Return to the example of being asked to lecture by your professor. Even if you do not enjoy speaking in public, you probably could manage to do it. You would purposefully control your emotions, which would allow you to speak, but we constantly regulate our emotions, and much of our emotion regulation occurs without us actively thinking about it.

After three decades of interdisciplinary research, the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett argued that we do not understand emotions. She proposed that emotions were not built into your brain at birth, but rather were constructed based on your experiences. Emotions within this constructivist theory are understood to be a form of mental prediction about what your sensory information means. Barret explains, “In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion.”^[1]

Earlier in this course you learned that concepts are categories or groupings of linguistic information, images, ideas, or memories. Barrett extended this notion to include emotions as concepts (Barrett, 2017). Two identical physiological states can result in different emotional states depending on how your brain interprets these physiological states using past experiences to make predictions. For example, if your brain was to predict the meaning of a churning stomach while you were waiting in line at a bakery, this could lead to you experiencing hunger. However, a churning stomach while you were waiting for medical test results could lead your brain to predict that something bad was going to happen, and so it might construct worry. Thus, you can construct two different emotions from the same physiological sensation. Rather than emotions being something over which you have no control, your brain can control and influence your emotions.

Other Views on Emotion

Two other prominent views worth mentioning arose from the work of Robert Zajonc and Joseph LeDoux. Zajonc asserted that some emotions occur separately from, or prior to, our cognitive interpretation of them, such as feeling fear in response to an unexpected loud sound (Zajonc, 1998). He also believed in what we might casually refer to as a gut feeling—the experience of an instantaneous and unexplainable like or dislike for someone or something (Zajonc, 1980).

LeDoux also views some emotions as requiring no cognition: some emotions completely bypass contextual interpretation. His research into the neuroscience of emotion has demonstrated the amygdala’s primary role in fear (Cunha, Monfils, & LeDoux, 2010; LeDoux 1996, 2002). A fear stimulus is processed by the brain through one of two paths: from the thalamus (where it is perceived) directly to the amygdala or from the thalamus through the cortex and then to the amygdala. The first path is quick, while the second enables more processing about details of the stimulus.

In the following section, we will look more closely at the neuroscience of emotional response.