An Integral Aspect of Cognition

Models of Emotions - Part 2

Post Summary: I describe my current model of emotions, based on predictive processing and the theory of constructed emotion by Lisa Feldman Barret. This view has helped me increase my emotional intelligence, make sense of embodiment, and furthered my rationalist project of reducing bias.

I ended part 1 on a cliffhanger - criticizing what I’m calling a “Cartesian assumption” of emotions. The assumption is that emotions originate outside “the mind” - and then enter the mind to be processed.

In this post, I’ll share my current view on emotions.

Emotional Integration

This view is based on my understanding of predictive processing, and more particularily the theory of constructed emotion by Lisa Feldman Barret.

Nowadays, I think of emotions as an integral part of my cognitive processing. I’ve started putting more energy into my emotional functioning - giving it the same level of care and nurture as the rest of my cognitive machinery.

I think of emotions as a bridge between conscious and non-conscious processing. There’s a lot of information flowing through me at any given time, with only a mere fraction fitting into my consciousness. Non-conscious processes perform “background work”, such as detecting threats, judging impressions, and performing insight-driven problem-solving.

The output of these processes can take multiple forms:

• When a threat is detected, non-conscious processing puts the body on high alert, and the conscious part of my cognitive machinery interprets the state as fear.

• If a non-conscious process detects a potential opportunity, my salience landscape shifts to highlight the opportunity, and the conscious part of my cognitive machinery interprets the salience shifting as curiosity.

• Some insights “pop up” fully formed, in a heureka-moment. Others manifest as hunches, gut feelings and other embodied signals - some of which can be interpreted as emotions

In these examples, I treat emotions as interpretations - a way for the conscious part of my cognitive processing to interact with non-conscious processes. Emotions provide meaning to my instinctual reactions, allowing me to glean knowledge and keep track of my physiological state.

The key idea here is that emotions are constructed on the fly to make sense of instinctual reactions. As such, they are an interpretation the mind puts on the body, rather than aspects of the body itself.¹

A Warming Relationship

As my stance towards my emotions softened into curiosity and care, I’ve opened up to exploring skilled ways to work with their integration. I have warmed considerably to the idea of embodiment practice as a way to reason better - increased awareness of bodily signals and their emotional correlates increases the bandwidth between conscious and non-conscious processing.

Accepting the ubiquity of emotions in cognitive processes has opened my eyes to the ways emotion can bias the thinking of myself and others. Back when I was using the naive view of emotions, I thought of reasoning as a sequence of implications and inferences. I thought people did (or at least should) reason their way through life using step-by-step reasoning.

Nowadays, I believe that reasoning processes are driven largely by hunches and intuitions. Non-conscious processes lead the way, supported by conscious processing. Conscious processing is useful for careful reasoning - things like keeping track of the argument and double-checking the results.

The reasoning process is influenced by factors that weren’t obvious back when I held the naive view. For an extreme example, consider the reasoning process of an infatuated teenager - their arguments might (hypothetically) make sense “locally”, but their focus is skewed towards the target of their affection.

My background emotional state affects things like:

• my salience landscape, what things seem important

• whether my initial impulse is to disagree or confirm

• whether I go into quick problem-solving mode, or not

• if I try to empathize and feel in, or not

• whether I use abstract reasoning as a way to escape from unpleasant realizations

• etc

Emotional awareness has allowed me to break out of some thought traps I’ve been stuck in. One such thought trap is my stance towards flirting - I used to avoid flirting completely, telling myself that I was a good feminist ally who avoided making women uncomfortable. This is locally true, but also a cover-up story to avoid having to face my fear of judgement and social anxiety.²

End Notes

This post is heavily inspired by David Chapman’s website on meta-rationality, as well as predictive processing, the theory of constructed emotion by Lisa Feldman Barret, and Evan McMullen’s excellent presentations at the stoa.

If you find yourself unable to make sense of something important to you, you might be affected by an emotional bias. If that is the case, I’d love to guide you through an inquiry process:

Finally, this post is rather theory-heavy and likely to leave some of you thinking “Now what?”. For a more practical take, I recommend this older post of mine:

1. I get tense when I’m anxious, with my muscles knotting up. You can say, poetically, that the anxiousness “sits in the muscles”. This is true in a sense - my anxiety is connected to the tensing of muscles. However, according to the theory of constructed emotion, the body is in a state of arousal which leads to muscle knotting. The mind then interprets this state of arousal as anxiety, perpetuating the emotion.

2. Technically, the arousal response triggered when faced with seemingly dangerous situations such as social disapproval - manifesting, when observed, as a fear/anxiety. It takes a while to adopt the Copenhagen interpretation of emotions.