Concepts dissolve artificial boundaries in the study of emotion and cognition, uniting body, brain, and mind

ABSTRACT

Theories of emotion have often maintained artificial boundaries: for instance, that cognition and emotion are separable, and that an emotion concept is separable from the emotional events that comprise its category (e.g. “fear” is distinct from instances of fear). Over the past several years, research has dissolved these artificial boundaries, suggesting instead that conceptual construction is a domain-general process—a process by which the brain makes meaning of the world. The brain constructs emotion concepts, but also cognitions and perceptions, all in the service of guiding action. In this view, concepts are multimodal constructions, dynamically prepared from a set of highly variable instances. This approach obviates old questions (e.g. how does cognition regulate emotion?) but generates new ones (e.g. how does a brain learn emotion concepts?). In this paper, we review this constructionist, predictive coding account of emotion, considering its implications for health and well-being, culture and development.

KEYWORDS:

• Prediction
• construction
• conceptualisation
• embodiment
• language

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to J. Theriault for his comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Katie Hoemann http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9938-7676

Notes

1 There are, of course, exceptions to this theoretical assumption. For example, Fiske and Neuberg’s (1990) model of impression formation regards both concepts and categories as mental constructs. This model is in keeping with our definition of conceptual categories.

2 Even studies that use identical methods have been unable to replicate multivariate pattern classifiers across experiments (e.g. Stephens, Christie, & Friedman, 2010 vs. Kragel & LaBar, 2013).

Additional information

Funding

The paper was supported by grants to from the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences [grant number W911NF-16-1-0191], the National Cancer Institute [grant number U01 CA193632] and the National Institute of Mental Health [grant number R01 MH113234 and R01 MH109464] to L.F. Barrett; and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute [grant number 1 F31 HL140943-01] to K. Hoemann. The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this paper are those of the authors and shall not be construed as an official U.S. Department of the Army position, policy, or decision, unless so designated by other documents.