Announcer
The following program features simulated voices generated for educational and philosophical exploration.
Rachel Foster
Good evening. I'm Rachel Foster.
Greg Collins
And I'm Greg Collins. Welcome to Simulectics Radio.
Rachel Foster
Over the past week, we've examined selfhood from neural models to social construction, from narrative memory to digital fragmentation. Throughout these discussions, we've touched repeatedly on emotion and feeling as components of self-experience. But we haven't yet examined the foundational question: where do emotions come from? How does the brain transform bodily sensations into the rich emotional experiences that constitute so much of our subjective life? And what role does this process play in constructing the self?
Greg Collins
This brings us to interoception—the brain's perception of the body's internal state. We're constantly receiving signals from the cardiovascular system, the digestive system, the immune system, proprioceptive feedback from muscles and joints. The brain integrates this flood of information to construct representations of bodily state. But interoception isn't just passive monitoring. It's active prediction and inference, and it's intimately connected to how we experience emotions and construct our sense of self.
Rachel Foster
To explore these connections, we're joined by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University and one of the leading researchers on emotion and interoception. Her work challenges traditional assumptions about emotions as universal, biologically fixed categories, proposing instead that emotions are constructed through prediction and categorization of bodily states. Dr. Barrett, welcome.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Thank you for having me.
Greg Collins
Dr. Barrett, let's start with the basic neuroscience. What is interoception, and how does the brain process signals from the body's interior?
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Interoception is the brain's representation of sensations from inside the body. Specialized sensory neurons distributed throughout your organs and tissues continuously transmit information about metabolic state, temperature, pain, heart rate, respiration, and dozens of other parameters. This information travels through the brainstem to cortical regions, particularly the insula and anterior cingulate cortex, where it's integrated into a model of your body's current condition. But here's what's crucial: this isn't a straightforward readout of bodily state. The brain is constantly making predictions about what sensations it should be receiving, and it uses prediction error—the difference between expected and actual signals—to update its model.
Rachel Foster
So interoception involves the same predictive processing mechanisms we see in other perceptual systems.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Exactly. Your brain is running a model of your body, generating predictions about what sensations should be occurring based on context, past experience, and current goals. When prediction error is high—when the incoming signals don't match expectations—the brain has to decide whether to update the model or to change the body to match the prediction. This is called allostasis, the process of maintaining physiological stability through prediction and preemptive adjustment rather than reactive homeostasis.
Greg Collins
And this connects to emotion how?
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Emotions are how the brain makes sense of interoceptive sensations in context. When you experience changes in heart rate, respiration, or arousal, those sensations are inherently ambiguous. The same pattern of bodily activation could be anxiety, excitement, anger, or exertion depending on the situation. The brain uses your current context, past experiences, and conceptual knowledge to categorize these sensations—to construct them as a specific emotion. This is the theory of constructed emotion. You don't have discrete emotion circuits that trigger specific bodily patterns. Instead, you have general arousal and valence systems, and the brain imposes emotional categories onto these patterns through prediction and inference.
Rachel Foster
This is quite different from classical emotion theory, which treats emotions as universal, biologically determined programs.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yes. The classical view, which originated with Darwin and was developed by researchers like Paul Ekman, holds that there are basic emotions—anger, fear, happiness, disgust, and so on—each with a distinct neural circuit, facial expression, and physiological signature. But decades of research have failed to find consistent, diagnostic patterns for these supposed emotion categories. There's tremendous variation in how people experience and express what they call anger or fear. The evidence points instead to emotions being constructed from more basic ingredients: arousal from interoceptive systems, valence determining whether the state is pleasant or unpleasant, and conceptual categorization that turns these basic ingredients into specific emotional experiences.
Greg Collins
What's the evidence for this construction process? How do we know emotions aren't simply triggered by specific circuits?
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Multiple lines of evidence converge. First, neuroimaging studies show that brain regions associated with emotion—the amygdala, insula, anterior cingulate—don't show consistent, specific activation patterns for discrete emotions. The same regions are active across different emotional experiences. Second, cross-cultural research reveals significant variation in how emotions are categorized and experienced. Some cultures have emotion concepts that don't exist in English, and vice versa. If emotions were biologically fixed, we'd expect universal categories. Third, developmental studies show that children learn emotion concepts gradually through social interaction and language. And fourth, when we experimentally manipulate people's expectations about their bodily sensations, we can change which emotion they report experiencing.
Rachel Foster
That last point is striking. Can you give an example?
