Barrett’s Constructed Emotion and Lonergan’s Cognitional Theory
Objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity.
Constructed Emotion vs. Lonergan’s Cognitional Structure
Lisa Feldman Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion proposes that emotions are not hardwired reactions but emergent constructs that the brain actively creates. In Barrett’s view, the brain continuously uses past experience and learned concepts to interpret incoming sensory information, effectively “giving your sensations meaning” by categorizing them as specific emotions. Rather than assuming dedicated neural circuits for each “basic” emotion, Barrett argues that what exists fundamentally is a core affect (a continuous state of valence and arousal) and that discrete emotions arise when the brain predicts and categorizes this core affect using emotion concepts in context. In other words, “instances of emotion are constructed predictively by the brain in the moment as needed”, drawing on multiple brain networks. Key ingredients in this construction include interoceptive signals from the body, conceptual knowledge (emotion categories), and social context (shared cultural meaning). Barrett likens this to how we perceive color: just as the brain carves up a continuous spectrum of light into discrete colors using learned categories, it also slices continuous affect into recognizable emotions via learned emotion concepts.
Bernard Lonergan’s cognitional theory, by contrast, is a philosophical model describing the hierarchical structure of human consciousness. Lonergan identifies four levels of cognitional activity through which the knowing subject progresses:
Empirical Level (Experience) – the level of attending to data through sensing, perceiving, imagining, feeling, etc. This provides the raw contents of consciousness (the “scraps of data” of experience).
Intellectual Level (Understanding) – the level of inquiry and insight, where one asks “What is it?” and forms concepts or hypotheses to make sense of the experiential data. Here the mind organizes data by grasping meanings or patterns.
Rational Level (Judgment) – the level of critical reflection, marshaling evidence and asking “Is it truly so?” in order to verify or falsify the understanding. This is the conscious act of judging truth or reality, ensuring our insights are correct.
Responsible Level (Decision) – the level of deliberation and action, concerned with “What should I do?”. One evaluates values and consequences and makes choices accordingly, introducing an ethical dimension to cognition.
Lonergan emphasizes that these levels are cumulative and self-transcending: each higher level builds on and goes beyond the lower, moving from mere data to meaning, to truth, and finally to value-based action. This structured process is how the conscious subject comes to know and to act responsibly in the world.
Alignment and Divergence: There is a notable alignment between Barrett’s empirical model and Lonergan’s cognitional structure in that both acknowledge a progression from raw experience to meaning-making. Barrett’s “ingredients” of emotion map onto similar functional stages: the interoceptive affect corresponds to Lonergan’s empirical level (bodily feeling as part of experience), while emotion concepts are a product of understanding that give form to feelings (akin to the intellectual level of grasping what one’s feeling means). In Barrett’s terms, the brain continually integrates sensations with learned concepts to categorize what one is feeling, which resonates with Lonergan’s view that experience by itself is not yet knowledge until it is understood and interpreted. Both frameworks therefore see an active mind imposing order on experience: Barrett’s brain predicts and imposes an emotion category on bodily sensations, much as Lonergan’s subject seeks an insight to make sense of sense-data.
However, the two models diverge in scope and emphasis. Barrett’s account is a descriptive, neuroconstructivist model focused specifically on emotion generation; it operates largely pre-consciously and emphasizes brain physiology and predictive computation. Lonergan’s account is a normative, epistemological model of general cognition and conscious insight, emphasizing the deliberate attentiveness and rationality of the knowing subject. For example, Lonergan delineates a judgment stage (asking “Is it true?”) and a decision stage oriented by moral values, whereas Barrett’s theory, being scientific, does not explicitly include a moral assessment phase in emotion construction. In practice, a person may indeed reflect on or appraise an emotional response (engaging Lonergan’s rational level) and choose how to act on it (responsible level), but Barrett’s model primarily describes how the emotion arises in the first place. Thus, Barrett’s constructed emotion fills in the sub-conscious mechanism bridging Lonergan’s empirical and intellectual levels (how sensations become meaningful as a specific emotion), while Lonergan’s later levels (rational and responsible) speak to conscious evaluation and choices about those emotions (e.g. questioning whether one’s fear is warranted and deciding how to respond). In summary, both theories affirm that emotion involves a multi-layered process of sensing and interpreting, but Lonergan provides a broader framework of cognition and decision-making in which Barrett’s findings about emotion construction can be situated.
