes from the one-who-experiments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until finally, the one-who-experiments has gone extinct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is natural selection at work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that\u2019s why I first stopped reading the book How Emotions Are Made after the first chapter, because the theory of constructed emotions violates some basic tenets of evolutionary theory: the concept of learned emotions is simply not an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS)<\/a>. The moment a more effective alternative strategy, such as having innate emotions, is introduced, it will start invading and eventually replacing the unstable strategy of learned emotions, over evolutionary time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And again, if we want to understand behaviour, we must bring in the evolutionary perspective; the theories that we formulate must make sense when seen through the evolutionary lens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in How Emotions Are Made, the adaptive perspective is completely lacking. Nowhere<\/em> does Barrett discuss which adaptive value emotions might have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that is my main concern with that book, and the theory of constructed emotions: it doesn\u2019t make sense from the evolutionary perspective; it doesn\u2019t even discuss adaptation in any way that makes sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, when Barrett mentions Darwin, it\u2019s for two reasons:<\/p>\n\n\n\n