Bodily Contributions to Emotion: Schachter’s Legacy for a Psychological Constructionist View on Emotion

Abstract

Although early emotion theorists posited that bodily changes contribute to emotion, the primary view in affective science over the last century has been that emotions produce bodily changes. Recent findings from physiology, neuroscience, and neuropsychology support the early intuition that body representations can help constitute emotion. These findings are consistent with the modern psychological constructionist hypothesis that emotions emerge when representations of bodily changes are conceptualized as an instance of emotion. We begin by introducing the psychological constructionist approach to emotion. With Schachter as inspiration, we next examine how embodied representations contribute to affective states, and ultimately emotion, with inflammation as a key example. We close by looking forward to future research on how body representations contribute to human experience.