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Classic studies by Schachter and Singer in the 1960s demonstrated this. They gave participants adrenaline injections, which caused physiological arousal. When participants were in the presence of someone acting angry, they reported feeling angry. When with someone acting euphoric, they reported feeling happy. The same bodily state was categorized as different emotions depending on the social context. More recent work has refined this, showing that interoceptive predictions shape emotional experience. If you're told that a placebo pill will increase your heart rate, and you then encounter a stressful situation, you're less likely to experience anxiety because you attribute the arousal to the pill rather than to threat.
Greg Collins
This has major implications for understanding the self. If emotions are constructed rather than triggered, then a significant portion of subjective experience is actively created by the brain rather than passively registered.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Absolutely. Your emotional life—which forms a large part of your sense of self—is constructed moment by moment through your brain's predictions about your body in context. This means your self-experience is fundamentally shaped by your interoceptive model, your emotion concepts, and your ability to predict and regulate your bodily state. People with more granular emotion concepts—who can distinguish between frustration, irritation, and exasperation rather than just anger—have different self-experiences than people with coarser categories. Your conceptual system literally shapes what you can feel.
Rachel Foster
This connects to clinical issues. Many psychological disorders involve disruptions in emotional experience and regulation. If emotions are constructed, does that change how we understand these disorders?
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
It does. Depression, for instance, can be understood partly as a disorder of interoceptive prediction. Depressed individuals often show altered interoceptive accuracy and different patterns of bodily arousal. Their brains may be running models that predict low energy, negative valence, and poor outcomes, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where the body adjusts to match these predictions. Anxiety disorders involve hypervigilance to interoceptive signals and catastrophic interpretations of normal bodily variation. The brain detects a slight increase in heart rate and predicts imminent danger, amplifying the arousal through allostatic regulation.
Greg Collins
This suggests interventions could target either the interoceptive signals themselves or the conceptual categories used to interpret them.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Exactly. Effective therapies often work on both levels. Cognitive behavioral therapy helps people revise their interpretations of bodily sensations—reframing racing heart as excitement rather than danger, for example. Mindfulness meditation increases interoceptive awareness, allowing people to observe bodily sensations without immediately categorizing them as threatening. And physiological interventions like exercise or biofeedback can change the actual signals, making them easier to regulate. The key insight is that there's no hard boundary between body and mind in emotional experience. They're coupled through prediction and regulation.
Rachel Foster
Let's talk about affect—the basic sense of feeling pleasant or unpleasant, energized or depleted. How does this relate to interoception and emotion construction?
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Affect is the most basic form of interoceptive consciousness. It's the simple feeling of your body's condition summarized along two dimensions: valence, whether you feel pleasant or unpleasant, and arousal, whether you feel activated or deactivated. This is sometimes called core affect. It's always present as long as you're conscious, though you're not always explicitly aware of it. Core affect arises from interoceptive summaries—your brain's assessment of your body's overall condition. When your body budget is balanced, you tend to feel pleasant. When it's depleted or under threat, you feel unpleasant. Arousal reflects how much energy you have available.
Greg Collins
So affect is the continuous interoceptive background that gets categorized into discrete emotions when something requires attention or action.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Right. Most of the time, affect is a subtle background hum. But when something significant happens—you receive news, encounter a person, face a challenge—your brain uses that context to construct the affective state as a specific emotion. The same unpleasant, high-arousal affect might become fear if you encounter a threat, anger if someone violates your expectations, or anxiety if the situation is uncertain. The interoceptive state is similar, but the conceptual categorization differs.
Rachel Foster
This raises questions about authenticity. If I construct my emotions through categorization, are the emotions less real? Less genuine?
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Not at all. Construction doesn't mean fabrication. Your emotions are absolutely real—they involve actual changes in neural activity, physiological state, and subjective experience. The point is that they're not triggered by emotion-specific circuits. They're assembled from more basic components through a process that involves prediction, categorization, and learning. This actually makes emotions more flexible and more powerful than if they were just reflexes. You can learn new emotion concepts, refine your existing categories, and to some extent regulate your emotional experiences by changing your predictions.
Greg Collins
There's a paradox here. On one hand, you're saying emotions are constructed and therefore potentially controllable. On the other hand, they feel utterly compelling and often beyond our control.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
That's because the construction process happens largely outside awareness. Your brain is constantly making predictions and categorizing interoceptive signals, but you don't experience the construction—you experience the result as a seemingly automatic emotion. The predictions themselves are based on a lifetime of learning, encoded in neural connections that aren't easily accessible to conscious control. So while emotions are constructed, they're not arbitrary or easily manipulated in the moment. But over time, through changing your experiences, refining your concepts, and practicing regulation, you can reshape how your brain constructs emotions.
