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She rejects the “classic” view of emotions being innate. 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, 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. In the book, Barrett goes on a quest looking for what she refers to as “fingerprints of emotions” 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 “fear center” or an “anger center”, for instance. 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. The case Barrett makes is that rather than being innate, emotions are constructed.Īccording to the CToE, emotions are not our reactions to the world, they are our constructions of the world. We’ll get to my objections in a minute, but let’s start with: what is the central idea behind the Constructed Theory of Emotions? What the Constructed Theory of Emotions (CToE) is all about. Swimming against the behaviour analytical crowd So, many behaviour analysts love the book, and I feel like a complete dissenter in that crowd, because while they’re all nodding in agreement, I shake my head thinking that some of the main conclusions in the book are seriously flawed. In the book she makes a big, and in many peoples’ eyes, compelling, case of emotions being constructed rather than innate.

The book is called How Emotions Are Made, and it’s by Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of Psychology and a neuroscientist.

It’s a book that’s getting a lot of traction amongst animal trainers lately, specifically amongst the behaviour analytic crowd. Well, before I tell you, let me frame the context. So why, then, did this particular book take me so long? I plowed through Brandon Sanderson’s 1100-page brick The Way of Kings in less than a day.