Your Truth Is Simulated

What the theory of constructed emotion suggests about certainty, rationality and our social realities

How we think about emotions and regulation may be undergoing a big change and it seems that most of us who are not students of emotion or related fields are at risk of missing the event entirely. How do I know this? Because in talks I attend, in the press, on social media … in spaces where I would expect to gradually hear more about this, I don’t find enough of it. Not nothing, but also not enough.

People, me included, are quite susceptible to the belief that if something were true or if it were truly significant, they would know about it. But sadly, it is not as simple as that.

It was Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book, How Emotions Are Made, that first introduced me to the theory of constructed emotion and I have referred to it before in my newsletters but never dedicated a full article to it. I have also since reread it. This theory challenges, in far-reaching ways, ideas we hold about emotions, rationality and how we organise ourselves. Many of which slip into our world as given and as facts all the time.

Some might wonder why the fuss, is it not all just a matter of semantics? Does it really matter exactly how our brains and bodies work? Isn’t it sufficient that specialists have methods of helping us regardless of what the current scientific undercurrent might be?

I have asked these questions myself. But if some of what helps can cause harm as well, then it matters. What we do with our unexamined beliefs about how our brains and bodies work is not neutral. This is so even when these beliefs feel intuitively true.

I want to acknowledge from the outset that the theory of constructed emotion is not scientifically settled, and I realise that I have spent more time understanding it than the counterargument. Reading about it, though, has made me aware of how we popularise and encode specific scientific moments when they resonate and offer a utility that is aligned with an existing goal. They begin to serve us rather than enlighten and inform us. So, at risk of doing the same here, let’s consider what this theory offers us.

Before we take a detour into the theory itself, I will offer a few examples of scientific ideas about emotion and regulation we have popularised. I often hear of the reptilian brain; how the amygdala hijacks rational thinking; how emotion and reason run on different systems; and that your fight, flight, freeze or fawn (four Fs) response is your fear and/or stress response.

Now, I can see why there is some truth to all these when viewed through a specific lens. By asking what else there is to know, we may find something that challenges us to grow in new ways. Something that supports us as we consider if these popularised ways of thinking about how we work are the full story. We might find a gift of agency we had not noticed we had before.

What Is the Theory of Constructed Emotion?

What is this theory of constructed emotion then? I will attempt to summarise it, so please bear with me as I go through a section that may feel a little dense. It might just change how you think about yourself and others. If you’d rather start with the practical examples, feel free to jump ahead to Where This Theory First Resonated with Me and come back to this section later.

Our brains are always predicting what might impact our body-budget (the energy we’ll need) and what we predict is informed by all our past experiences, our culture and our concepts which are influenced by the words available to us. The purpose of the prediction, in Barrett’s account, is to anticipate the body’s energy needs and meet them before they arise. Predictions influence our perception and actions in the world as they simulate our current experience – they come before the inputs are registered. Pause for a moment if you haven’t heard this before.

What you simulate or predict is not total fiction, because you do have a history of sensory and interoceptive inputs behind these predictions. It is just that your inputs (internal and external) do not cause your experiences directly and in the moment; they are instead what your brain compares your predictions against. If there is a mismatch, it is called a prediction error and when weighted as significant enough, a new input may update the models you hold which will in turn influence your next simulation. This weighting is not a conscious act.

What these predictions also do is inform our affect through the interoceptive system. We always have affect. It doesn’t come and go, it merely shifts. It is an internal feeling state usually distinguishable at its most basic as pleasant/unpleasant or by how aroused we are. Affect is not emotion and Barrett presents affect as a summary of our body’s budgetary state. No decision or action can be free of affect.

And here is the mind-boggling piece. I had always understood interoception as how our brains know what we are feeling internally. This changes it quite significantly. Interoception is predictive, and the interoceptive system is part of a predictive loop. It predicts bodily needs and our sensations/feelings, and as part of the loop updates those predictions when incoming signals matter enough. Predictions may include things we likely thought of as “true experience” like racing hearts, tight chests, sinking stomachs and so forth. Of course, our heart does beat, things do take place in our body. That doesn’t change. But these become later inputs which, if weighted unconsciously as a significant prediction error, will impact future predictions and probably cause a moment of recalibration.

Whether or not prediction errors update our models is complicated. One factor that influences this is our metabolic energy state or body budgeting processes.

