Gefühl, Emotion, Affekt

Wer sich mit psychologischer oder neurowissenschaftlicher Literatur befasst, wird feststellen, dass die Begriffe Gefühl, Emotion oder Affekt sehr unterschiedlich verwendet werden. Es gibt auch verschiedene Theorien darüber, wie Gefühle oder Emotionen entstehen. Essentialistische Theorien gehen davon aus, dass es für bestimmte Emotionen unterschiedliche biologische Ursachen gibt (Essenzen), die universell sind und durch die Evolution weitergegeben wurden. Der kon­s­t­ruk­ti­vis­tische Ansatz postuliert, dass Erfahrungen und Wahrnehmungen vom Gehirn konstruiert werden. Aufgrund neuer wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse und ihrer eigenen Forschung, hält die Psychologieprofessorin Lisa Feldman Barrett die essentialistische Vorstellung für überholt, und hat daher die Theorie der konstruierten Emotionen entwickelt.

"In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion." Theory of constructed emotion. Barrett, Lisa Feldman (2018): How Emotions Are Made - The Secret Life of the Brain, London: Pan Books, E-Book, Chpt. Emotions are constracted

"The theory of constructed emotion explains how you experience and perceive emotion in the absence of any consistent, biological fingerprints in the face, body, or brain. Your brain continually predicts and simulates all the sensory inputs from inside and outside your body, so it understands what they mean and what to do about them. These predictions travel through your cortex, cascading from the body-budgeting circuitry in your interoceptive network to your primary sensory cortices, to create distributed, brain-wide simulations, each of which is an instance of a concept. The simulation that’s closest to your actual situation is the winner that becomes your experience, and if it’s an instance of an emotion concept, then you experience emotion. This whole process occurs, with the help of your control network, in the service of regulating your body budget to keep you alive and healthy. In the process, you impact the body budgets of those around you, to help you survive to propagate your genes into the next generation. This is how brains and bodies create social reality. This is also how emotions become real." Barrett, Lisa Feldman (2018): How Emotions Are Made - The Secret Life of the Brain, London: Pan Books, E-Book, Chpt. 7 Emotions as Social Reality

All terms and explanations are taken from the book "How Emotions are Made" and the accompanying website "how-emotions-are-made.com". Glossary refers to "how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Glossary".

"Affect is your basic sense of feeling, ranging from unpleasant to pleasant (valence), and from agitated to calm (arousal). Emotion is a much more complex mental construction." (book)
References
how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Affect-1
how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Affect-2
how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Affect_is_universal
how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Circumplex

"Everything that has any relevance to your body budget in the present moment." (glossary)
"When your budget is unbalanced, your affect doesn’t instruct you how to act in any specific way, but it prompts your brain to search for explanations. Your brain constantly uses past experience to predict which objects and events will impact your body budget, changing your affect. These objects and events are collectively your affective niche. Intuitively, your affective niche includes everything that has any relevance to your body budget in the present moment." (book)
References
how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Affective_niche

"The phenomenon that interoception influences what you see, hear, and otherwise perceive." (glossary)
"In these moments of affective realism, we experience affect as a property of an object or event in the outside world, rather than as our own experience." (book)
References
how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Affective_realism

"A metaphor for how your brain allocates energy resources within your body. The scientific term is allostasis." (glossary)
"In this manner, any event that significantly impacts your body budget becomes personally meaningful to you." (book)
References
how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Allostasis

"Philosophers and scientists define a category as a collection of objects, events, or actions that are grouped together as equivalent for some purpose. They define a concept as a mental representation of a category." (book)

"Combining known concepts to construct an instance of a new concept." (glossary)

"A brain network that ramps up the firing rate of some neurons and slows down others to optimize the process of categorization (among other things). Gives adults their 'spotlight of attention'." (glossary)
References
how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Control_network

"The observation that many different combinations of neurons can contribute to the same outcome. (Many to one.)" (glossary)