Self-Appropriation and Emotion Construction
Lonergan championed self-appropriation – a reflective method by which one attentively grasps one’s own cognitive operations. In his view, coming to understand how one’s mind works (experiencing, understanding, judging, deciding) is a fundamental task for intellectual development and authenticity. He even structures his works (Insight and Method in Theology) as exercises guiding the reader to “discover what happens when they reach knowledge, evaluate options, and make decisions”, thereby arriving at an explicit awareness of their own cognitional process. This involves paying close attention to the activities within consciousness – an inward attentiveness to how we form insights, how we feel and why, how we conclude something is true or good, etc. The result of such self-appropriation is that the subject personally internalizes the cognitional pattern; one becomes mindful of how one’s knowing and choosing actually occur, rather than naively assuming that thoughts or feelings just happen. Lonergan saw this reflective insight into one’s own mind as liberating and necessary for genuine self-understanding and personal growth.
Barrett’s theory of emotion aligns with Lonergan’s insistence on the role of prior knowledge and context, suggesting that our emotional experiences are deeply shaped by what we have learned and how we interpret the present. In Barrett’s words, “in every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to predictively guide your actions and give your sensations meaning”. When those concepts are emotion concepts, “your brain is categorizing sensations and guiding action” to construct an instance of emotion. In short, one feels anger or joy not as a direct readout of a stimulus, but as a result of the brain’s interpretation of bodily signals in light of past experiences (e.g. cultural knowledge of what “anger” is). Emotional experience is thus an active meaning-making process: we feel according to what we know. This implies that by changing what we know or how we apply our knowledge, we can change how we feel. Barrett’s research indeed shows that people with more refined emotion concepts (higher “emotional granularity”) experience and regulate their feelings differently than those with only broad labels. Context and expectation shape whether a racing heart is constructed as “anxiety” or “excitement,” for example.
Here is where Lonergan’s self-appropriation can directly enrich Barrett’s model: if our emotions are constructed by our own mind using our interpretations, then being attentive to and appropriating that constructive process gives us leverage over our emotional life. Lonergan’s method would encourage an individual to notice, in the moment of emotion, the sequence: the raw sensations (perhaps a tightness in the stomach, a flush of the face), the quick automatic meaning given to them (“I am angry at this insult”), and the subsequent impulse to act. By self-appropriation, one might catch how prior assumptions or contextual cues led to labeling the feeling as a particular emotion. This reflective stance is akin to the “special effort” Barrett says is required to overcome affective realism, the naïve tendency to take one’s feelings at face value as evidence about the world. Ordinarily, “our emotions and our sensations all feel equally real to us”, so “we believe what we experience” — “I feel bad, therefore something (or someone) bad must be present”. Barrett calls this affective realism and notes that it “feels so natural and intuitive to see the world this way—unless we make a special effort otherwise.” In scientific inquiry we do make that effort, treating feelings as data to be questioned rather than uncritically believed, and the same can be done in personal introspection. Lonergan’s self-appropriation is precisely such an effort: a deliberate turning of one’s attention to one’s own cognitional and emotional processes, which allows one to question and understand them rather than be swept along.
By applying self-appropriation to emotion, a person can recognize that an emotion is not just happening to them but is being actively constructed by them (albeit usually involuntarily and unconsciously). This recognition opens up the possibility of reshaping the process — for example, by expanding one’s emotion vocabulary, reframing the situation, or attending to different aspects of experience, one might recategorize a given affective state in a healthier way. Barrett’s work suggests that such interventions (like mindfulness or cognitive reappraisal) indeed alter emotional experiences by altering the conceptual context. In Lonergan’s terms, one becomes attentive to one’s experience and intelligent about it – noticing more of the relevant data (internal and external) and understanding it differently – which can lead to more reasonable judgments and responsible responses rather than reflexive reactions. Thus, Lonergan’s self-appropriation and Barrett’s emotion construction converge on the idea that increased awareness of how our mind is shaping our feelings empowers us to shape them more skillfully. The constructed nature of emotion is no longer an unconscious mechanism but becomes part of the subject’s conscious repertoire of understanding, promoting greater emotional insight and agency.
