Applying the Theory of Constructed Emotion

Title: Applying the Theory of Constructed Emotion to Police Decision Making
Authors: Joseph Fridman, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Jolie B. Wormwood, Karen S. Quigley
Journal: Frontiers in Psychology
Specialty section: Psychology for Clinical Settings

Law enforcement personnel often operate in high-stress, high-stakes environments where decisions impact safety and life.
The document applies the Theory of Constructed Emotion (TCE) to understand decision-making in police contexts, emphasizing the physiological and predictive functions of the brain.

Allostasis: The process where the brain predicts and regulates energy needs to maintain physiological balance, influencing cognition and emotion in challenging circumstances.
Predictive Coding: The brain constructs an internal model of the world, assisting in anticipation of events based on past experiences.
Emotion and Decision Making: All mental events—including emotion, perception, and action—are influenced by physiological states and allostasis, which affect decision making.

Decisions during critical incidents can result from distorted perceptions and memories.
Errors, such as perceiving unarmed individuals as threats, highlight the psychological and physiological challenges faced by officers under stress.
Importance of understanding how decision making evolves over time and its link to prior experiences (e.g., traumatic distress).

Emphasizes the need for innovative experiments and data collection to improve performance in high-stakes environments.
Suggests integrating physiological monitoring and context-aware technologies into training regimens for law enforcement personnel.

Affective feelings influence perceptions, decision making, and behavior during high-pressure situations:
- Research Findings: Officers are prone to misidentifying threats under emotional strain, revealing the necessity to address biases in training.
- Example: Analysis of officer-involved shootings has shown consistent patterns of threat perception failures, especially concerning demographics.

Training Programs: Develop initiatives focused on enhancing officers' awareness of their physiological states and potential biases in perception.
- Include strategies to recognize affective realism, i.e., how feelings shape perceptions of threat.

Interoception: Awareness of internal bodily states plays a vital role in decision making and emotional experiences.
Training scenarios could help officers better manage their physiological responses and emotional reactions in the field.
Examples of integration in training:
- Wearable Devices: Monitor physiological changes and guide officers in understanding their emotional states in real-time.

Recognizes individual differences in responding to stress, highlighting variability in emotional experiences categorized as similar across different contexts.
Higher interoceptive sensitivity leads to better coupling between physiological states and experiential outcomes, suggesting training may promote these skills in police officers.

Further studies should investigate the dynamics of allostasis and interoception in naturalistic settings to identify methods for improving officer health and decision-making.
Ambulatory data collection techniques can support real-world training scenarios.

The TCE framework provides insights into how emotions shape decision-making processes in high-stress professional contexts such as law enforcement.
Suggests that training focused on predictive awareness and interoceptive signals could improve both mental resilience and the effectiveness of police decisions in critical situations.