What is the neuroscience research support of the Psychological Construction Theory?

A constructionist account of emotion, interoception, and cultural meaning

In my recent publication, I have limited words to explain the neuroscience evidence supporting the constructionist account of emotion. I wish to elaborate further here and also provide some references for readers. (For someone who looks for only plain English explanation, please check out my Psychology Today Post here.)

In traditional psychology training, we are often taught two important ideas:
First, that there is no such thing as a “wrong” emotion; and second, that psychological health involves learning how to regulate our emotions.

These ideas are not wrong. They remain valuable and widely supported.

But in the past decade, developments in neuroscience—particularly within the framework of predictive processing—have begun to challenge something more foundational: the assumption that emotions are natural, fixed responses that can be objectively identified and measured.

This assumption is increasingly being reconsidered.

Predictive processing suggests that the brain does not simply react to the world. Instead, it is constantly making predictions—about both the external environment and the body’s internal state—and updating them over time. In this process, the brain is also engaged in what is sometimes described as “body budgeting”: regulating internal resources such as energy, arousal, and physiological balance.

From this perspective, what we feel is not just a direct reaction. It is the result of the brain’s interpretation of bodily sensations in context, shaped by past experience, language, and culture. Emotions, in this sense, are actively constructed.

This shift calls for a different lens.

Understanding emotions is not only about accepting them or regulating them. It also requires us to examine how we come to feel what we feel, in the way we do, at this particular moment.

(The video below is very short. Lisa has explained it clearly in layman’s language!)

For a more serious learner who prefers audio learning, here is an awesome conversation between two neuroscientists.

The Body Is Not Clear

At the center of this process is interoception—our sensing of internal bodily states.

But these signals are ambiguous.

A racing heart, a tight chest, a sinking feeling—none of these come with built-in emotional labels. The body does not tell us “this is fear” or “this is sadness.”

There is no inherent emotional meaning.

The brain continuously processes streams of interoceptive, exteroceptive, and relational signals, and these signals are always compressed for efficiency.

Emotion is not discovered. It is constructed

Emotional experience emerges when these signals are categorized using learned emotion concepts — concepts shaped by culture, language, history, and prior learning.

From this view:

• Emotions are events, not entities

• Categorization is predictive, not reactive

• meaning is constructed, not revealed

Crucially, emotional categorization does not require immediate closure. Emotional meaning can remain partial, provisional, multiple, or unresolved. Several candidate interpretations may coexist and compete.

Emotion labels, therefore, are not discoveries. They are learned predictive categories the brain uses to organize bodily and contextual signals — useful and communicable, but not inherently final.

I know it sounds counterintuitive. For many years, our scientific study of emotion has been founded on the assumption that a given emotion is ‘a natural kind’ and ‘can be identified objectively’; However, this assumption has been challenged in the past decade. (Barret, 2006)

Compression as adaptation, not deficit

If emotional meaning can remain open, why is it so often defined quickly?

A predictive and allostatic account points to cost.

In environments where emotional expression has carried relational risk — criticism, shame, withdrawal, loss of harmony, or threat to attachment — the brain has had limited opportunity to remain with emotionally ambiguous or unresolved internal states. Under such conditions, predictions that favour speed, familiarity, and safety become more reliable than those requiring prolonged exploration.

Emotional meaning becomes compressed.

Compression is not pathology. It is an adaptation.

In cross-cultural research, individualism predicts greater conformity around negative emotions, but not positive ones. Collectivism, by contrast, predicts greater variation in how negative emotions are evaluated. (Smith et al., 2025) While collectivism supports a wider emotional palette, deviation from the norm creates more stress than in an individualistic society (Gelfand et al., 2011). It heightened the brain’s need to compress emotions into socially acceptable labels.

This is why understanding where culture sits in the emotional process is particularly relevant for people with relational self-concept or coming from more collectivistic cultural backgrounds

Highly compressed affective representations:

• reduce uncertainty

• support rapid action

• increase social predictability

• minimize relational risk

What often appears clinically as emotional vagueness, premature certainty, or rapid meaning-making is better understood as predictive efficiency under constraint. So, Where Does Meaning Come From?