So, what then are emotions in this theory? Emotion is categorisation. Categorisation risks sounding like a conscious act, but it is not. It arrives with the affect in the prediction and that is why we often immediately feel like we know the meaning of what we are feeling (or what someone else is feeling). And our ability to do this in a useful way (because ‘correct’ is not quite the right word here) depends a lot on the concepts we have available to us for making sense of our affect. Emotions have no universal fingerprint, no universal expression, no universal look on a person.

Prediction gives us our version of reality. Reason and emotion are both simulated and what determines how we make sense of our experience of self or others is a matter of categorisation and the concepts available to us.

So, someone who appears to us as data-led and rational is as susceptible as someone who appears emotional to have predictions that could skew judgement. They may believe and feel they have good judgement and they may elicit that feeling in others. How real or true their perspectives have little to do with how they appear. It has more to do with how their predictive brain and model updating process works. How “well” this works can shift over time, even as their personal demeanour might remain largely stable to the naked eye.

Calm, low-arousal states which are neutral on the scale of pleasant to unpleasant are not more authoritative than agitation. They may be useful states, especially in social contexts that value calm, but they are not proof that a perception is truer.

I can’t do the theory of constructed emotion justice in one article. But let’s consider how it could shift things for us.

Where This Theory First Resonated with Me

For example, take the familiar language of fight, flight, freeze or fawn. Concepts that have some evidential basis albeit from different sources, at different points in time, and with varying levels of evidence. These responses that we can all relate to may describe visible patterns of protection more than fixed emotional circuits.

Can you think of any moment when one of these responses has come over you and you’ve gone looking for the trigger of your “fear, anxiety or stress”? Have you ever felt that you needed to assume you have the emotion rather than truly recognise it in yourself or found that you almost had to create a story to fit the narrative? I can think of such moments. For sure.

What happens when you think back to one of those moments and you change the question? Ask instead: why was my body protecting me? Was there a fear-inducing threat or was my body-budget just so compromised that it led to this response? Because if your body-budget is compromised, whether in an acute or chronic sense, it has an impact on how your interoceptive network shapes your predictions. The difference is subtle, but it is there. One speaks of threat and the other of measures that are protective of your energy needs. Both may signal a danger of sorts, just not in the same way. And if you were to give the same meaning to energy depletion as the threat of physical harm you may well come across as anxious for no reason.

I have heard myself explain to my husband, after moments when I lost my temper in ways that surprised even me, that it felt more like I just had no energy to get through what I needed to get through and it was as if my body knew that I needed an extra jolt of something to do what needed doing. Yet I could not identify something that I was angry about, having learnt that temper loss shows anger.

I have also seen myself go silent, mute. And even as it happened, I could recall how this happened to my mum. Only, then I thought she was manipulating us with her silence. Giving us the silent treatment with intent. But here I was and my experience was one of just having no energy with which to try and explain, no cognitive capacity with which to find words that would help another understand what was going on. I knew I had no hidden intention; I was just depleted. And here’s the crucial part; I don’t have any real way of knowing if my silent moment was the same as my mother’s silent moment. They look similar, but the affect and intent may well have been different and only by being curious about it could we have figured it out were she still here.

Body-budgets can be acutely compromised (e.g. after a night of no sleep) or chronically compromised, and when chronically compromised we may find that our baseline predictions and models shift to the extent that the compromised state becomes a normalised state. We begin to predict (read expect and act) what we have come to know. Not as a malfunction necessarily, but as a function of a system organised around our body-budget’s needs.

Interestingly, the two examples I gave came from a period in my life when I had chronic depletion. During this time, I saw how moments like the above increased in their frequency and intensity. I could have adopted the cultural concepts for them wholeheartedly but chose to remain curious about them because for me, things didn’t add up.

If this is how we really work, then regulation becomes simpler and more complicated in the same breath. It becomes a matter of supporting your body-budget, moment-to-moment as well as through taking a longer-term view. It is the longer term that is more likely to shift our baselines in a way that can become increasingly hard to course-correct, so we need to be conscious of this.

Beyond Emotion: How We Construct Social Reality

The other thing that strikes me about all of this is that the process of meaning making through emotions as concepts is essentially similar to how we make meaning generally. Including how we construct our social realities.

