How Emotions Take Shape Over Time

We often talk about emotions as if they simply appear.

Anxiety hits. Anger flares. Joy arrives.

This makes emotions sound like automatic signals sent by the body — clear, direct, and almost self-explanatory.

But psychological research suggests something more nuanced:

Emotions or feelings are something that take shape depending on context through a continuous interaction between your body, your attention, and the meaning you make of what is happening in a given situation.

This idea first took form in the early 1960s, and modern emotion science increasingly supports it today.

A researcher of emotion, Lisa F. Barrett, even put it this way [8]: 

“…The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology.”

The Classic Two-Factor Model of Emotion

The two-factor model of emotion, most closely associated with Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer, suggests that emotion depends on two factors working together [1]:

1. Bodily arousal: Changes in heart rate, breathing, tension, activation
2. Interpretation: The meaning we assign to those bodily changes

In their classic study of emotions (n = 184), participants were injected with adrenaline to create physical arousal. Some were told the true side effects, some were given no explanation, some were misinformed, and others received a placebo [1].

They were then placed in either a playful (happy) situation or an irritating (anger-inducing) one.

Those who felt arousal without a clear explanation were most shaped by the situation: they felt happier in the playful setting and angrier in the hostile one. Participants who knew why their body was activated were far less reactive.

The study shows that when bodily arousal lacks an explanation, people use the social context to decide what they are feeling.

In another study by Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron [2], men who crossed a frightening suspension bridge later showed greater romantic interest in an attractive researcher than men who crossed a stable bridge.

The physiological activation — racing heart, adrenaline, tension — did not automatically become “fear.” In the presence of an appealing person, that activation was interpreted as attraction rather than anxiety.

Expectations Increase Emotions

Research by Stuart Valins also showed something surprising.

In a study, people reacted with stronger emotions to images when they believed their heart rate was increasing — even when it was not. Perceived bodily change shaped the whole emotional experience [3].

Later, researchers expanded this finding. Richard Lazarus showed that emotion depends on how we evaluate what a situation means for us — whether it helps, threatens, or matters to our goals [4].

Dolf Zillmann showed that bodily activation can linger and intensify later emotions, even after the original cause has disappeared. Let’s call that leftover arousal [5].

Across these theories, one pattern becomes clear: The body provides arousal and intensity. Meaning and context determine how you feel. Therefore, healing is about providing a new context that expands the old one.

Emotions Are Not Simple Reflexes

Recent emotion science shows that emotions are constructed in real time through context [9]. A rapid pulse may reflect physical movement — or the perception of threat or panic.

In the book How Emotions Are Made, Lisa F. Barrett argues that emotions are not fixed biological packages that simply switch on. Instead, they are experiences assembled from bodily sensations, past learning, concepts, and context [6].

Your brain continuously interprets signals from the body and predicts what they mean. Emotion is the brain’s best guess of what is happening.

If emotion depends on interpretation, then attention plays a big role in their formation. Think about watching only certain news which creates a sense of threat even though the birds are singing peacefully outside your windows.

Should We Down-Regulate Emotions?

This post questions a popular assumption: that emotional well-being depends on how succesful we are at calming the body — slowing the heart, regulating the breath, dampening arousal.

If emotions were merely physiological events, that would be enough. Control the body, solve the feeling. But since emotions take shape in context, it is probably not enough. Trying to control your the body can even backfire and signal a kind of threat to your mind.

A racing heart is not yet anxiety. It becomes anxiety when attention locks onto threat and interpretation supplies a narrative.

From this perspective, well-being cannot rest solely on down-regulation. It depends on how meaning forms.

Relief may come not from eliminating activation, but from interrupting the rapid construction of a self-referential story: What does this say about me? What if this means something is wrong?

In therapy, it is often the case that emotions soften when the mind stops amplifying them — like a fire that eventually burns out. A spark becomes a wildfire only if it finds fuel.

Concluding Remarks on Emotions

Across decades of research — from early laboratory studies to modern constructionist theory: Emotions appear less like fixed biological messages and more like experiences shaped by arousal, attention, and meaning [1,6, 9]. 

So, emotions are not fixed messages delivered by the nervous system. They are meanings assembled in context. They are shaped by attentional and thinking processes. 

And what is “shaped” can shift and move. This is what psychotherapy, and life, are about. 

 

References

1. Schachter, S., & Singer, J. E. (1962). Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state. Psychological Review.
2. Dutton, D. G., & Aron, A. P. (1974). Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety. JPSP.
3. Valins, S. (1966). Cognitive effects of false heart-rate feedback. JPSP.
4. Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and adaptation. Oxford University Press.
5. Zillmann, D. (1976). Attribution and misattribution of excitatory reactions.
6. Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made.
7. Hoemann, K., & Barrett, L. F. (2019). Psychological construction of emotion (review).
8. Barrett, L. F. (2020). The theory of constructed emotion: An active inference account of interoception and categorization. 
9. Russell, J. A. (2003). Core affect and psychological construction of emotion.