Concept of the Subject
The concept of the subject in both Barrett’s and Lonergan’s frameworks is not that of a passive onlooker but an active participant in meaning-making – though each comes at this in a different idiom. Barrett’s theory, rooted in neuroscience and embodied cognition, portrays the subject (i.e. the brain–body organism) as a proactive constructor of experience. The brain is essentially a prediction engine, constantly regulating the body and interpreting inputs to guide action. As one commentator summarizes, “the brain… is an organ of prediction driving a vulnerable body through an uncertain world” . Rather than waiting for stimuli to impose themselves, the brain anticipates and infers what’s happening (based on memory and context) and updates its predictions via sensory feedback (prediction errors) . In Barrett’s model, the subject is thus deeply embodied and engaged: your feeling of fear or joy is your brain’s best guess at what your bodily sensations mean in context, geared toward preparing you to act. This predictive, body-regulating view emphasizes that the self is not a rational mind floating above it all, but a dynamic, metabolic process constantly making sense of the world for the sake of survival and well-being. Notably, Barrett also highlights the role of social reality in shaping the subject’s experience – we become the kind of emotional subjects we are through socialization, by internalizing cultural concepts and language. In short, the Barrettian subject is an active, context-dependent constructor of its own emotional reality.
Lonergan’s notion of the subject is complementary in its dynamism, though articulated in philosophical terms. For Lonergan, the subject is essentially the conscious agent who performs the cognitional operations (experiencing, understanding, judging, deciding). The subject is not a static substance or a mere introspective “I”; it is known through its acts. “Operations imply an operator, and the operator is called the subject… it is through these operations that the operator is conscious.” In other words, the human subject exists and discovers itself in the very process of attending, questioning, reflecting, and choosing. Lonergan describes the subject as dynamic and self-transcending: each level of consciousness is a step of going beyond what is given to seek more (we move beyond sensory data by understanding it, beyond understanding by verifying truth, beyond knowing by pursuing value in action). Through “our wonder and care” we transcend the “solitary self” and engage with the world – a phrasing that captures how, for Lonergan, the subject is inherently oriented toward meaning and value beyond its immediate experience. Lonergan’s subject is also historical and developmental: as we accumulate insights and make free decisions, we constitute a personal identity and horizon (the sum of what we know, care about, and aspire to) that can widen or narrow over time. In brief, the Lonerganian subject is the conscious, questioning, valuing self, continuously constituting itself through its intentional acts and capable of growth and transformation (hence “self-transcending”).
When we put these two conceptions in dialogue, a rich picture emerges. Both Barrett and Lonergan reject a spectator theory of the self. Instead, the subject is a producer of experience: Barrett’s brain actively predicts and categorizes to produce an emotion, and Lonergan’s subject actively inquires and judges to produce knowledge. This underscores a philosophical shift from seeing the mind as a mirror of reality to seeing it as a constructive participant. Barrett’s predictive processing adds a neurophysiological understanding of how the subject’s activity is implemented: the subject is literally structured to be proactive (to “surf” the incoming waves of sensation by staying just ahead with predictions). Lonergan provides an epistemological and existential understanding of why the subject’s activity matters: it’s how we achieve objectivity and fulfill our rational and moral nature (by being attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible). In Lonergan’s terms, the brain that Barrett describes is the empirical consciousness at work, but Lonergan would remind us that the full subject also aspires to truth and goodness, not just survival.
Another point of contact is the role of the subject in meaning-making. Barrett’s subject uses concepts (acquired through culture and personal history) to imbue raw sensations with significance. This aligns with constructivist and phenomenological notions that the world we experience is always colored by our interpretative frameworks. Lonergan similarly holds that the world of the subject is mediated by meaning – our knowing is not a direct pick-up of data, but a mediated process requiring interpretation and judgment. He even broadens “experience” to include the data of consciousness (our interior experiences of values, questions, etc.) as part of the reality we must interpret. Both thinkers, then, resist any sharp separation between subjective and objective; instead, they show how the subjective processes create our experienced reality. Lonergan famously said “objectivity is the result of authentic subjectivity,” meaning that only by faithfully performing our subjective operations (being attentive, thoughtful, critical, etc.) do we attain a truthful grasp of reality. Barrett’s account, from a scientific angle, underlines how much of what we take as “objective feeling” is in fact a construction of our subjectivity (our brain’s best guess). The overlap suggests that the subject is actively constituting the world of meaning and emotion in both frameworks.