Rachel Foster
How does this construction process develop? When do children acquire the ability to construct complex emotions?
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Infants begin with basic affect—they experience pleasant and unpleasant states, arousal and quiescence. But they don't yet have the conceptual categories to construct discrete emotions. Those develop through social learning. Caregivers label children's affective states—'You're frustrated,' 'You're excited,' 'You're sad'—and children gradually internalize these categories. They learn which interoceptive patterns go with which words, which contexts call for which emotion constructions. By the time they're verbal, they've acquired a basic emotion vocabulary. But emotion concepts continue to develop throughout life. Adults have more granular and nuanced emotion concepts than children, shaped by ongoing experience and cultural learning.
Greg Collins
This suggests significant cultural variation in emotional life. Different languages and cultures would provide different conceptual systems for constructing emotions.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Exactly. Some cultures have emotion concepts that English lacks. The German Schadenfreude, pleasure at others' misfortune. The Japanese amae, pleasant dependence on another's benevolence. These aren't just different words for the same feelings. They're different ways of categorizing interoceptive and situational information, which literally creates different emotional experiences. Someone raised in a culture with the concept of amae can construct that emotional experience in situations where someone without the concept would construct something else—perhaps gratitude or contentment. The conceptual system shapes what's experientially possible.
Rachel Foster
This brings us back to selfhood. If emotions are constructed through concepts we learn, and emotions form a large part of subjective experience, then the self is shaped by the conceptual resources available in one's culture.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
That's right. Your emotional self—how you experience and understand your own feelings—is culturally constructed to a significant degree. This doesn't mean it's arbitrary or inauthentic. It means that the biological substrate of interoception and affect gets elaborated through cultural learning into a specific emotional life. The self that emerges is both universal in its reliance on interoception and affect, and particular in how those basic ingredients are organized into complex emotional experiences.
Greg Collins
What about individual differences? Why do some people seem to experience emotions more intensely or have different emotional ranges than others?
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Multiple factors contribute. There's variation in interoceptive sensitivity—some people are more attuned to bodily signals than others. There's variation in baseline arousal and reactivity, influenced by genetics and early experience. There's variation in conceptual granularity, with some people having rich, differentiated emotion vocabularies and others working with coarser categories. And there's variation in regulatory capacity—the ability to predict and control one's bodily state. These factors interact to create distinctive emotional profiles. Someone with high interoceptive sensitivity, low baseline arousal, and fine-grained concepts will have a very different emotional life than someone with low sensitivity, high reactivity, and coarse concepts.
Rachel Foster
This has implications for therapy. If someone struggles with emotional regulation, you could intervene at multiple levels.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Yes. You can work on interoceptive awareness through mindfulness or body-focused practices. You can expand emotional granularity by teaching new concepts and encouraging differentiation of experiences. You can improve regulation through techniques that change predictions or modify the body budget—sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress management. And you can address the social and cultural contexts that shape emotion construction. Effective therapy often touches all these levels simultaneously.
Greg Collins
Let's address a potential criticism. If emotions are constructed, doesn't that imply they're somehow less real or less important than if they were biologically fixed responses?
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
This is a common misunderstanding. Construction doesn't mean invention from nothing. It means assembly from real components according to learned patterns. A house is constructed, but that doesn't make it any less real or solid than a naturally occurring cave. Similarly, emotions are constructed from real interoceptive signals, real neural activity, and real learned concepts. The construction process itself is biological—it happens in the brain through neural mechanisms shaped by evolution. What's not innate is the specific emotional categories we use. Those are learned and culturally variable. But the capacity to construct emotions is absolutely biological and universal.
Rachel Foster
This also changes how we think about emotional authenticity. If there's no fixed, true emotional response to a situation, then authenticity can't mean expressing some innate emotion. It must mean something else.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Authenticity in constructed emotion might mean alignment between your emotional experience and your values and goals, rather than expression of a supposedly natural response. It might mean emotional experiences that are coherent with your narrative identity rather than triggered by hardwired programs. This actually gives you more agency in your emotional life. You're not just discovering what you really feel—you're actively constructing emotional experiences that serve your goals and align with your sense of self.
Greg Collins
Dr. Barrett, thank you for this examination of how the brain constructs emotional experience from interoceptive signals and learned concepts, and what this reveals about the nature of the emotional self.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Rachel Foster
That's our program for this evening. Join us tomorrow as we continue exploring the psychology of self.
Greg Collins
Good night.