“Emotions are not built in, but they are just built.”

-Lisa Feldman Barrett

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The classical view of emotions being universal and innate that philosophers in the past claimed is being questioned by the constructionist framework. Constructionist framework believes that brain neurons predicts and constructs expressions of emotions based on past experiences. Neuroscience debates that there exists no brain region dedicated for different emotions, unlike previously when it was believed in the classical view on emotions and the faculty approach, for e.g., amygdala is associated with fear only, contradicting to the constructionist framework which believes in activation of various brain regions for various emotions

Scientifically, the persistence of the debate of emotions being natural and innate are unknown.

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Human experiences and culture contribute to training our brain neurons to predict and construct emotional expressions. Science claims expressions are neither an effect nor triggered. Though, it is commonly assumed that a person’s emotional state can be readily inferred from his or her facial movements, typically called emotional expressions or facial expressions. And those can vary from person to person. For e.g., my way expressing happiness doesn't match with the other person expressing happiness and hence people take it differently, though the messaging between the neurons are same. Because we are culturally and socially so convinced and habituated with standards of expressions and facial movements, we tend to take it for granted and emotions are mis-expressed.

It is often believed that facial expressions are the indices to understand a person’s emotional state and hence there has been huge investments towards emotion detection system whereas it’s just concluding on facial movements. We also fail to understand emotional state, not very different from emotion detection systems.