Emotional evaluations determined by beliefs about interoception

Seth & Friston (2016) propose interoceptive inference as a generalization of earlier physiological (James-Lange) and two-factor or appraisal theories of emotion, framing emotional experience as a cognitively contextualized perception of changes in bodily state rather than two separate, qualitatively distinct steps. They extend these ideas through a hierarchical predictive coding framework, where precision-weighted predictions and prediction errors operate continuously across levels, with no sharp boundary between cognitive and non-cognitive processing. By analogy with predictive coding accounts of visual perception, the authors concluded that emotional content is determined by beliefs, or posterior expectations, about the causes of interoceptive signals across multiple hierarchical levels (Seth & Friston, 2016).