Take another pause.

I expect it is slightly easier to get your head around the idea that emotions are simulations that come from more than just a feeling inside you, because we have at least inherited a distrust of emotions even if what they are is not exactly settled. But the further implication is that our perceptions and thoughts work in the same way.

Emotions, thoughts, perceptions and ideas are all built on our predictive processes. We construct how we experience the world (important as well to mention that Barrett is not the only scientist in this camp). Some things that we thought of as ‘real’ are part of that construction and become a shared social reality.

We use concepts like emotions, organisations, laws, policies, weekdays and many more to organise our social reality. None of this is real in an objective sense, or absolutely true, but constructed. And the most fascinating thing about this is that it is mostly automatic and unconscious, yet partly conscious and that is the bit that intrigues me.

We have the capacity, over time, to shape how we experience the world. Only, not through mindset alone.

In some ways, if we stick to our known environments consistently, it is more likely than not that how we think, feel, learn and grow will continue to be roughly in keeping with what we’ve always known. Even when the environment creates friction and feels ill-fitted, when no contrary reality is presented to us, we may well stay in a familiar loop of predictions about our world that gets continually reinforced and so increasingly hard to question.

But when something changes – through choice or happenstance – it will create a prediction error that may result in our model of the world being updated.

The mere fact that we have many versions of culture and social organisation is the clue that most things are constructed rather than given.

Our working environment is a social construct. An individual and collective prediction remade every day and so somewhat alive and not controllable by any one person. To me, that feels like such a significant understanding to keep a hold of. Our working environments are not real in the material sense of realness. They differ from country to country and culture to culture.

I am not saying any of this is completely relative, unreal or inconsequential, just that it is constructed collectively and through repeated practice and reinforcement. What that gives me is a way in which to hold things lightly. It means that any of our social constructs can at any point lose their utility and change in their value to us. When we are open to this, it might feel less threatening should that happen.

And the beauty of all of this is that it is not a mindset matter, because mindset on its own loops.

It is environmental, relational and personal. The most powerful choices we make are not the day-to-day ones; they are the environments we enter and exit, the relationships we foster or leave, and how we look after our body-budget and remain cognisant of our impact on the body-budgets of others. That means it is at once complex and simple. Complex because it is near impossible to get everything right, but simple because we have many levers. And once you realise there are many levers, the question becomes which levers you can influence. And how shifting those levers impacts you and those in your immediate world. Perhaps that is the best any one person can do.

So, What Do We Do with This?

There is a lot in this article, and even more to be read in books and academic articles for those so inclined. Is there a practical takeaway?

I think of it this way.

Perhaps it is time to rethink how we value and relate to the search for truth and objectivity. Our predictions or simulations of the world do not have the purpose of giving us the truth but rather of supporting us in a life-sustaining way.

Treating wellbeing as something soft or remedial is a mistake. And believing mindset alone will help us transcend this basic mechanism will not hold in the long run, though mindset is a useful tool along the way. Change, novelty and learning are not the only factors. Our body budget is critical to how well all this works. So, our agency lies not only in the experiences we enter and exit, but in how we look after our energy reserves.

Staying curious is critical. We don’t need to mistrust ourselves, but we need to acknowledge that our predictions can mislead us and sometimes the best version of our reality comes from how our differing versions inform and update each other. We are not guaranteed to be in sync with each other, but usually in sync enough to feel that we have a shared reality.

We need to remember that the affect we feel may be strong, the concept that comes along with it could feel significant and real. Yet, we’d do better not to interpret these as fact and instead, we can be curious about their meaning and consider other interpretations that may be valid too.

We can treat misunderstanding and conflict as opportunities to update our models for the better – neither party needs to be right or wrong. When we actively allow for the new and different, our models are more likely to update, and the prediction loop and error weighting process (when not under-resourced) can be an incredible safeguard.

Neuroconnectedness: Thought to feeling. Body to brain. Me to you. Us to our systems.

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About the Author

Deoné Duffy is a coach and chartered accountant (ACA) with a professional background that spans risk advisory; governance and compliance; and operational transfer pricing. She has worked in industry and in two of the Big Four.

She now supports leaders and teams in finance, tax or technology change programmes around how to prototype and practise the team they need to become. She offers one-to-one coaching, group coaching programmes and is available for speaking engagements.

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