Finally, Lonergan’s subject is explicitly self-transcending – it can reflect on itself, correct itself, and reach towards higher goals (truth, value, God, in his theology). Barrett’s model doesn’t use that language, but implicitly, because the brain is malleable and its concepts are learned, the subject can also transcend its initial conditions. For example, one can learn new emotion concepts, adopt new cultural meanings, or re-conceptualize one’s sensations, effectively reconstructing one’s emotional repertoire. This is a kind of self-transcendence in the psychological domain – the ability of the subject to go beyond its past predictions and form new patterns. In practice, therapy or education can alter one’s conceptual system and thus how one’s brain predicts and feels. Lonergan would frame this as conversion or expansion of one’s horizon, an upward movement in which the subject appropriates new meanings and values. In sum, both perspectives affirm a subject that is active, interpretative, and capable of development, rather than a fixed essence. Barrett provides the mechanistic insight into the predictive, embodied nature of this activity, while Lonergan provides the philosophical insight into its intentional and transcendental character.
Philosophical Implications
Bringing Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion into conversation with Lonergan’s cognitional theory yields several important implications for understanding human consciousness, subjectivity, and the nature of emotions:
Emotions as Cognitive–Affective Constructs: Both frameworks support the view that emotions are not brute physiological events divorced from cognition, but integrative acts of meaning-making that straddle the traditional divide between mind and body. Barrett’s work shows empirically that an emotion like “anger” or “joy” only emerges when bodily affect is interpreted in context – an emotion is at once something felt and something understood*. Lonergan’s theory, which includes feeling as part of the experiential level and understanding as necessary for identifying what we feel, philosophically reinforces this unity. The implication is that human consciousness is inherently affective-cognitive: our feelings inform our knowing (e.g. feelings can signal values or significance), and our knowing informs our feelings (e.g. what we think is happening shapes what we feel). This undermines any simplistic Cartesian view that reason and emotion are separate realms. Instead, emotion can be seen as a mode of cognitive appraisal (as some psychologists have said) – but here grounded in both neuroscience (predictive coding) and epistemology (intentional consciousness).
Subjectivity and Reality: The intersection of these theories highlights the active role of subjectivity in shaping reality as experienced. Barrett’s concept of affective realism (taking one’s constructed feelings as objective reality) and Lonergan’s emphasis on the need for critical reflection illustrate a key insight: the way things feel to us is a product of our mind’s constructive work, which may or may not align with how things are. Philosophically, this resonates with long-standing themes in phenomenology and hermeneutics: we never encounter the world raw; we encounter a world already clothed in the meanings our consciousness has conferred. Heidegger, for example, noted that we are always in some mood or attunement (Befindlichkeit) that shapes how any situation shows up as mattering to us. Barrett gives this a scientific explanation (our brain’s predictions imbue situations with affective meaning), and Lonergan provides a normative remedy for the distortions this can cause (inviting us to heighten our awareness and exercise judgment). Thus, linking the two leads to a view of human experience as fundamentally interpretative: our biology enables us to generate a personal, value-laden world, and our intellectual conscience urges us to verify and guide those interpretations responsibly. This has ethical implications: it suggests we have a certain responsibility for our emotions, since they are not inevitable happenings but involve our own interpretations. It also fosters empathy – recognizing that each person’s emotional reality is a construct of their history and context helps us understand differences in emotional responses (akin to Lonergan’s idea of different “horizons” for different people).
Cultural and Neuroscientific Integration: The convergence of Barrett and Lonergan underscores the importance of both cultural context and biological embodiment in any comprehensive theory of mind. Barrett explicitly includes social reality as constitutive of emotion (without concepts and language from our culture, we literally would not experience emotions in the same way). Lonergan, writing in a philosophical theology context, also acknowledged the socio-historical nature of consciousness – for instance, our “horizon” (all we know and care about) is shaped by our time and place, and the meanings and values we live by are transmitted through culture. Thus, both theories reject a reductive individualism. The philosophical implication is a call for interdisciplinary understanding: to truly grasp human consciousness and emotion, one must account for neurological processes and cultural meaning systems. We see a potential bridge here between phenomenology, which studies the lived experience of the subject, and cognitive neuroscience, which studies the mechanisms giving rise to that experience. The predictive brain hypothesis that Barrett employs has even been interpreted through a phenomenological lens by other scholars (e.g. seeing it as explaining the intentionality of consciousness – how consciousness is always about something anticipated or valued). Lonergan’s transcendental method (be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible) could be seen as a phenomenology of mind that, when applied, refines the operation of the predictive brain by curbing biases (what he calls “bias” in Insight, which are aberrations in our cognitional process). In practical terms, this integrated view suggests that advancing our understanding of mind requires both first-person insight (the kind Lonergan cultivates) and third-person investigation (the kind Barrett conducts). Each can inform the other: phenomenological/philosophical analysis can ensure that neuroscientific models like Barrett’s do justice to the richness of lived experience, and neuroscience can ground philosophical theories in empirical reality.
