201. Theory of Constructed Emotion

We experience our emotions as instantaneous reactions to the world around us, but what if fear, happiness, & anxiety aren’t the result of dedicated, hardwired circuits in our brains? The Theory of Constructed Emotion suggests an alternate explanation.

- Links for the Curious -

[TheGemsbok]

Whoa, new logo. I dig it. Glad to see the gray on gray go, but still weirdly sad because it had such a long run. Well, that, or maybe I'm just inferring sadness from the context because I'm hungry?

[Infantry]

Yeah this makes a lot of sense to me, and addresses the failures of brain scans to understand emotions.

I haven't had therapy that directly contended with reframing, but its something I've noticed throughout my life, particularly lately. There's a practice to force yourself to think of things that you're grateful for when you're feeling down, because it's said to be harder to feel negative emotions at the same time as gratefulness. I think this is related.

Here's another one, when you encounter new situations, do you approach with curiosity or fear? I've seen it written that how you generally approach this question can influence how positive or negative you are, and since hearing about it I've noticed it improve my outlook on life. And I think that aligns well with the model proposed: same stimuli of new information, scrambling to fit it into existing known frameworks, a moment of feeling unsettled and unmoored. Reframing this as a good thing can help you better handle this stuff moving forward, and probably affects all sorts of other life experiences too.

Really interesting topic, thanks so much for sharing it!

[tiberiu_nicolae]

This makes a lot of sense and supports how I felt about my own emotions

[cwalshie]

Thank you for making such an accessible but also detailed dive into psychological constructionism! 😊

[ShabbyTabernacle]

Haven't gotten your videos in my feed for a while, glad I came back to a really good one! :)

[patrickkelly]

Serendipity. I just read an article about the relationship that schizophrenics have with their hallucinated voices based on their culture. In North America voices are almost universally hostile whereas in India and Africa they can be reframed as helpful or entertaining. Maybe voices are like emotions, their significance is in the ear of the beholder.

[AnthonyJEmberton]

You make some of my favorite videos on YouTube. Thank you.

[kyussbrooker]

I have been developing my own model of emotions.
From my model, emotions are only felt if two critera are met.
One is thought to action.
Two is perception.
Ill give an example,

A thought to action, could be self awarness or options of action.
But as those are opposites only one is active.
The second is perception and in this case we will say size.
If i have a big sence of self awareness i would would have positive feelings, but if it was small self then it would be negitive feelings. Were as with options of action if i have big options of action id have negitive feelings were as if it was small id have positive feelings.

My model goes into more detail to explaine how to spesificly explain courses for emotions. Rather then looking at it as an outside the body event i look at it as internal.

Take anger. We are angry when we desire to change somthing that we can not change.
This definition is only for anger but it dose not meen we cant have other emotions at play at once thus giving us a tapestrey of different emotional expirences.

[maringeorgiev]

You are making such an amazing videos, keep the good work!

[koniginsaab]

Awesome video, a lot of useful references!

[bthomson]

A tangential subject here is how many police analyze how a subject should be feeling (Amanda Knox!) and hold it against them if they don't conform! Also, watch Burke Ramsey in his interview with Dr. Phil (normally not a fan!) Whoa! Weird!

[toasttghost]

This video means a lot to me thank you for making it

[somewony]

What I find interesting is that as a philosophy student, this is sort of the normal theory of emotions I was taught, and not from modern sources either, but from 19th and early 20th century philosophers. I'm hearing for the first time that psychologists use a model that considers emotions to be pure biological responses.

I'm not trying to seem smart, or make it look like my field is better than others here. I just find this interesting. Is this another regrettable case of philosophy and the sciences not really communicating? Or did my professors interpret a modern theory into old texts?

[InShadowsLinger]

It is interesting to me how “schadenfreude” had this positive connotation in English. I have not realized that until this video. Growing up in Central Europe, the local version of “schadenfreude” had mostly negative connotations to it and was to be suppressed - “don’t laugh at misfortune of others”. Yet on the English speaking internet it is always used with relation to just karma payback. That let’s me to believe that envy (maybe other negative emotion) to the point that you derive pleasure from your target’s misfortune must be something a lot more prominent to Central Europeans and a lot less common in US at the minimum.

