Socially embedded predictive construction: a model of emotional experience

The dominant view in affective neuroscience has long held that discrete emotional states are universal, biologically fixed, and implemented in dedicated neural circuits. This ‘basic emotions’ framework faces accumulating challenges from neuroimaging meta-analyses, cross-cultural research, and studies of individual variability, while an alternative account—the theory of constructed emotion—holds that emotional experiences are generated by integrating interoceptive predictions, prior conceptual knowledge, and cultural and linguistic context. This Perspective makes three contributions. First, it distinguishes the following three explananda that the debate routinely conflates: rapid, largely subcortically mediated emotional reactions and expressive behaviour; the conscious experience of feeling; and the linguistic categorisation of that experience. Much of the apparent inconsistency of the neuroimaging literature follows from treating these as one phenomenon. Second, it reports that the evidence is genuinely mixed: univariate analyses do not identify consistent and specific regional signatures for discrete emotional categories, whereas multivariate analyses frequently decode such categories from distributed activity, and cross-culturally recurrent facial behaviour has been reported at scale. A constructionist account is argued to accommodate the context-sensitivity, cultural variability and language-dependence of affective neural representation more economically than a dedicated-circuit account, without claiming that the basic-emotions programme has been refuted. Third, it proposes the Socially Embedded Predictive Construction (SEPC) model: a stratification of a single generative model into allostatic-interoceptive, conceptual-linguistic and socio-cultural levels that differ in represented content and temporal horizon rather than in kind. For each level the model specifies candidate substrates, measurable indicators, selective manipulations and falsification criteria, together with three study designs that would test it and the results that would falsify it. Recognising emotion as constructed across stratified predictive levels supports a view of the brain as a socially embedded organ whose affective states are shaped by, though not exhausted by, language and culture.