If the body signal carries no inherent emotional meaning, the emotional meaning must be constructed. ‘Our brain is predictive, not reactive. All animals’ brains run an internal model for the purpose of allostasis.’ (Barret, 2017)

The brain uses past experience to predict what these bodily signals mean. Over time, these predictions become habitual—we experience them as “emotions.”

But this raises a deeper question:

What shapes those predictions in the first place?

Culture as Infrastructure

Predictions are not formed individually. They are learned through:

• language

• relationships

• social expectations

• repeated interpersonal experience

This is where culture becomes fundamental. Emotions can be conceptualized as cultural artifacts that evolve through processes of social transmission, including vertical (across generations) and horizontal (between groups) learning (Lindquist et al., 2022).

Not as “influence,” but as infrastructure.

Culture provides:

• the categories we use to make sense of feelings

• the meanings attached to bodily states

• the rules about what can be felt, named, or expressed

In this sense:

Emotion is not just constructed by the brain.
It is constructed through culture.

Why Relationship Is Central

Because culture is carried through relationships, emotional meaning is inherently relational, particularly for collectivistic cultures.

The same bodily sensation can become:

• anxiety

• guilt

• excitement

• or something that cannot yet be named

depending on:

• what the situation demands

• What the relationship allows

• What matters in that cultural context

Emotion, then, is not just internal. It is organized around relational meaning.

Barret (2022) has clearly indicated in her study of “context” in psychological science and argued for this paradigm shift: from the traditional understanding of “context” as a moderator of signals with inherent psychological meaning, to the possibility that psychological events emerge in ecosystems of signal ensembles, such that the psychological meaning of any individual signal is entirely relational.

Further Reference

This perspective underpins the theoretical foundation of my recent paper:

Ng-Kessler, B. (2026). Culture as predictive infrastructure: A constructionist account of emotional access in schema therapy. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10879-026-09728-7

In the paper, I extend this account by proposing that:

Culture is not simply influencing emotion—
it provides the infrastructure through which emotional predictions are formed.

Clinical Takeaway

If emotion is constructed, then therapy is not about “accessing what is already there.”

It is about working within a relational context to co-construct emotional meaning—
where culture shapes what can be felt, named, and known. That is exactly why I consolidated my clinical experience into the Content-Process-Relationship framework (Ng-Kessler, in press), which offers another way to think and make sound clinical judgment in psychotherapy, creating space for what I proposed as an important Process-Level Construct: delayed labeling.

Reference:

Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 12(1), 1-23.

Barrett, L. F. (2006). Are emotions natural kinds?. Perspectives on psychological science, 1(1), 28-58.

Barrett, L. F. (2022). Context reconsidered: Complex signal ensembles, relational meaning, and population thinking in psychological science. American Psychologist, 77(8), 894.

Lindquist, K. A., Jackson, J. C., Leshin, J., Satpute, A. B., & Gendron, M. (2022). The cultural evolution of emotion. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1(11), 669-681.

Tan, C. S., & Titova, L. (2025). Enjoying the moment of joy: Culture and self during emotional experience. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 20(3), 498-509.

Smith, P. B., Kirchner-Häusler, A., Grigoryan, L., Lun, V. M. C., Lopukhova, O., Perez Floriano, L., ... & Castillo, V. A. (2025). Which Cultural Dimensions Predict Variations in Emotional Conformity? An Extension of Vishkin et al.(2023) Across 28 Nations. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 56(8), 911-928.

Vishkin, A., Kitayama, S., Berg, M. K., Diener, E., Gross-Manos, D., Ben-Arieh, A., & Tamir, M. (2023). Adherence to emotion norms is greater in individualist cultures than in collectivist cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 124(6), 1256.

Gelfand M. J., Raver J. L., Nishii L., Leslie L. M., Lun J., Lim B. C., et al. (2011). Differences between tight and loose cultures: a 33-nation study. Science 332, 1100–1104.

Ng-Kessler, B. (in press). The CPR framework: A culturally responsive process model for working with emotional inhibition in collectivistic contexts. Practice Innovations.

Lindquist, K. A., Jackson, J. C., Leshin, J., Satpute, A. B., & Gendron, M. (2022). The cultural evolution of emotion. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1(11), 669-681.