The Conceptual Act Theory: A Précis 1 Running head: THE CONCEPTUAL ACT THEORY: A PRÉCIS The Conceptual Act Theory: A Précis

According to the Conceptual Act Theory, emotions emerge when physical sensations in the self and physical actions in others are meaningfully linked to situations during a process that can be called both cognitive and perceptual (creating emotional experiences, and emotion perceptions, respectively). There are key four hypotheses: (1) an emotion (like anger) is a conceptual category, populated with instances that are tailored to the environment; (2) each instance of emotion is constructed within the brain’s functional architecture of domain-general core systems; (3) the workings of each system must be holistically understood within the momentary state of the brain, the body, and the surrounding context; (4) being emergent states, emotional episodes have functional features that physical states, alone, do not have. Similarities and differences to other theoretical approaches to emotion are discussed. The Conceptual Act Theory: A Précis 3 1. What are the essential elements of your theory of emotion? Which elements are shared by different theories? What element(s) distinguishes your theory from the others? I find it helpful to begin with an analogy. Consider the plant whose taxonomic name is “viola”. It’s commonly referred to as a “violet”. A violet is sometimes a flower. At other times, it is a weed. (Some people put violets in salad, in which case, they are food.) Like all plants, violets are real in the natural world – they exist whether or not humans perceive them. Weeds and flowers, however, are real only in the social world – their existence depends on the minds (and therefore the brains) of human perceivers. The concepts for flowers and weeds are probably universal in all human cultures, yet they are not innate, nor are their instances fixed; there is nothing in the biology or molecular structure of a plant that identifies it as a weed or a flower. So how, in a given instance, is a violet transformed into a weed or a flower? Although anger is not an object, like a plant, the answer to this question holds the key to understanding the nature of emotion. A plant becomes a flower or a weed when it is categorized as such by a human perceiver. The distinction between flowers and weeds is based on human intention. When a plant is deliberately cultivated, it is a flower. When a plant is not wanted, it is a weed. By virtue of this act of categorization, the plant acquires functions it does not have by its physical nature alone – flowers and weeds convey meaning, signal intent towards another person, prescribe action, and communicate value, and might even influence homeostasis and glucose metabolism in the The Conceptual Act Theory: A Précis 4 perceiver (Barrett, 2009, 2012; Barrett, Wilson-Mendenhall, & Barsalou, in press a). This is an illustration of how humans have the capacity to create a social reality, of physical consequence, by virtue of the concepts they teach one another and apply to physical instances. Employing a framework from John Searle, I have summarized these ideas by saying that when a physical object or event (Y) is categorized in a certain context (C), it becomes real in the social world (X) and acquires functions that it otherwise would not have (see Barrett, 2012). Along with colleagues and lab members, I have developed a psychological construction of emotion, called the Conceptual Act Theory, which uses this logic. The CAT hypothesizes that physical changes in the natural world (internal physical changes occurring within a perceiver, and sensory changes in the world such as other people’s facial muscle movements, actions, the physical surroundings, etc.) become real as emotion (as fear, anger, etc.) when they are categorized as such using emotion concept knowledge within a perceiver. These concepts have been learned from language, socialization, and other cultural artifacts within the person’s day-today experience. We refer to an act of categorization as a “situated conceptualization”, meaning that the conceptual knowledge that is brought to bear is during an act of categorization is tied to the situation, enactive, and prepares a perceiver for situated action (Barrett, 2006, 2012, 2013; Barrett, Wilson-Mendenhall, & Barsalou, in press a, b; Wilson-Mendenhall et al., 2011). The process of combining incoming sensory input (from the body and from the surroundings) with learned, category knowledge within the brain of the perceiver is a normal part of what it means to be conscious. Situated conceptualizing is instantaneous, ongoing, obligatory, and automatic (meaning, a person will have rarely have a sense of agency, effort or control in constructing an emotion). It rarely happens because of a deliberate, conscious goal to figure things out. It is via The Conceptual Act Theory: A Précis 5 the process of conceptualizing that physical changes acquire functions that do not have on their own (i.e., without conceptualization). We hypothesize that