Nevertheless, psychophysiological and neuroscientific evidence has failed to yield consistent support for the existence of such discrete categories of experience.
The theory is given in simplified form as:[2] "In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning.
[2] Interoceptive predictions provide information about the state of the body and ultimately produce basic, affective feelings of pleasure, displeasure, arousal, and calmness.
Social reality provides the collective agreement and language that make the perception of emotion possible among people who share a culture.
The physics of color, however, is actually continuous, with wavelengths measured in nanometers along a scale from ultraviolet to infrared.
Likewise, emotions are commonly thought of as discrete and distinct — fear, anger, happiness — while affect (produced by interoception) is continuous.
This process takes place before any actual sensory input of a snake reaches conscious awareness.
In contrast, a "basic emotions" researcher would say that the person first sees the snake, and this sensory input triggers a dedicated "fear circuit" in the brain.