Are emotions simulations?

The title has a question mark because scientists are not unanimous about what emotions really are. This text is based on the assumption that a theory of constructed emotion is right. A classical view says that emotions are constant biological components that have grown in millennia and they have been developed by the survival instincts needed a long time ago. A theory of constructed emotion sees things differently. It sees emotions as learned and created social agreements based on your experiences, immediate stimuli, and culture. This theory makes you more responsible for your own behavior.

Neurons and emotions

A classical view talks about emotion fingerprints. According to it, you have the same facial and bodily expressions about emotions. This means that your muscle movement tells others everything they need to know about your emotions. A theory of constructed emotion disagrees with a classical view about this. According to it, emotions don´t have any physical fingerprints. For example, anger doesn´t look the same in the facial muscles all the time. The classical view believes that the same neurons and their synapses in the brain create the same facial expressions that express anger or other emotions. According to a new theory, different neurons and their synapses can create the same emotions, and varying facial movements can express the same emotions like anger in different contexts after different experiences and social agreements. Different neurons have different purposes according to this new theory.

Context, experiences, and social agreements

According to this new theory, your immediate surroundings, previous agreements, and social agreements construct emotions together. Your emotions depend on your environment. You can show your anger or feel it differently depending on where you are. You can express your anger differently at home and at work. Emotional expressions are tied to specific environments. You can express your anger to someone else differently depending on your immediate surroundings. Another person can show their anger to you differently at home than at your office. You give different meanings to different occurrences based on your previous experiences. When you have experienced anger on the bus, you can expect that you will experience it again on the same bus, even though your other surroundings are different. Different cultures can have different expressions for different emotions. For example, Asians have different facial expressions of anger than people who live in Western countries. They have learned to express their emotions differently. One of the most important things to understand is that people construct their emotions differently and it is very hard to know what others are feeling all the time.

Simulations

All your senses provide you with stimuli all the time. Your brain uses your past and present stimuli and compares them to construct simulations. Then your brain chooses stimuli that are relevant to your current situation and throws other stimuli away. Your senses do not provide reactions, they provide simulations based on current stimuli through your senses and some previous simulations that have created different neural patterns in your brain. Then it chooses the most probable simulation that is the sensory input you react to. It adjusts you to the current situation. The primary tools for your brain to understand current situations are your previous experiences. Cultural differences are based on different previous experiences. And these culture-dependent experiences have created different social agreements based on different cultures.

Your simulations are your neural patterns. They guide your actions and produce meaning for the stimuli you experience through your senses. When your neural patterns describe emotion simulations, your brain constructs emotions. Your brain actively constructs emotions based on your sensory inputs. It doesn´t just react to inputs. Without previous experiences and simulations based on them, you couldn´t make any sense from your current sensory inputs. They would just be meaningless noise. Sometimes your sensory inputs help you to have a meaning for your current stimuli and your brain constructs an emotion. Sometimes it does something else like produce an action.

This is an interesting theory. It makes sense, but I have no idea if it is a fact or not. If you are interested in learning more, you can read Lisa Feldmann Barrett´s book: How Emotions Are Made or watch her TED talk about the theory.

Until next time,

TT