any conceptual act is embodied, because prior experience, in the form of category knowledge, comes “on-line” as the activation of sensory and motor neurons, reaching down to influence bodily activations and/or their representations and sensory processing. Conceptual acts are also self-perpetuating, such that experiences created today reach forward to shape the trajectory of future experiences. Our hypothesis is that this is the way the mind works: the act of seeing, or feeling, or thinking is at once a perception, an emotion, and a cognition. All mental states are, in fact, embodied conceptualizations of internal bodily sensations and incoming sensory input. These conceptualizations are situated in that they use highly contextdependent representations that are tailored to the immediate situation. There are four unique hypotheses about emotions that derive from our view of situated conceptualizations: (1) emotions, like other mental state categories, are conceptual categories, consisting of populations of instances that are tailored to the environment; as a result, there is meaningful variation within each emotion category; (2) each instance of any emotion is constructed within the brain’s functional architecture for creating situated conceptualizations, involving domain-general core systems; as a result, instances belonging to different emotion categories (or even non-emotional categories, such as cognitions or perceptions) have some degree of similarity to one another; (3) emotional episodes cannot be deconstructed and reduced into these domain general systems but instead emerge from their interaction; therefore, the workings of each system cannot be studied alone and must be holistically understood within the The Conceptual Act Theory: A Précis 6 momentary state of the brain, body and the surrounding context; (4) being emergent states, emotional episodes have functional features that physical states, alone, do not have. These are discussed in more detail in Barrett (2013) and in Barrett, Wilson-Mendenhall, & Barsalou (in press, a). The CAT shares certain similarities with other viewpoints. Like so-called “basic emotion” approaches, it is an evolutionary view. Instead of assuming that natural selection sculpted domain-specific mechanism for each emotion (a position which suffers from the weaknesses of the “adaptationist programme” discussed out by Gould and Lewontin, 1979), we hypothesize that the brain’s functional architecture contains domain-general processes that interact and from which emotions emerge. In principle, domain-general processes are favored by evolution for their efficiency and flexibility (Laland & Brown, 2002). In addition, like “basic emotion” approach, our view is that emotional episodes can contain species-general elements (actions that all species share, such as behavioral adaptations, such as freezing, fleeing, or fighting); in our view, however, there is no one to one mapping between a specific behavioral adaptation (e.g., freezing) and an emotion category (e.g., fear) (Barrett, 2012; see also Gross & Canteras, 2012). Furthermore, species-general processes are not sufficient for emotion; species-specific processes that exist in only humans (or perhaps in limited form in great apes), such as abstract emotion concepts and language, are also required. Finally, like the “basic emotion” view, the CAT is inspired by Darwin’s insights (Barrett, 2013); we take our lead from On the Origin of Species, however, which contained conceptual advances (e.g., population thinking) that are absent from the more essentialist thinking in The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals which “basic emotion” writers often cite as their inspiration. The Conceptual Act Theory: A Précis 7 Like other views, the CAT is a functional account of emotions (Barrett, 2012). An emotion is enacted when embodied conceptual knowledge is brought on line to shape the perception of a physical state, binding that physical state to an event in the world (so that the physical changes in the body are experienced as “about” something in the world). A body state or an action has physical functions (e.g., changes in respiration might regulate autonomic reactivity or widened eyes increase the size of the visual field), but these events do not intrinsically have functions as an emotion; events are assigned those functions in the act of categorizing them as emotion during the construction of a situated conceptualization. Like “appraisal” approaches, the CAT views emotions as acts of meaning making. The CAT hypothesizes that emotions, like all mental states, arise through the continuous process of perceivers making meaning from the sensory input that they take in from the internal world of the body and the external world of physical surroundings. Our approach is more consistent with some “appraisal” models (i.e., constituative appraisal models) than with others (i.e., causal appraisal models) (Barrett, Mesquita et al., 2007; Gross & Barrett, 2011). In causal appraisal models (e.g., see w