[Jesse__H]

Is that wee little Tom Servo new? I never noticed him before 😊

[ajmarr]

A different take on the wheel of emotion from 1897
The colors of the rainbow do not begin to reflect all of the infinite hues of reflected light. However, the myriad colors of the world are not separate things, but are in truth admixtures of three primary colors, red, yellow, and blue. This simple conceptual scheme provided the explanation of color that made the replication of color easy, to the delight no doubt of interior decorators the world over.
Deriving complex structure from elemental processes serves all the physical and biological sciences, and like the metaphors of disease and space and time, can encapsulate a world view in a phrase. However, feelings or affective states have not been so tractable, though an early psychologist would demur. He was the late 19th century psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology. Wundt wanted to know the rudiments of felt experience, or affect, and his aim was to see if affect, like color, can be derived from rudimentary components. Wundt believed that the affective components of the human mind could be determined by rigorously objective introspection. That is, he thought that affect or feelings could be broken down (or reduced) to their basic elements without sacrificing any of the properties of the whole. Wundt’s introspection was not a casual affair, but a highly practiced form of self-examination. He trained his students to make observations that were free from the bias of personal interpretation or previous experience, and used the results to develop a theory of affect which derived from three bi-polar dimensions. According to Wundt: “In this manifold of feelings… it is nevertheless possible to distinguish certain different chief directions, including certain affective opposites of predominant character.”
Wundt identified three bipolar dimensions whose permutations comprised moment to moment affective states: (i) pleasurable versus un-pleasurable, (ii) arousing versus subduing, and (iii) strain versus relaxation. An attentive reader would note that strain versus relaxation also reflect unpleasant and pleasant affective states, however these states differ from our workaday pleasures and pains because they are continuously rather than intermittently present. So, with this new perspective, Wundt in effect postulated one discrete and two continuous affective dimensions. For example, a delicious meal or touching a hot pan are pleasurable and un-pleasurable states that occur discretely, however the relative activity of the covert musculature is continuous, as is our moment-to-moment state of alertness, or attentive arousal. For Wundt, the affective modalities or pleasure and arousal and their respective intensity were features or qualities of the simple feelings that arise from internal bodily sensations. People are, wrote Wundt, never in a state entirely free from feeling.
What Wundt did not know and could not know at the time due to the rudimentary observational tools then available was the source of arousal and pleasure, which are respectively due to the activity of mid-brain dopaminergic and opioid systems. The neuromodulator dopamine elicits a feeling of alertness and energy, but not pleasure, and is induced through the experience and anticipation of novel positive events. On the other hand, opioids are responsible for pleasure, and are elicited in very small regions or ‘hot spots’ in the brain by exteroceptive (food, drink) and interoceptive stimuli (relaxation). Finally, arousal and pleasure are not just complementary but synergistic. In other words, pleasure stimulates arousal, and arousal stimulates pleasure. This reflects the fact that the neuronal assemblies or nuclei that induce dopaminergic and opioid activity abut each other in the midbrain, and when individually activated can have synergistic effects, or dopamine-opioid interactions. This can explain why high arousal and pleasure, or ecstatic, peak, or ‘flow’ experiences, correspond to novel and ‘meaningful’ experiences during relaxed states.
If we map the continuous affective dimensions of Wundt’s proposal to each other, when informed by affective neuroscience, Wundt’s color wheel can bloom, and account for and predict different affective states. The vertical axis would represent dopaminergic activity, from high to low, whereas the horizontal axis would represent the degree of covert neuro-muscular activation, or muscular tension, again from high to low. High arousal would be felt as a sense of energy or alertness, and low arousal would be felt as a sense of lethargy or depression. High tension would be felt as anxiety or nervousness, and low tension would be felt as a pleasurable state of calm or relaxation. Mapping these affective events to their physiological correlates gives us emergent subjective states that match the emotional labels of our affective wheel, or an ‘emotional circumplex’. Thus ‘elation’, or a state of pleasure and arousal would occur when arousal is high and tension is low, ‘frustration’ would reflect high arousal and high tension, ‘worry’ would reflect low arousal and high tension, and ‘relaxation’ would correspond to low arousal and low tension.
And so with a little tinkering of Wundt’s proposal, his observations are correct after all, and perhaps as the affective wheel turns can help psychologists arrange the colors of emotion in ways that would do interior decorators of the soul proud.
For a more detailed analysis of Wundt’s work and how is accurate introspection can map to simple neurological truths, see pp. 47-56 in my little book linked below and on my website on the history and implications of the neuropsychology of incentive motivation.

[Xob_Driesestig]

Is this a reupload? My comment and like are gone. But more importantly, when I last opened the comment section String Epsilon was the first comment (as always), but now his (her?) comment is gone. It just isn't a THUNK comment section without String Epsilon.

[MW-iclr]

How does this relate to Panksepp's research?

[bigcat]

Isn't this circular? Terror is this association of physiological affects because these physiological affects are called terror...

[Zole-ud]

What is the diffrence between that and gaslighting