Human Development and Authenticity: A further implication of linking these theories is a richer notion of personal development. If emotions are constructed, then emotional maturity might consist in constructing them well – i.e. in ways that are fitting to reality and conducive to flourishing. Lonergan’s highest level, the responsible level oriented by values, suggests that part of becoming fully human is aligning our feelings with true values (what he calls an affective conversion). One can hear an echo of this in Barrett’s suggestion that by understanding our emotions better, we can achieve greater emotional intelligence and well-being. Indeed, Barrett notes that learning new emotion concepts (perhaps from other cultures or nuanced vocabularies) can actually expand one’s emotional experience – allowing more subtle distinctions and more appropriate responses, rather than being stuck with a few blunt reactions. This is akin to what philosophers might call self-transcendence: going beyond one’s initial emotional palette to a more refined one. Lonergan would frame it as enlarging one’s horizon or improving one’s authenticity (since authentic subjectivity involves not being enslaved by e.g. a fear that is based on misinterpretation). Thus, the nature of emotions as cognitive-affective constructs opens the door to educating our emotions. Ancient philosophers like Aristotle believed in habituating the right emotions as part of virtue; here we see a modern twist – by training the mind (both conceptually and reflectively), we train the emotions. Morally, this means accountability: we are not simply victims of our feelings but participants in their making. At the same time, it invites compassion: much of our emotional makeup was constructed without our explicit choice (in childhood, by culture, etc.), so self-appropriation is a journey of reclaiming authorship of one’s emotional life.
Consciousness as Creative Synthesis: Both theories imply that human consciousness is creative. Barrett’s brain doesn’t just process stimuli – it synthesizes a meaningful experience (an emotion episode) out of various inputs. Lonergan’s cognitional subject similarly synthesizes data into insights, and insights into a coherent view of the world. In both, consciousness is an achievement, not a given. This has deep philosophical ramifications: it challenges empiricist notions that the mind is a passive receptor of impressions. Instead, the mind (or brain) is more like an artist or scientist, constructing models and narratives to account for the sensory information. Kant’s influence is evident here (Lonergan was influenced by Kant’s insight that the mind actively structures experience), and Barrett’s theory can be seen as giving Kantian categories a neuroscientific twist (emotion concepts as categories that shape what we experience). The active, constructive mind means that meaning is not found but made – a central constructivist tenet. However, neither Barrett nor Lonergan falls into a relativistic view where anything goes; there are still realities (physical, biological, social) that constrain and inform the constructions. This balance is philosophically significant: it navigates between naive realism and extreme constructivism. Emotions are real, but their reality is of the order of meaning emergent from matter, not a fixed chemical reflex. Lonergan’s notion of emergent structures of consciousness and Barrett’s “emotions emerge from more fundamental ingredients” converge on this point. It suggests a layered view of nature in which higher-level human experiences (like the feeling of love, anger, remorse) are culturally and cognitively crafted atop physiological states – fully real as experiences, yet not reducible to a single gene or circuit.
In conclusion, linking Barrett’s and Lonergan’s theories enriches our understanding of emotions as holistic human experiences. Emotions are seen as intentional constructs: they are about something (a situation, a goal, a value) and built from both subjective and objective elements (bodily affect and conceptual interpretation). This underscores the unity of mind and body, reason and feeling, individual and culture in constituting human experience. It also emphasizes the role of the subject – our active participation – in the unfolding of our emotional lives. Such a perspective has broad implications, from psychology and neuroscience (suggesting that therapies should target both body and meaning, physiology and interpretation) to ethics and phenomenology (reminding us that how things feel is partly our doing, and inviting us to cultivate an authentic affective life). Ultimately, the conversation between Barrett and Lonergan points toward a vision of human consciousness as embodied understanding. Emotions are not merely raw drives nor untethered thoughts; they are acts of understanding the body’s state in light of the world, and thereby are fundamental to how we exist as knowing, feeling, self-transcending beings. This integrated view moves us closer to answering the perennial questions about the nature of emotions, the mind, and the self with both scientific rigor and philosophical depth.
Sources:
Barrett, L.F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.
Barrett, L.F. (2016). “The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization.” Soc. Cog. & Aff. Neurosci., 12(1), 1–23.
Lonergan, B. (1957). Insight: A Study of Human Understanding.
Lonergan, B. (1972). Method in Theology.