"Emotions are meaning. They explain your interoceptive changes and corresponding affective feelings, in relation to the situation. They are a prescription for action. The brain systems that implement concepts, such as the interoceptive network and the control network, are the biology of meaning-making." (book)

"Goal-based concepts therefore free you from the shackles of physical appearance. When you walk into an entirely new situation, you don’t experience it based solely on how things look, sound, or smell. Your experience is based on your goal." (book)
"So, what’s happening in your brain when you categorize? You are not finding similarities in the world but creating them. When your brain needs a concept, it constructs one on the fly, mixing and matching from a population of instances from your past experience, to best fit your goals in a particular situation. And herein lies a key to understanding how emotions are made." (book)

"A more scientifically objective way to say 'an emotion' when you’re talking about a single occurrence." (glossary)
"Usually, you experience interoception only in general terms: those simple feelings of pleasure, displeasure, arousal, or calmness that I mentioned earlier. Sometimes, however, you experience moments of intense interoceptive sensations as emotions. That is a key element of the theory of constructed emotion. In every waking moment, your brain gives your sensations meaning. Some of those sensations are interoceptive sensations, and the resulting meaning can be an instance of emotion." (book)

"Interoception is your brain’s representation of all sensations from your internal organs and tissues, the hormones in your blood, and your immune system." (book)
References
how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Interoception

"The interoceptive network issues predictions about your body, tests the resulting simulations against sensory input from your body, and updates your brain’s model of your body in the world." (book)
References
how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Other_names_for_the_interoceptive_network

"Darwin’s idea that a species is a population of diverse individuals that have no essence at their core." (glossary)
"A category, such as a species of animal, is a population of unique members who vary from one another, with no fingerprint at their core. The category can be described at the group level only in abstract, statistical terms." (book)

"A guess made by the brain of what sensory input will arrive in the next moment." (glossary)
"Your brain is always predicting, and its most important mission is predicting your body’s energy needs, so you can stay alive and well. These crucial predictions, and their associated prediction error, turn out to be a key ingredient for making emotions." (book)

"A brain wiring arrangement in which a prediction is launched, simulated, compared to actual sensory input, and then either corrected or left alone." (glossary)

"It said that a concept is represented in the brain as the best example of its category, known as the prototype." (book)
References
how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Prototype_theory_of_concepts
how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Prototype_views_of_emotion_concepts

"Agreement by a group of people that something is real, which they share by way of language." (glossary)
"This sort of social reality, in which two or more people agree that something purely mental is real, is a foundation of human culture and civilization." (book)

"The theory of constructed emotion tosses away the most basic assumptions of the classical view. For instance, the classical view assumes that happiness, anger, and other emotion categories each have a distinctive bodily fingerprint. In the theory of constructed emotion, variation is the norm." (book)
References
how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Variation_is_the_norm

Barrett, Lisa Feldman (2018): How Emotions Are Made - The Secret Life of the Brain, London: Pan Books, E-Book

• Körper & Psyche bei michaelditsch.de
• Individuelle Realität bei michaelditsch.de
• Extended endnotes for How Emotions are Made
  how-emotions-are-made.com
• Extended notes for Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
  sevenandahalflessons.com
• Lisa Feldman Barrett Website
  lisafeldmanbarrett.com
• That Is Not How Your Brain Works
  Forget these scientific myths to better understand your brain and yourself
  Lisa Feldman Barrett
  nautil.us/that-is-not-how-your-brain-works-2-238380/
• How Emotions Connect Your Body and Brain
  Inside a new theory of emotions that spotlights how the brain works
  Lisa Feldman Barrett
  nautil.us/how-emotions-connect-your-body-and-brain-237725/
• Emotion bei Wikipedia
  de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion
• Fühlen bei Wikipedia
  de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fühlen_(Psychologie)
• Affekt bei Wikipedia
  de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affekt
• Theory of constructed emotion bei Wikipedia
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constructed_emotion
• Allostase bei Wikipedia
  de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allostase